IWPR's Syria Coordinator Speaks at Women in World Event

IWPR Syria project coordinator Zaina Erhaim was part of a stellar line-up of inspirational female figures at the Women in the World event in London this week.

The forum showcases women of influence in the fields of politics, business, culture and human rights. Other speakers this week include Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep as well as Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

Erhaim, 30, is an award-winning journalist who trains citizen journalists and helps support local independent media on the front lines of the Syrian civil war. She told the conference about her experience of living and working under the threat of regime barrel bombs in Aleppo, where she has based herself for the last two years.

“I came back because I felt responsible,” she told panel moderator Kirsty Wark. “I belong to those chants of freedom and democracy that the demonstrators chanted at the beginning of the revolution. I felt obliged to go back because I had friends being killed while they were chanting for better rights for me and my kids.”

Earlier this year, she won a landmark journalistic prize, the Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism. Her work has involved training about 100 citizen reporters, around a third of them women, who are now among the very few able to provide eyewitness accounts of events on the ground.

Erhaim’s own on-the-ground reporting offers unique insights into the harshness of life in Aleppo. (See for example Child's Play in Aleppo Graveyard and Whose Side Was That Plane On?  Zaina also writes regularly for The Economist and has contributed to the Guardian and Arabic-language media like Orient TV, Al-Hayat and Al-Quds Al-Arabi.

Born in Idlib and educated in Damascus, Erhaim was finishing a degree in international journalism in London just as unrest began in Syria in 2011. She spent two years as a broadcast journalist with the BBC before joining IWPR and returning to northern Syria.

IWPR has worked in Syria since 2007, supporting journalists, civil society groups, and youth and female activists. Its Damascus Bureau platform is a space for news, comment and reportage written by Syrians. Since February 2015, the Women’s Blog has carried pieces by new writers with no background in professional journalism, talking about the hardship of daily life and the horrors of war. Erhaim has been instrumental in bringing these stories out.

This story was produced by Syria Stories (previously Damascus Bureau), IWPR’s news platform for Syrian journalists.