The sky fell. The rusty fragments of metal rent air thick with the reek of bodies burnt by artillery fire and napalm. The buildings, warring with the thickets of lance-like rifles, groaned in the pitch-black night, alive with the endless screams of people who could find no way to live save tearing one another to pieces.   The sky dropped earthwards with the falling barrel, the distance between it and the machine guns and the gore-drenched bodies beneath less than the distance that divides the 50mm lens in the bag from the 55mm lens on the camera. The barrel takes seven seconds... more

Our Terrible Country’ takes us on the perilous journey of Yassin Haj Saleh, a well-known Syrian intellectual and dissident, and the young photographer Ziad Homsi who travel together in an arduous and dangerous route from the liberated area of Douma/Damascus to Raqqa in northern Syria, only to find themselves eventually forced to leave their home country for a temporary exile in Turkey.   While Yassin was detained in 1980 at the age of twenty, and remained imprisoned for 16 years, he is also one of the few intellectuals who participated clandestinely in the Syrian uprising since its earliest days in 2011. However,... more

In February of 2013, in the northern side of Syria, over in a little town of Binnish, some extremists published a video showing a child being held on the shoulders of young men as he sings for Al-Qaida, Bin Laden and incited to kill the Alawites and Shiites in Syria. Few months after, the supporters of Assad from the “Fourth Brigade” of the Syrian Army (known for its act of the bloody killing), recorded another video showing a child singing songs insulting the revolution and all its supporters.“Bidayyat” also had something to say for those who film and upload these kinds... more

The videos coming out of Syria of the nightmarish scenes of unspeakable violence and hatred have shaken people from around the world. It makes one doubt humanity and what some people are capable of: excruciatingly agonizing  decapitations and cannibalizing raw organs, on tape. I will not embed these gruesome videos here because I am still reeling from the carnage and gore. What’s worse is that children are present at these very public executions, that pre-teen innocent boys are being taught songs inciting violence, hatred and even butchering of people from other sects. The video above, is a very morbid sarcastic video, and... more