Our research continues

From the Turkish city of Gaziantep in south-eastern Anatolia, we used the Easter holidays to continue researching our documentary project. The trip to Reyhanlı on the Syrian border, just 70 km from the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo, in particular brought us many new contacts, information and insights. In Reyhanlı alone, more than 100,000 people from Syria who have fled the civil war are living. North-western Syria, which borders the Turkish provinces of Hatay, Kilis and Gaziantep, is an area in which all the parties to the Syrian civil war are defending their positions in close proximity to one another. East of Gaziantep, right on the Turkish border, lies an area controlled by the so-called Islamic State (DAESH in Arabic). In the Syrian territory west of the Turkish city of Gaziantep there are Kurdish fighters. South of that, level with the town of Reyhanlı, are units of the FSA (Free Syrian Army). But there are also scattered fighters of the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front there. We found a situation that in many details looks different from the picture you otherwise get from the media. Talking to Syrian refugee families also gave us many new contacts, details and starting points that we will show in our film. And when, in the evening, you watch the Tagesthemen news in a hotel room on the Turkish side not far from the Syrian border, and Caren Miosga speaks in her introduction of a “liberation” of Palmyra by Bashar al-Assad's soldiers, while ARD correspondent Volker Schwenck gives an assessment of the situation from Cairo, you realise that the Tagesthemen newsroom and ARD's correspondent office in Cairo are far, far away. When, on the same day, almost every Syrian refugee tells you which of their family and friends were abducted, tortured or killed by the Assad regime, it is cynical to speak of a “liberation”.