It was March 2011, and with the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the first demonstrations erupted across Syria demanding the departure of President Bashar al-Assad. In the suburbs of Damascus, the country’s capital, the town of Darayya would become one of the epicenters of the revolution.
Since the early 2000s, a pacifist opposition movement had been taking shape there, influenced by Imam Abdel Akram al-Saqqa and the well-known activist Yahya Sharbaji. Within days, dozens of demonstrators began offering flowers to regime soldiers sent to disperse the gatherings. The soldiers responded quickly by firing live rounds into the crowds. Syria was slipping into a civil war that would last nearly 14 years.
At that moment, a group of activists secretly organized to create a newspaper to distribute under the regime’s radar. Here began an epic quest for press freedom: the story of the independent Syrian media outlet Enab Baladi.
Bahaa Ziadeh was 18 when the revolution began. Outgoing and neatly dressed, he was known as the reckless one among his friends — a trait that worried his family. Scarred by the popular uprisings of the 1980s and the brutal repression that followed, his relatives feared the consequences of his involvement in the opposition. “I was working in precarious conditions, often using the family computer with state-controlled internet access, without always having the support of my loved ones, who were paralyzed by fear,” recalled Bahaa, now 33.
Undeterred, he ignored their warnings and began distributing flyers for The Voice of Justice, a small activist newspaper printed in just a few dozen copies. Before long, the three authors behind the publication were arrested. Bahaa could no longer distribute newspapers, but he found fellow dissidents who added him to a Facebook group called The Olive Tree — after the regional symbol of resilience and courage — which gathered a wide circle of activists from Darayya.
Among them was Kholoud Helmi. She joined the group through her younger brother, Mohammad, one of Darayya’s student protest leaders. “At the time, I was working for a paint company in Damascus, so I was rarely in Darayya and couldn’t get involved as much as I wanted in activism,” she explained from London, where she has lived for the past decade.
Every day, the 24-year-old made the 20-minute commute from Darayya to her office in downtown Damascus. But just one week after the first demonstration in Darayya, on March 25, 2011, the Syrian army deployed tanks in the streets and established numerous checkpoints to encircle the town. The result was massive traffic jams at the city’s exits. “Sometimes I would arrive hours late, and my manager never believed me. Darayya is just 20 minutes from Damascus, yet no one could imagine civilians being detained, tanks surrounding the city, checkpoints everywhere,” Kholoud sighed.
Her boss, skeptical, scolded her. Her colleagues didn’t believe her either when she explained her repeated tardiness. It became unbearable, and she resigned. Without a job, Kholoud was now free to throw herself wholeheartedly into the revolution. She joined the Free Women of Darayya, an all-female activist group, where she quickly rose through the ranks.
After leaving her job, Kholoud channeled her energy into countering the regime’s narrative. “We realized that, in reality, no one knew what was happening in Daraa, Hama, Homs, Deir ez-Zor — all the other cities where protests had erupted,” she recalled. “Foreign journalists were also being denied visas. There was a real information blackout.”
Faced with this realization, a post appeared on The Olive Tree in November 2011, calling for the creation of a citizen newspaper. Twenty-three activists answered the call. A poll proposed several potential names for the paper, but it was Enab Baladi (“The Grapes of My Country”) that won the vote. Since Darayya was known at the time for its vineyards, the name evoked something deeply rooted in the local soil — something unmistakably Syrian.
A new Facebook group emerged. At the time, the platform was still secure enough for activists to exchange information. Enthusiasm was at its peak despite the growing repression. Many believed the tanks would leave Darayya’s streets within two weeks, not realizing that mass arrests awaited them. Inside this fledgling newsroom, everyone knew their role. Kholoud and Bahaa edited their colleagues’ articles and wrote their own, while others who were more skilled with cameras were dispatched to protests, tasked with gathering testimonies from residents searching for missing loved ones. Everyone was anonymized, both sources and writers alike, to shield them from the reprisals of a regime already fighting for its survival.
Within the Enab Baladi team, backgrounds varied. Most were amateurs. The only trained journalist among them was Nabil Sharbaji. He was a scholar who had long been an activist alongside Yahya Sharbaji and had taught his knowledge of political and social issues to other members of the opposition. He insisted that to truly serve their cause, Enab Baladi’s fledgling journalists could not afford to abandon professional ethics, no matter how deep their resentment toward the regime. “He used to edit our articles and tear his hair out — we wrote with too much bias, especially about the Assad family. We called them criminals, and he would repeat, ‘That’s not journalism!’” recalled Kholoud.
Saturday nights — on the eve of the weekly edition’s publication on Facebook — were particularly tense. Nabil Sharbaji spent hours arguing with his colleagues. The men of the newsroom gathered around generous slices of knafeh at the home of Jawad Sharbaji. Editor-in-chief of Enab Baladi since its creation, Jawad lived less than a mile from the Mazzeh military airport, a notorious site where the regime imprisoned and tortured many political opponents. In these editing meetings, as in their activist lives, men and women never met together. In Syria’s conservative society, gender-segregated gatherings were common, a cultural habit that also helped them avoid suspicion.
The group took its mission seriously. Every Monday, an editorial meeting was held on Skype — the only way to bring men and women together. To evade surveillance, they used the virtual private network Psiphon. But the team lacked structure, and too much energy was lost in editorial debates. It was an issue that was noticed by Muhammad Koraytem, who worked with numerous international organizations. In a country with virtually no democratic culture, he proposed electing an editor and a board to bring structure to the newsroom. His framework restored order to the chaos. Every six months, five co-founders of the newspaper were elected to the board. For greater stability, the mandate eventually extended to one year, then two. In 2015, a permanent composition was adopted, though the co-founders retained the power to change it if necessary.
“Without Muhammad Koraytem, we wouldn’t be where we are today — he pushed the idea far beyond just a Facebook page, as I had imagined it,” Kholoud stressed. Koraytem gave Enab Baladi legitimacy as a true media outlet. All that was missing was a print edition to expand their reach. But printing a physical newspaper would be a massive logistical challenge — and, under the watch of the regime’s mukhabarat (secret police) intelligence agents, an extraordinarily dangerous one.
The task fell to Jawad Sharbaji. In 2011, he was 31, with three brothers in Syrian prisons. Cautious and discreet, he knew how to operate in the shadows — and he was resourceful. Working in logistics, Jawad had a knack for quietly obtaining paper and ink without drawing attention. “Even today, I sometimes fix our printers in factories,” he laughed. With design experience as well, he sketched Enab Baladi’s logo: a white vine leaf on a green background.
On the night of Jan. 28, 2012, Jawad waited for his wife to go to bed, then slipped into his office. He carefully closed the shutters and switched on his home printer. All night, until sunrise, the machine hummed nonstop. By morning, the first 200 copies of Enab Baladi were born. The result exceeded expectations. “When I first saw the finished product, I let a few tears run down my cheeks. Then the whole team followed — it was such an accomplishment for us,” he recalled, still moved.
The adventure had begun. Print runs soon reached up to 700 copies, at the peak of distribution. Moving so many newspapers from Jawad’s home to readers became a logistical challenge demanding extreme discretion. At dawn, after printing, Jawad packed the papers into black garbage bags and loaded them into his car’s trunk, hidden from neighbors’ eyes. “I drove to a remote spot in the nearby countryside to avoid revealing the printing location,” he explained. Half an hour later, trusted allies — journalists and revolutionaries — arrived to collect the papers for further distribution. Once read, the copies were burned to erase any trace. “Most of the people who distributed Enab Baladi were women, because they could slip past checkpoints more easily,” he said.
One of the women was Kholoud Helmi. With her collective, the Free Women of Darayya, she undertook the perilous mission of carrying newspapers each week to demonstrations against the regime in the heart of the capital. Syria’s conservatism became an unlikely ally: Women hid newspapers under their clothes or in handbags padded with feminine items, meant to embarrass soldiers during inspections. They also knew the safest routes to avoid checkpoints. But repression in Darayya intensified, and mobile checkpoints began to appear.
One day, while Kholoud was transporting papers to Damascus with her brother Mohammad, also a co-founder of Enab Baladi, soldiers appeared on the road ahead. Only a few dozen yards separated them from the guards. Her younger brother warned her that he would lose his temper if the soldiers touched her. In a split-second decision, Kholoud threw her handbag at a soldier’s face and blurted out: “Go ahead, search it! But all you’ll find are intimate things!” Startled, the soldier handed her the bag back. “Get out of here — and don’t let me see you again!” he shouted.
This time, they escaped arrest. But the regime, now aware of an underground opposition newspaper in Darayya, increased the pressure. Residents were questioned at checkpoints about the mysterious authors of Enab Baladi’s articles. The noose tightened, and some members of the team paid the price. On Feb. 3, 2012, co-founder Ammar Ziadeh was arrested with his brother outside a mosque in the Kafr Sousa district of Damascus. With no proof of their involvement, they were released after four months — a rare stroke of luck in Syria, where countless others were imprisoned, tortured or executed without evidence.
On Feb. 26, 2012, Nabil Sharbaji was next in line to be arrested. Just a month earlier, his voice had announced the launch of the newspaper’s print edition in a video published on Facebook. A few weeks later, Bahaa Ziadeh was detained on a street in Kafr Sousa. Police checked his ID card; it showed he was from Darayya. They took him away. “It was an ambush. I think they knew they would find me — one of my friends had been arrested a few days earlier and denounced me,” Bahaa said.
On May 20, mukhabarat agents pounded on the door of the Helmi family home. In a panic, Kholoud hid her computer and compromising documents under her mattress. “Where is the economics student?” the guards demanded, referring to her brother Mohammad. “They didn’t know his name, but they knew about his activities,” Kholoud explained, her voice tight over the phone.
Terrified, she tried to intervene, claiming to be the person they were looking for. It made no difference. Mohammad eventually emerged from his room. The police dragged him away as his parents watched in shock. One officer told them they would kill him and cut his body into pieces, while another insisted he was only wanted for questioning. It was the last time Helmi saw her brother alive.
When the regime finally fell on Dec. 8, 2024, the country’s prisons were opened and thousands of documents were released. A death certificate published on Telegram finally reached the Helmi family. They learned that Mohammad died in prison just 27 days after his arrest. A flood of grief, anguish and overall relief overwhelmed them.
By Aug. 20, 2012, Darayya was plunged into absolute horror. The city was partly controlled by two rebel groups: Liwa Shuhada al-Islam and the Ajnad al-Sham Islamic Union. For five days, Assad’s forces bombed the city from the air. On the night of Aug. 25, the army entered multiple neighborhoods and carried out a massacre on a scale unprecedented since the start of the war. According to an investigation by the Syrian British Consortium, more than 700 people were killed, mostly civilians executed in the streets or in underground shelters where they had sought refuge from bombardment. Hundreds of bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave behind a mosque. That week remains the only time in Enab Baladi’s history that the newsroom did not publish its weekly edition.
In the weeks that followed, conditions deteriorated further. The “shabiha” — pro-Assad militias known for their brutality — stepped up their hunt for journalists and activists from the Free Women of Darayya, but the city remained a thorn in the regime’s side, a place where the democratic structures the regime feared most began to take root. The city established a local civic council to oversee the actions of rebel groups, a rare initiative in Syria at the time. Meanwhile, a group of activists opposed to armed struggle gained increasing attention through its newspaper, directly countering the regime’s propaganda.
For Assad’s regime, it was too much, and they turned to besieging the city. For Assad’s commanders, this was a lucrative business: Senior officers established smuggling networks, secretly bringing in food, cigarettes and hygiene products to sell at exorbitant prices inside besieged zones.
At dawn on Nov. 8, 2012, tanks rolled into Darayya, enforcing a siege that would last until January 2016. The streets emptied, leaving only the clatter of steel tracks cracking the asphalt beneath their weight. Enab Baladi’s journalists managed to escape the tightening noose, some fleeing into the Damascus countryside. Amid the chaos, a handful traveled to Beirut to attend a journalism training session organized by the nongovernmental organization Internews.
The group included Jawad Sharbaji, along with Kholoud Helmi and members of the Free Women of Darayya. On Nov. 28, while attending a workshop just a few hundred miles away, a missile struck Jawad’s home. Inside were his brother, his uncle and Koraytem, Enab Baladi’s engineer. All were killed instantly.
The area was too dangerous for immediate recovery; it took three days before relatives could identify the bodies. Among the rubble lay scattered newspapers. Nothing was left, Jawad’s printer and personal belongings reduced to ashes. “Even today, Google Maps still marks Enab Baladi’s location at the very spot where Muhammad Koraytem died. He was killed where the newspaper was born,” Jawad said, his voice heavy with emotion. The shock convinced the former logistician to remain in Lebanon.
Kholoud, however, chose to return to the Damascus countryside to continue working there. Two activist sisters, Susan and Ghada Abbar, who also attended the training in Lebanon, joined her. With the Free Women of Darayya, they found ways to discreetly break through the siege imposed by Assad’s forces. Knowing the city inside out, they used little-traveled streets and, to avoid snipers, hammered holes through adjoining walls, creating secret passageways from house to house. Several times a week, Kholoud and her comrades infiltrated Darayya with food and medical supplies to aid the population. They also gathered testimonies to publish in Enab Baladi.
During one mission, as night fell, the women deemed it too risky to return and opted to stay in the city. At dawn, they attempted to leave, and all — except for one — narrowly escaped the soldiers. Her name was Majd Sharbaji, and she was a member of the Free Women of Darayya and Enab Baladi. She was arrested while her husband, Abdulrahman Kammah, was captured moments later at a checkpoint. Their two children were suddenly left with no parental figures at home. Living in France, Majd’s mother rushed to Syria. When she arrived in Damascus, the mukhabarat followed her into Darayya, where she found her grandchildren. Soon, she too was arrested, held and pressured by the intelligence services. After a week, they forced her to lure the activist group into a trap.
On Jan. 15, 2013, Majd’s mother arranged a meeting with several members of the Free Women of Darayya. Among them were Kholoud, Susan and Ghada. The atmosphere was tense; suspicion ran high since they knew the regime was hunting them. Kholoud lagged behind her friends and called them. “Everything okay? Are you there?” she asked. “Yes, we’ve arrived. Hurry up, we’ll talk there — khalas!” they replied. Within the group’s code, the everyday Arabic word “khalas” — meaning “enough” — signaled danger. Quietly warned by Susan and Ghada, Kholoud turned back, her heart heavy.
The arrest of the Abbar sisters sent shockwaves through Enab Baladi. After more than a year of surviving underground, time was running out — they realized they must flee. “They searched the house and took the laptops, so it was very likely they would uncover our identities,” Kholoud said. That very night, many members of the newsroom hastily packed their bags and headed for the Lebanese border.
They didn’t know it at the time, but that same day in the hell of Syria’s prisons, several leaders of Darayya’s pacifist opposition movement, including Yahya Sharbaji, were executed by the regime. Their families only received death certificates in 2018, more than five years after their killings.
Under Assad’s rule, most families of the disappeared never received proof of their loved ones’ deaths in the regime’s prisons. When the dictator finally fell, thousands rushed into the newly opened detention centers, even digging yards underground after rumors spread of secret subterranean cells. Those reports were later widely debunked. According to an August 2023 report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), more than 112,000 people who were arrested by the regime after March 2011 remained missing. After the regime fell, SNHR concluded that they were all almost certainly dead.
While Nabil Sharbaji languished in prison, and Jawad Sharbaji and Kholoud Helmi remained exiled in Lebanon, Ahmad Shehadeh chose to stay in Syria. An economist by training, he became Enab Baladi’s “finance man.” “Without the policies he put in place and his economic knowledge, we would have gone bankrupt very quickly,” Kholoud said. From the newspaper’s launch in November 2011, Ahmad insisted on writing invoices for every expense, keeping a clear financial record.
The paper’s first two years were financially difficult. The team received little foreign funding to sustain their work. So when small amounts of money did come through, Shehadeh implemented the idea of a bank account to save unused funds. The strategy proved sustainable — and remains in place today — helping Enab Baladi survive lean years when international donors were slow to provide support.
“For him, there were three pillars: transparency, archiving and sustainability,” recalled Jawad Sharbaji, his throat tightening at the memory of his friend. Yet transparency was not always Shehadeh’s default with the Enab Baladi team. In 2012, when the newspaper was being printed clandestinely each week using the modest savings of its members, a mysterious donor appeared. “We started receiving 20,000 Syrian pounds — around $400 at the time — every month from someone who refused to reveal their identity,” Jawad said.
The monthly donation covered the printing costs and allowed the team to work with a rare sense of calm. Then, in March 2013, the money stopped coming. At the same time, Shehadeh was killed in a regime missile strike. “That’s when we realized he was our anonymous donor,” Jawad said, pausing, the grief still raw. “He was that kind of man — a good man who did things spiritually, in his relationship with God.”
Shehadeh’s death hit the team hard. They had just relocated to Chtaura, a town in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a few dozen miles from the Syrian border. “The problem was that the area was a Hezbollah stronghold, allied with Bashar al-Assad. We didn’t feel safe,” Jawad recalled. With the support of Internews, they found new offices in Beirut.
After imprisonment in 2012 and exile to Lebanon in early 2013, Ammar Ziadeh married a few months later before moving to Egypt. Enab Baladi, meanwhile, sought a country where it could operate legally, without fear of interruption. Lebanon, with its restrictive visa policies, offered little stability.
Cairo seemed promising. “Just when we thought it might work, protests toppled President Mohammed Morsi, and anti-Syrian campaigns escalated,” Ammar explained. After the July 3, 2013 coup, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who would become Egypt’s president, accused Syrian refugees of backing the Muslim Brotherhood and participating in pro-Morsi demonstrations, painting them as internal enemies.
Egypt was no longer an option. The team turned to Turkey, where Syrians could enter without a visa. Jawad and Ammar flew to Istanbul, rented an apartment, and made it their home, office and workspace. In December 2013, they hung the logo Jawad had designed two years earlier on the wall. Enab Baladi had its first official office — a new chapter marked by exile and recognition.
In Istanbul’s many cafes, Ammar and Jawad spent long hours interviewing, writing, and connecting with other Syrian journalists who had fled. Expanding their network was crucial; the country was fracturing, movement was dangerous and journalists needed local anchors across the territory. Helmi, now exiled in the U.K., helped them in this networking effort.
“I relied on trusted contacts, asking if they could recommend activists interested in Enab Baladi. That’s how our network grew,” she recalled. While many citizen media outlets created at the war’s start were closing, Enab Baladi grew stronger, both structurally and editorially.
In November 2014, at the first Syrian Journalists Association conference in Gaziantep, Turkey, Enab Baladi officially launched an ambitious project: archiving Syrian newspapers published since 2011. The goal was preservation and accessibility, with a website allowing advanced searches by date, title or author.
At the same time, the newsroom moved to a larger office in Istanbul’s Findikzade neighborhood. From there, the team produced a newspaper printed in 7,000 to 10,000 copies, funded by international donors and distributed alongside six other newspapers, mainly in Turkey, to Syrian refugees and in regions beyond the regime’s control in northern Syria, including Aleppo and Idlib.
Donors poured millions into Syrian opposition media, also funding training for exiled journalists. In 2015, Enab Baladi joined the Ethical Journalism for Syria Alliance, a collective promoting journalistic ethics. About 30 local media organizations adopted the charter, formalizing ethical standards.
Four years after Nabil Sharbaji’s tireless efforts to instill journalistic ethics in his inexperienced colleagues, the team had finally made ethics the heartbeat of their work — a legacy he would never witness with his own eyes. On May 3, 2015, Nabil died, allegedly under torture in Sednaya prison, following a harrowing stint in the notorious Adra facility.
Even behind bars, he had found ways to communicate. Letters slipped out, hidden in biscuit wrappers or an old T-shirt belonging to a fellow inmate, inked in blood and rust. Most of these letters reached his wife during the rare visitation windows granted to prisoners.
“The detainee struggles to find an outlet to escape from the walls of his prison, to smell the fragrance of life, a scent that makes him forget his stolen freedom for a moment,” Nabil wrote in 2013, a fragment later published by Enab Baladi. It is a haunting glimpse into a man seeking small victories against the suffocating weight of confinement, a fragile assertion of life within death’s shadow.
Jawad Sharbaji recalled rediscovering Nabil’s messages years later. “Recently, I went through my emails and found those Nabil had sent me in 2012. I spent three days reading them. He was good, pure, unfiltered — we even liked teasing him a little,” he said, a trace of a smile cutting through the lingering grief.
Active since 2013 in the Darayya pacifist movement initiated by al-Saqqa, who was arrested in 2011 and is still missing, Nabil was perhaps the most devoted to the ideals of the Syrian revolution. “He knew so much. Sometimes I felt he was hiding things from me, which annoyed me. But eventually, I understood — he just wanted to protect us,” said Bilal Abu Allaman, co-founder of Enab Baladi and Nabil’s childhood friend.
Even from exile, Nabil’s voice remained a tether to home. One day, Abu Allaman received a message through Nabil’s wife after a short visitation: “I’m glad you left, but stay connected to your homeland and to what’s happening there.”
“Whenever it gets hard,” Abu Allaman said, eyes glassy, “I remember that.”
Nabil’s death was not just a personal loss; it became a crucible for the entire newsroom. The grief cemented a collective resolve: to continue reporting for Syrians at home and abroad, to honor the sacrifices of those who could no longer speak.
Bilal was not the only one tempted to abandon the newspaper as Syria’s situation worsened. Jawad, editor-in-chief from day one, also considered leaving, especially after Koraytem’s death in November 2012. “When he died, many of us wanted to stop the paper. Then we realized that would betray Muhammad,” he said. “We resumed work, determined that Enab Baladi would be for all Syrians, beginning an adventure we were meant to carry forward.”
The decision to make the newspaper a lasting institution, despite the loss of founders, was formalized in 2015 in Turkey. Nearly all the co-founders gathered in Istanbul, some meeting in person for the first time. Nabil’s death, though devastating, cemented their determination to inform Syrians at home and abroad.
International training and years of experience professionalized the newsroom, refining its editorial line. “You have to know when to set aside revolutionary ideals and adopt a professional mindset, less guided by emotions,” Jawad explained.
In three years, the team grew from a 650-square-foot office to a more than 8,000-square-foot one in an Istanbul neighborhood known for hosting major media outlets. Enab Baladi aimed to expand its audience, especially in Germany, where over a million Syrian refugees had received visas from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. Many opposition figures were based there, making a local presence essential.
Another reason was the uncertainty of Turkish NGO funding laws. “It’s very unstable, complicating fundraising,” said Bahaa Ziadeh, who moved to Germany in 2014 and was tasked with establishing the German branch. He built a network in Syrian activist circles, which included helping with refugee resettlement paperwork, while pursuing a master’s degree and working as a research software engineer in medicine — a role he still combines with journalism today.
After four years of paperwork, Enab Baladi opened a bureau in Germany in 2018. It would take until 2023, however, for a member of the newsroom to receive a work visa. Since then, several other Enab Baladi journalists have joined the team in Germany.
In late November 2024, the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched a surprise offensive from Idlib province, which it had controlled since 2017. Druze and Bedouin armed groups from the south joined the operation. This lightning revolt toppled Assad’s regime on Dec. 8, barely 10 days after the start of the campaign.
Enab Baladi’s journalists were caught off guard. “When Aleppo fell on Nov. 30, I had planned a trip to Beirut with my wife so we could go to Syria if the regime fell — but it happened much faster than expected. We were taken completely by surprise,” said Bahaa Ziadeh, with a broad smile. From Amsterdam, Jawad Sharbaji spent three sleepless nights ensuring he did not miss a single development in the offensive.
When Assad’s flight to Moscow was confirmed, they initially struggled to believe it. Yet it was true: The dictator, the tormentor of their colleagues and friends, no longer controlled Syria. In two weeks, the prospect of returning and settling in their homeland moved from fantasy to reality. The newsroom worked tirelessly to prepare for its return to Damascus.
Ammar Ziadeh, an expert in setting up offices, took charge. In early January 2025, he returned to Syria and inspected a bureau in the Mazzeh district, home to the former regime’s air force base and just a few hundred yards from their old printing press. “I inaugurated our new offices in Damascus before even visiting my family,” he said, his eyes reflecting the enthusiasm he displayed throughout the process.
Seated on a comfortable couch in the new office more than a month after his return, Bilal Abu Allaban still struggled to believe he was in Damascus. When New Lines met him in June, he was responsible, along with Bahaa Ziadeh, for the 25 journalists working in the bureau. For now, there is no official editor-in-chief in this office. Jawad Sharbaji has not yet set foot back in Syria, while Kholoud Helmi plans to return after she has ensured that her U.K. residence visa will not be revoked. The office operates with rotating leadership each month — a situation expected to change soon with the planned closure of the Istanbul office, now considered obsolete by the newsroom.
“When we opened applications to work with us, we received thousands of submissions. We selected about 10 to get started,” Bahaa said. The media outlet now seeks to expand and reach audiences it previously could not access in areas formerly under regime control. But it also faces an economic crisis affecting all independent Syrian media. “With the cut in USAID funding, particularly under the Trump administration, we lost 35% of our resources,” explained Kholoud, noting that Enab Baladi partnered with a handful of other newspapers to form a consortium aimed at facilitating fundraising.
With over a million followers on social media, Enab Baladi is now among the most widely followed Syrian media outlets online. Fourteen years after its clandestine birth, and after sacrifices that claimed the lives of six of its founders, Bilal Abu Allaban and Bahaa Ziadeh look out through the newsroom’s large windows at the shattered horizon of Darayya. Before them lie the ruins of their city, deep scars of a war that crushed millions of lives and at times obliterated any hope of return.
Yet this landscape of devastation acts as a compass: It reminds them that their mission endures — to inform a people long silenced, to revive a memory others would erase and to pave the way toward freedom and peace, a mission that 14 years of struggle have never extinguished.
Below are the names of the 24 co-founders of Enab Baladi:
Jawad Sharbaji, Ammar Ziadeh, Rudaina Khoulani, Majd Ezzat Sharbaji, Manal Shakhashiro, Bahaa Zuadeh, Kholoud Helmi, Moawia Sharbaji, Muhammad Koraytem, Nabil Waleed Sharbaji, Ahmad Waleed Helmi, Mohammad Dalain, Afraa Sharbaji, Ghada Al Abbar, Fadi Dabbas, Fadi Sharbaji, Noor Al Tall, Anas Al Saqqa, Rasha Khoulani, Moataz Murad, Mohammad Khaled Shehadeh, Mostafa Reesha, Mohammad Fares Shehadeh, Azhar Sharbaji.
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