“Month by month, I realized that the most vulnerable in this war are the children,” he recalled.
Some of his photos are hard to look at such as the ones showing children running out of buildings that had been hit by bombs minutes before; fathers holding their dead children shrouded in white cloth; and the tearful mother who doesn’t have enough milk to feed her newborn, so instead, sticks her pinky in the baby’s mouth to calm her hunger.
A baby discovered in the rubble after an airstrike is lifted in the air by White Helmets and community members.
This photographer s work shows the impact of the Syrian war on children msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Ten years ago this week, protesters in Syria were crushed by government forces, launching a bloody civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced more than 10 million people. Bassem Habieh picked up a camera - initially, he used his phone - and began documenting what would be years of urban warfare from his hometown of Douma, a rebel holdout. Later becoming a professional photographer, his camera lens often focused on children, many who have known only fighting their whole lives. Bassam Khabieh s forthcoming book is called Witness To War: The Children Of Syria, and he joins me now from Istanbul. Welcome to the program.
In early 2011, as she watched the removal of the graffiti that had been scrawled around Tahrir Square in the heady days of the popular uprising, followed by a “cleansing” of that space of revolt, Dina Heshmat realized she was witnessing the deliberate rewriting of history, a deletion of the people’s spontaneous discourse, to be replaced by a more elitist narrative.
Guided by this awareness, Heshmat sets out, in
Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to re-examine the Egyptian revolution of the previous century, looking into the country’s archives to find unpublished novels and out-of-print articles that reflect the people’s mood during what she argues was the early 20th century’s equivalent of Egypt’s Arab Spring: a popular uprising against an oppressive regime by society’s poorest and most downtrodden classes, that was later claimed by the nationalist bourgeoisie.