middle East
Article reserved for subscribers
Thanks to visas granted by the dictatorship, Western videographers visit and film Syria during closely monitored trips to restore the regime’s image.
Strolling through the old city of Aleppo, contemplating the Umayyad Mosque, tasting Mhallabiyé, this famous Syrian dessert… From the images of these Youtube videos, it seems that Syria has never been ravaged by a ten-year war, and that at that time stood still before 2011 . Since the reopening of the country’s borders, more and more YouTubers are “travelling” there. The rhetoric of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime is hardly hidden behind the facade of the pictures of their travels: Syria is a safe country again and the Syrians are happy there.
The Damascus regime has well understood the interest in issuing travel visas to these camera-in-hand tourists. “This is a real regime strategy aimed at encouraging them to travel to Syria and then taking them to certain places to tell them, ‘Look, the war is over and Syria is a normal country ’ he analyzes the director of the NGO Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), Bassam Alahmad.
Yet peace has not truly returned to the country, which still bears the scars of a conflict that has claimed nearly half a million lives and driven the soul away…