Monday
Feb252013
Syria Feature: The Life and Death of a Citizen Journalist (Hanano)
Monday, February 25, 2013 at 7:05 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran On April 25, 2011, a man held up a video camera in Deraa. He was not an experienced videographer and he did not have a tripod.
He stood in front of a group of Syrian army soldiers with tanks and filmed them shooting their machine guns towards civilian targets. Each time he watched the clip on his laptop, he noticed the footage was shaky due to his trembling hand, so he would go back to his exposed vantage point to film once more.
He did this 24 times before he made this passably stable clip:
His name was Mohamed “Abu al-Nimer” Masalmeh.
On January 18, 2013 --- after 22 months of reporting as a citizen journalist from Deraa --– he was killed by army snipers in the village of Busra al-Harir