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SyrianBoy SyrianBoy Est. 2011 · Aleppo
A young blogger works by lamplight in an Aleppo apartment, 2011. © SyrianBoy Archive / contributor file

Aleppo, 2011 —

A seventeen-year-old opened a laptop on the first day of the uprising and began filing dispatches. Fourteen years later, he is still filing.

SyrianBoy began as one notebook, one rented internet line, and a refusal to let the cameras arrive after the story did. It has never gone offline — not through the 2016 siege of Aleppo, not through the 2024 coastal offensives, not through exile.

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Aleppo · March 2011

Why we started

I was seventeen. The protests were two streets from our flat and the official story on the evening news was already a different country than the one I was walking through. State media called us terrorists. Satellite channels called us a crisis. Nobody called us by our names.

I bought a used laptop on installments and started writing what I saw — the names of the dead, the names of the neighborhoods, the small, ordinary things that cameras missed. A friend in Berlin set up a WordPress. A friend in Beirut taught me how to verify a photograph. By the end of that first month, three other teenagers were filing with me.

We were never going to replace a press corps. We were going to be the press corps that was already there — Syrians, under thirty-five, reporting from inside the country we were born in, in a voice the state broadcasters refused to use. Fourteen years on, that is still the only editorial brief we have ever needed.

— M. H., founder, writing from Berlin, 2025

By the numbers

Fourteen years, still publishing

The record of a project that has never gone dark — measured in years, people, dispatches, and readers who came back.

14 yrs Continuous publishing since March 2011 — through siege, exile, and return.
140+ contributors Active local reporters across Aleppo, Idlib, Damascus, Raqqa, Hassakeh, and the coastal mountains.
4,800+ dispatches Original bylined reports, photo essays, and oral histories archived and date-stamped.
218,000 readers Newsletter subscribers across the Arabic and English editions, as of 2025.

Independent journalism supported by readers, not by states. Become a recurring donor →

A contributor files notes by hand inside a damaged building in northwest Syria. Contributor A. K. filing from Idlib, 2024. Photographed for the SyrianBoy archive. © SyrianBoy / A. K.

Editorial commitments

How we report

Witness-led, unflinching, intimate is not a slogan. It is a set of rules our three-person editorial board enforces on every dispatch before it carries the SyrianBoy byline.

  1. 01

    Source protection precedes the story.

    Every contributor can file under a chosen pen name, a region tag, or no name at all. We never publish a photograph that could identify a source without their written on-record consent, and we strip EXIF metadata from every image before it leaves the newsroom. Verification is handled in Beirut and Berlin, never on the same network as the contributor.

  2. 02

    Two independent witnesses, one byline.

    No casualty figure, no armed-faction claim, no destruction tally is published on a single source. Our standard is corroboration from at least two independent paths — a second contributor, a dated satellite image, a recording cross-checked against our oral-history archive. When we cannot meet that bar, we say so on the page.

  3. 03

    Bylines belong to the people on the ground.

    Eighty-seven percent of our bylines are contributors reporting from inside Syria. We do not aggregate wires, we do not re-publish from outlets we cannot verify, and we do not strip a contributor's name when their work is syndicated. A SyrianBoy byline is the contributor's, not the platform's.

Safety architecture

Protecting the people who file

For every donor, editor, and prospective contributor, the question is the same: how do you keep 140 reporters alive? Here is the answer, in three chapters.

Chapter 01

Verification

Every contributor is vetted by a three-person editorial board based in Beirut and Berlin. Vetting means a recorded interview, two professional references inside Syria, and a six-month probationary period during which dispatches are cross-checked against independent sources before publication. Fewer than one in three applicants completes the process.

Once vetted, a contributor receives a secure reporting handle and a Signal-based channel to the editorial board. The board never holds the contributor's real name and the contributor's real phone line in the same file.

Chapter 02

Digital safety

Every device that files to SyrianBoy is configured by our digital-security lead using tools vetted by the Rory Peck Trust and Access Now. Devices travel with hardware-encrypted drives, mesh-network fallback for areas without cellular data, and a one-press duress protocol that wipes the local archive while leaving a beacon ping.

We rotate contributor handles on a quarterly basis, strip EXIF from every photograph at upload, and never store a contributor's GPS coordinates on the same server as their published work. The 2022 Rory Peck Trust bursary funded the rebuild of this stack; the 2023 Index on Censorship nomination was for keeping it standing under sustained attack.

Chapter 03

Editorial cover

A dispatch that could expose a source is held — sometimes for weeks — until it can be paired with corroborating reporting from a different contributor in a different location. When the risk is acute, the story is filed jointly under the SyrianBoy editorial byline rather than a named contributor, and our partner syndication network (openDemocracy, The New Humanitarian, Middle East Eye) carries the same framing.

We name our threats in our annual transparency report and we publish, every year, the number of dispatches we held, the number of bylines we anonymized, and the number of contributors we evacuated. We do not promise safety. We publish the work that made safety harder to maintain.

The translation bench

Thirty-eight sworn translators, four languages, one weekly rhythm

Every Tuesday the Arabic edition closes. By Wednesday morning, the same dispatches are live in English, German, and Turkish. The bench that makes that possible is not a contractor pool — it is a roster of thirty-eight volunteer translators, many of them former contributors themselves, who work under sworn confidentiality and rotate in pairs so no single translator holds a complete source-to-publication chain.

“A good Arabic-to-English translation is not a word-for-word job. It is a decision about what the reader on the other side needs to feel in order to keep reading. We have argued about one preposition for forty minutes, because that preposition was the difference between a wounded neighborhood and a destroyed one.”

Lina D. Lead Arabic→English translator · joined the bench in 2017

The same-day turnaround on breaking dispatches — under six hours for the English edition, under twelve for German and Turkish — is the single operational metric we are most often asked about. The honest answer is that it is not fast because we are efficient. It is fast because thirty-eight people answer a Signal ping on a Wednesday morning.

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