The Archive · Established 2011
A working archive of on-the-ground Syrian reporting, searchable by date, city, and contributor.
Fourteen years of continuous publishing — 4,800+ dispatches, 36,000+ verified photographs, and 600+ oral history recordings — every item date-stamped, contributor-attributed, and free to search. Built for journalists, researchers, educators, and documentary filmmakers sourcing citable primary material.
- Dispatches
- 4,800+
- Photographs
- 36,000+
- Oral histories
- 600+
- Contributors
- 140+
Search interface
Search 14 years of dispatches, photographs, and oral histories.
Filter by format, date range, governorate, contributor, and language. Same-day Arabic-to-English turnaround on breaking dispatches. Every result links back to a contributor byline and a verifiable dateline.
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Oral history · 47 min
"We taught the children to count the planes before the bombs."
A first-person account from a primary-school teacher who kept forty-two children in a basement classroom through the final months of the siege. Includes lesson transcripts, names withheld for safety.
Open transcript & audio → -
Photograph · 14 in series
Bread queues, Damascus, day 412 of the fuel crisis.
Fourteen frames documenting the four-hour wait at a state-subsidised bakery in the Mezzeh district. Camera EXIF preserved; subjects unblurred.
Open photo essay → -
Dispatch · 1,820 words
Notes from a reopened hospital in Raqqa, ten years after the offensive.
A staff-surgeon's field report on the rebuilt national hospital — what works, what is missing, and the patients who arrived by pickup truck from the surrounding villages.
Read dispatch → -
Photo essay · 36 frames
The night buses from Idlib: a visual log, December 2024.
A 36-frame essay on the informal return-coach network — passengers, drivers, and the roadside vendors who materialise at each stop.
Open essay →
Showing 4 of 4,847 indexed records. Advanced query syntax supports governorate:Aleppo, year:2016, and contributor:"layla h".
Licensing & citation
Free for educators and researchers under Creative Commons — with a citation convention that holds up to peer review.
Our photograph archive is released for non-commercial educational use under a Creative Commons licence. Dispatches remain © the contributor and SyrianBoy Media Collective, but may be quoted and reproduced with attribution for teaching, scholarship, and documentary work. University partners receive full-text access on request.
Photographs & oral histories
Released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for educational and scholarly reuse. 36,000+ verified photographs and 600+ oral histories downloadable by registered educators at 1,200+ partner institutions.
Dispatch text
Each dispatch carries a suggested citation in its footer — author, dateline, dispatch number, and translator where applicable. We publish citation conventions in Chicago, APA, and Harvard formats.
University partner access
Free full-archive access for students and faculty at 14 European partner universities — including SOAS, Humboldt-Universität, and Sciences Po. Request partner access if your institution is not listed.
Source protection
Sources who filed under anonymity are flagged in the metadata. We do not publish identifying details for any contributor who has not given explicit on-record consent, regardless of academic pressure.
"SyrianBoy is the closest thing the Syria file has to a primary archive. When we cite a date, a place, or a name, we cite them — and the citation holds."
From the archive
Selected photographs, captioned and credited.
Six frames from the 36,000+ photograph archive. Click any image to open the full record — EXIF, caption, contributor byline, and rights statement.
© Yusuf D.
© Rana K.
© Dr. Khaled M.
© Omar S.
© Layla H.
© Rana K. & Omar S.
Browse by reporter
Six contributors, drawn from a network of 140+ on-the-ground voices.
Every dispatch in the archive is filed under a contributor byline. Researchers often search by author — the contributor index gives the archive a human shape that wire aggregations cannot offer.
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Aleppo · Beirut (in exile since 2017)
Layla H.
Oral histories · 142 recordings · Active 2012–present
A primary-school teacher who recorded her pupils' families through the siege; now coordinates a 12-person oral history bench in Beirut.
View 142 records → -
Damascus · Reporting in residence
Yusuf D.
Photographs · 1,840 images · Active 2014–present
A self-taught photographer whose Aleppo and Damascus archives have been exhibited at the Imperial War Museum and Foto8.
View 1,840 records → -
Raqqa · Resident
Dr. Khaled M.
Dispatches · 96 long-form · Active 2018–present
A trauma surgeon whose dispatches from the reopened national hospital are cited in four Lancet public-health papers.
View 96 records → -
Idlib · Resident
Rana K.
Photo essays · 47 series · Active 2019–present
A field reporter trained by the Rory Peck Trust whose essays on displacement and return have been syndicated by The New Humanitarian.
View 47 series →
87% of bylines are filed by contributors reporting from inside Syria. The remaining 13% file from the diaspora under the same editorial standards.
View all 140+ contributorsUsed by researchers
14 European universities and cited in 600+ academic papers and policy briefs since 2016.
- SOAS SOAS, University of London
- HUB Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- Sciences Po Sciences Po, Paris
- LSE London School of Economics
- Chatham H. Chatham House
- ICG International Crisis Group
- Reuters Reuters Photographer Picks
- TNH The New Humanitarian
- Academic papers
- 600+
- Partner universities
- 14
- Translators
- 38
- Languages
- 4
- Newsletter readers
- 218k
- Monthly reach
- 1.4M
Featured by the BBC, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, NPR's Morning Edition, and Reuters' photographer picks. Recipient of the 2022 Rory Peck Trust bursary; nominated for the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award in 2020 and 2023.