Filed from Aleppo · 14 March 2025 The Dispatch Archive · 2011—2025
Dispatches from Syria, witnessed by the world.
Fourteen years of unbroken, bylined reporting filed by 140+ local reporters across Aleppo, Idlib, Damascus, Raqqa, Hassakeh, and the coastal mountains. Each entry below is a witness report — date-stamped, contributor-named, and filed from inside the country it describes.
The current reading shelf · Newest first
Recent dispatches, filed this week.
Six entries from across the network. Each is a bylined witness report — a city tag, a dateline, and the contributor who filed it. Open one and read to the end.
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A letter from the old city, written between two sieges
The bakery on Bab al-Faraj reopened on a Tuesday. By Friday it had a queue that bent past the barber's and the shuttered textile shop where my grandmother used to buy cotton thread.
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© Yara Khoury -
Electricity hours in Idlib, kept on a kitchen wall
A handwritten schedule taped above the kettle: four hours on, two off. Twenty-two households on this street keep the same hours. The refrigerator hums, stops, and the children decide which hour gets the iron.
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© Mahmoud al-Omar -
A café on Mezzeh, kept open across three owners
"The espresso machine never left. We wrapped it in blankets when the street emptied, and we wrapped it again when the street filled back up." A transcript in three voices, recorded over two afternoons in February.
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© Reem Haddad -
The bread queue on al-Naim Street, at six in the morning
Three shifts at the public bakery, two subsidized bundles per family, and a queue that begins forming before the lights come on. I stood in it for two mornings. Here is what people told me, in their own words.
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© Omar Faisal
The archive, in numbers
Fourteen years of uninterrupted reporting from Syria, measured in the materials a researcher can actually cite.
Cited in 600+ peer-reviewed academic papers and policy briefs published by Chatham House, the International Crisis Group, and the London School of Economics since 2016.
From the archive — photo essays
Four frames from the 36,000-photo archive, shot by contributors reporting from inside Syria.
These are not stock images. Each frame was filed by a named local reporter — verified by our three-person editorial board in Beirut and Berlin — and shipped alongside the dispatch it was made to illustrate. Click any frame to open the full essay.
© R. al-Khalil / SyrianBoy
© H. Othman / SyrianBoy
© M. Daoud / SyrianBoy
© N. Bitar / SyrianBoy
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