Gender Equality, Media & Journalism, Middle East Syrian journalist details dangers, challenges covering her country

Hidden away in a file marked “not to be published,” journalist Zaina Erhaim has saved notes she took while living and working in the war-torn northern region of her native Syria. Publishing those accounts would have risked her life and the lives of her sources and her family, friends, and other connections. 

“For a local journalist, you are either [a] propagandist, or you could be dead,” said Erhaim, who lives in exile in London. 

During four public discussions on campus last week, Erhaim described in detail the dangers she faced covering armed conflicts while in Syria, especially as a local female journalist. 

Erhaim was on campus through Penn’s Writer at Risk residency, sponsored through a partnership among Perry World House, Kelly Writers House, and the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Media at Risk. The residency is the second in what is expected to be an annual event. The first was Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats, who came in the fall of 2017. 

“I didn’t plan to be a war correspondent; it just so happened war came to my homeland and made me a war correspondent,” she said during a discussion with National Public Radio Middle East correspondent Deborah Amos, moderator of “Risk and Reward: Local Journalists Covering the Front Lines of War in Syria and Yemen” for an audience of nearly 150 people at Perry World House. 

Read more about Zaina Erhaim's time on campus in Penn Today >>