Anton Mukhamedov – The Daily Star
The Syrian revolution buried one of its most determined and outspoken voices Friday after as unidentified gunmen shot nonviolent activist and citizen broadcaster Raed Fares along with his colleague Hammoud Juneid in Kafranbel in opposition-held Idlib.
A staunch advocate of an independent civil society and citizen journalism in Syria, Fares was also a longtime veteran of peaceful protests against the Assad regime in his hometown of Kafranbel. He became known for creative slogans with a frequently satirical spin on the international community’s reaction to the Syrian war, often shared on English-speaking social media.
“Today, America and Syria are two nations sharing two tragedies: 9/11 attack and Assad’s birthday,” read one such banner on the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In 2013, Fares launched local radio station Radio Fresh FM to provide a coverage of Syrian news independent of any military groups operating in Idlib.
“If it weren’t for us and other independent voices, terrorists would be the only source of information about Syria locally and internationally. For that reason, the terrorist groups [and the regime] see us as a direct threat,” Fares wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year.
The radio station also provided much-needed training for Syria’s aspiring citizen journalists and warned civilians in Idlib of upcoming aerial attacks by the Russian and Syrian air force. “We warn our listeners when fighter jets take off and track their routes so we can give people as much time as possible to find as safe a place as possible to hide,” Fares wrote in a fundraising message spread by the activist group The Syria Campaign.
Hunted by all sides, Fares survived at least two assassination attempts by groups such as Daesh (ISIS) and Nusra Front, which later rebranded to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, while the Radio Fresh office was twice the target of bombings by the Assad regime, according to Fares.
In 2014, Fares was saved by his brother, who found him in time to rush him to a hospital, after his car was shot at by Daesh militants. Still, despite warnings by friends, he refused to permanently leave Syria. “I remember him telling me how strongly he believed in a civil state, and I thought it could be naive, because of how powerful [groups like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham] had become,” American journalist Patrick Hilsman, who met Fares in Syria several days before he was first shot in 2014, told The Daily Star in an interview“But when I see … how the leaders of various Islamist factions have come and gone without too many people caring, it’s a stunning contrast to how beloved Raed is across much of Syria and the diaspora. I realize that he wasn’t naive, that his ideas would endure,” Hilsman added.
When armed groups banned Radio Fresh from playing music or recruiting women broadcasters, Fares would circumvent them with humor, playing various sound effects and using software to modify female broadcasters’ voices.
“Raed used to say that he won’t leave Syria to the regime and the extremists … He knew how dangerous it was: He was getting a lot of threats in the past couple of months,” said Syrian-American human rights activist Kenan Rahmani, who visited Fares in Kafranbel multiple times.
According to Rahmani, Fares “knew the extremists wanted him dead, and he knew they hated his protests, and his witty banners, and his radio, and he never stopped.”
Yet, according to Fares himself, no risk to Radio Fresh compared to Trump administration’s decision to withhold $200 million in funding for Syrian humanitarian and civil society groups, a change of policy announced to Fares by email in May 2018. “I’ve seen with my own eyes how Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups that were once scattered by U.S.-backed forces are regrouping and recruiting fearful and disenfranchised youth,” Fares wrote in The Washington Post op-ed at the time.
He warned the American public that “without groups like Radio Fresh to provide alternative messages, another generation will take up arms to found the [Daesh’s] second and third editions.”
Fares’ assassination was confirmed by Radio Fresh FM’s Facebook page in a post, that showed photos of Fares’ and Juneid’s bodies, after reports had emerged of his assassination in early afternoon.
“When we say Raed, we remember the famous Kafranbel signs, we remember the peaceful protests against all atrocities. When we say Hammoud we remember him as inseparable from his camera, running toward the barrel bombs to record history and capture the crimes against his people,” The Syria Campaign said in a statement.
A video published on Twitter showed Kafranbel residents escorting Fares’ body draped in the flag of revolutionary Syria.