Roba El Husseini has spent the past decade with Agence France Presse (AFP) reporting from some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, covering crises in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond. Her reporting relays powerful stories of military operations, human tragedies, and systemic issues in the region, from the Syrian war to Lebanon’s 2019 protests and its following economic fallout. Today, she is the AFP Deputy Bureau Chief in Baghdad but is taking a brief pause from her work to be a World Fellow here at Yale.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Did your upbringing influence your approach to journalism?
I grew up in South Lebanon, so my childhood was tainted with wars, conflict, bombing, and displacement. Growing up in that situation, I wanted to understand the world better.
When you start journalism in a place like Lebanon and the Middle East, you are drawn to conflict without wanting it.
When I joined AFP, a whole journey started. A journey filled with, unfortunately, a lot of conflict and crises but the Middle East is also very vibrant, intertwined, rich with culture, tradition, and history.
Could you share insights from investigative stories that you’ve covered which had a significant impact on you?
In the last three years, with AFP, I focused on investigations, including one on Captagon, the highly addictive amphetamine drug that has taken the Middle East by storm. Around 80% is produced in Syria and its market is Saudi Arabia.
We did an investigation about the salt rooms in Sednaya prison, one of the Syrian regime’s most notorious prisons, which was particularly hard. In 2017, Amnesty International reported that 13,000 people had been executed in that prison. In our investigation in 2022, we found out that there were rooms in the prison full of coarse salt to keep bodies from decomposing before sending them to mass graves.
We interviewed witnesses— – people who went into these salt rooms, who heard about them from other inmates, and even some tasted the salt because they weren’t allowed any in the prison. I interviewed them multiple times, asking them to tell the story of one of their hardest traumas. How do you deal with that? They taught me how to interview them without knowing it. It is one of the stories that is stuck in my mind and my heart.
The last investigation I did was on October 13 last year when a group of journalists were hit by a strike in South Lebanon. A Reuters colleague and a friend of 15 years, Issam Abdallah, was killed. My two colleagues from AFP, Christina Assi and Dylan Collins, and three Al Jazeera colleagues were also wounded.
It was a seven-week investigation that showed that it was Israeli shelling: two strikes. The first strike killed Issam and wounded Christina. It was one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do. I had to zoom in on pictures to identify the munition. It’s not easy to investigate something that is really linked to you.
You spent several months investigating Al-Hol, a detention camp in Syria housing ISIS-affiliated individuals and their families. Can you describe it?
We have many hells on Earth in the Middle East now. Al Hol is one of them.
Al Hol was described to me as an open-air prison. When you cover front lines, you see death, wounded people, and wounded children. We try to deal with everything we see, but a land of children behind barbed wires who don’t have the freedom to move or leave, that gets to you.
When I was covering the last battle against the Islamic State group five years ago, the captured families of the suspected fighters would ask me where they were being taken. I would say “They’re taking you to Al Hol camp.” They’d ask, “How long will we stay there?” “I don’t know, but I don’t assume long.” Five years later, they are still there. Those who entered the camp when they were two years old are now seven.
When I got there, I knew right away that it was a camp for children. You enter the camp and the first thing you see is children: children working, children throwing stones, children everywhere.
We had to leave the camp before 3 pm. People tell me that when it’s dark they hide in their tents because of the crimes and murders.
In that camp, children are paying the price for the sins of their fathers. They opened their eyes and they saw war, radicalism, angry mothers, tents, and camps.
The children of this camp are traumatized: they’ve seen bombardment, siege, and death. Now they are stuck in a place where they cannot go out. One mother told me that her child asked her if the tents inside the camp are better than the ones outside.
The camp is divided into the main camp and then the annex for foreigners. Could you describe this divide?
The main camp is where they, the US-backed Kurdish forces, keep the Syrian and Iraqi Islamic State families and displaced people. There are around 43,000 people in it—the great majority are children.
There is an annex for foreigners which now holds more than 6,000 people from around 50 countries. Name a country, and you have it in Al Hol’s annex. There’s also a smaller camp called Roj, which holds more than 2,000 foreigners.
From what I’ve seen, nationality brings people together, but so does radicalism. The radicals stick together and those who are afraid of the radicals stick together.
A woman described the camp for me. She said people on the outside see us as one thing, but we are not. Some have become super radicalized because of this situation; others don’t want anything to do with this anymore. People don’t see this from the outside. They just see bad people. How bad can a child be?
The Kurdish security forces have imposed more restrictions on the annex than on the main camp. In the main camp, it’s easier to engage with people and children want to talk to you. There was this 12-year-old kid, Ali. I was talking to his neighbor. She was telling me how Islamic State members had kidnapped her, beaten her, and shot her in the face and shoulder when she was only 18 years old. Then Ali interrupted and started explaining his own story.
But, when you go to the annex, to their marketplace, children will throw stones at you because they’re bored, because they don’t trust foreigners, because they have angry mothers, because they are growing up behind barbed wires.
What can the international community do for these children?
Al Hol has every issue you can find in a book—lack of education, complicated access to health care, poverty, sexual abuse. International organizations work there and there is so much for them to do but only so much that they can offer to children.
For example, there are educational programs, but then you have radical women who don’t want their children to be educated at a program run by an international Western organization. Other women are too afraid to send their children to these small schools because Al Hol is bursting with crime. A 2022 report by Save the Children said that children have seen murders, kidnappings, stabbings, and strangulation on their way to school. I had women telling me that they keep their children inside their tent. It becomes a prison inside a prison.
The world isn’t dealing with Al Hol. You have these speeches and statements about how “we” defeated the Islamic State group, but how are they dealing with this generation? How do they expect these children to grow up if they don’t know anything beyond these barbed wires?
The Kurds, the UN, and the international organizations have all been calling on countries to repatriate their citizens. You cannot separate children from their mothers without adding traumas to these children, so the international community need to find a solution.
The children are left there, stuck in limbo, with a big stigma placed on them. “They are the children of the Islamic State group fighters.” “They are bad.” How can a five-year-old be bad? If you want to fix their future, you need to deal with their present now.
The camps are managed by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF, who allied with the US to combat ISIS. How has the war changed the way the Kurds are operating within the region?
Syrian Kurds have been marginalized for so long. They weren’t allowed to study their language at school or celebrate their holidays, and so on.
Then, in 2012, the Syrian regime was losing and withdrew from the Kurdish-majority areas—that’s when the Kurds prevailed. They formed a semi-autonomous administration and started ruling and expanding the Kurdish-majority areas. In 2014, they allied with the US and in 2019, defeated the Islamic State group. There are still around 900 U.S. personnel in the Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria. Now, after spearheading the battle against the Islamic State group, the Kurds look after the Western-funded camps and prisons where the IS fighters are kept.
What the future holds for the Syrian Kurds is a very big question. Everything has changed for them since 2012. It will be tough, but there will come a time when these negotiations will have to happen.
How might another Trump presidency impact the Syrian Kurds, given their concerns after the 2019 U.S. troop withdrawal and Turkey’s subsequent invasion?
In 2019, Trump decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Kurdish-held areas along the border with Turkey. This decision paved the way for Turkey to launch an invasion that same year. Ankara considers Syria’s Kurdish forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces, a terrorist group claiming that they are allied to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), a leftist Kurdish armed group that has been in conflict with Ankara since the 1980s.
The Kurds are worried that another Trump presidency will bring them something they cannot anticipate. In a recent interview with AFP last month, the commander of the SDF forces said, “In 2019 we had an unsuccessful experience with the Trump administration, but we are confident that the United States makes its decisions based on strategic interest in the region.”
At one point, all of this must be discussed. Since 2020, Syria has been in the shadows of everything. The world will have to deal with this question: For how long can Syria be this tattered country?
Everyone is involved in the answer—the U.S., Turkey, Russia, Iran. At one point, something must be decided. The Kurds are afraid that they will have to pay the price. After all their sacrifice fighting the Islamic State group, they don’t want to lose.
In February, you moved to Iraq to become AFP’s Deputy Bureau Chief in Baghdad. How do you plan on navigating the transition from being on the front lines to a managing role?
How can I describe Baghdad? I mean, Baghdad is a frontline by itself. It’s a city of civilization, but also chaos and exhaustion. Iraqis have endured so much for decades, before and after the 2003 invasion. They’re still trying to recover, and this is coming so slowly.
In the Middle East, countries are intertwined together. I wouldn’t have done a good job covering Syria if I hadn’t understood Iraqi politics or history. Whatever happens in Palestine, you feel it in Lebanon. The war starts in Syria, and we feel it in Lebanon. When you want to cover one country in the Middle East, you must understand the whole region’s politics.
I’ve always been an on-the-ground person. Being in Baghdad and doing management at the same time has been challenging—not altogether new but challenging.
Iraq is a very rich country. Imagine how many stories are there, how many stories people want to tell. Climate change in Iraq is the big thing. You see it, it’s so clear, the pollution, climate displacement, how the Euphrates and the Tigris are fading.
There’s always a story in Iraq and unfortunately, it is not on the front pages anymore, like Syria, like so many forgotten conflicts and countries in this world. I mean, look at Sudan, there are 11 million displaced, tens of thousands killed every day.
How do you prepare for the challenges of reporting in conflict zones, both during the assignment and in coping with the aftermath?
It’s not only the frontline, it’s the daily job. Working for a news agency like AFP, you work around the clock. When covering the Syria conflict, some days we worked 15 hours straight. You get exhausted.
On the front line, physical safety comes first but you need mental health to overcome what you’re seeing in the moment and to do the reporting job. Then, you deal with the aftermath. You need a support system. I get it from my colleagues and my friends. That’s a priority for every journalist, on the frontline or not.
How does being a female journalist in conflict zones shape your experiences compared to your male counterparts? What advice would you give to young women interested in conflict journalism?
Do it! I mean, it’s challenging for us women everywhere. You are on the front line, and you have someone telling you, “Maybe not you, maybe him.” But why not me? Why him? These kinds of challenges hit you all the time. You just have to prove yourself and be the best journalist you can be.
It must indeed be incredibly tough seeing present events in the region from here.
What’s happening now is changing everything, it’s reshaping the Middle East. I don’t know if I will go back to the Middle East that I know. I don’t think so.
I went crazy for the first two weeks when the war started in Lebanon. I was already going crazy because of everything happening there and in Gaza. I mean, I wake up every morning to check if my friends in Gaza have sent me a message, to make sure they are okay.
Journalists or not, war is never something that people should get used to. We cover war, but every front line, battlefield, and camp is different, the people are different, and the stories are different. It hits you in the face every time there’s war. It’s not something that should be normalized. Even though I grew up in a place like Lebanon and the Middle East where people would say, “These people are used to wars”, we don’t want to be used to wars.
How can you detach yourself from all the suffering around you? How can you detach yourself from your own country? It’s impossible.