By Jasmine Hsieh
The Scene staff
Rihab Sawah, a physics professor on the Florissant Valley campus who grew up in Syria, urges people not to trust everything they read in the media about the war-torn country.
In May, 2011, two months after civil war broke out, Sawah returned to Syria to see the situation for herself. While there, she noticed discrepancies between news reports and facts on the ground, counting 24 errors in 10 days.
Sawah gave a talk called “Syria – An Unheard View” on Nov. 19 as part of the International Festival on the Forest Park campus. She advised people to be skeptical when gathering information.
“Maybe cross check with another source, from somewhere else with a totally unrelated and different agenda,” she said. “They all have agendas, all of them.”
Sawah, 45, was born in the United States, but her family moved when she was 3 to Damascus, the capital of Syria. She returned to St. Louis at 21 to finish college and joined the Florissant Valley staff in 2009. She returned to Syria every year before the war.
For years, Sawah’s husband, Anthony Clark, a business professor at Florissant Valley, tried to convince her to talk about the Syrian unrest because he thought it was important for people here to know what was going on in other parts of the world.
“Last year, I remember hearing people everywhere debating, ‘Should we bomb Syria or not?’ as if they were talking about a football game,” Clark said. “So I thought, ‘What if these people really know somebody there?’ Then you can’t have that conversation and think of it the same way.”
For a long time, Sawah didn’t want to talk about Syria, not only to protect her safety but also because some of her experiences were private and upsetting.
Her father was a political prisoner for 12 years under the Al Assad regime, which has governed Syria for more than 40 years. He was arrested when she was 10 and was jailed without charges or a trial.
“Before I headed to the U.S., he said to me, ‘Move on with your life and don’t wait.’ And so I did,” Sawah said through tears.
She has a long list of examples of faulty news coverage, including a report by the Al Jazeera TV network that Syrian tanks had moved into a popular public square in Damascus. Sawah went there and found no evidence of tanks.
“I got there and asked people, ‘Where are the tanks?’ and they said, ‘What tanks?’” she said.
At one point, international news media, including CNN, reported that the Syrian ambassador to France had resigned. The ambassador later said someone had imitated her voice in an effort to make Syria seem weak.
“Of course, the clarification was not broadcast on Al Jazeera, and neither was it on CNN,” Sawah said.
Some of Sawah’s concerns were about stories not widely reported, including problems caused by insurgents opposing the government.
In Damascus, she met a taxi driver whose windshield had an inch-wide crack. He told her insurgents in the city of Homs had ordered a curfew and damaged his windshield when he violated it.
That was the first time Sawah had doubts about the insurgents.
On a side trip to Lebanon, she noticed large numbers of young men in the mountains. One group told her they actually were Syrians who had escaped the country after joining in protests.
“To my shock, they told me they were paid (between 15,000 and 20,000 liras),” she said, noting their regular jobs paid only up to 8,000 liras. “I asked, ‘Who is paying you that?’ But all they know is ‘a guy in the neighborhood.’ ”
In Damascus, friends who were merchants told Sawah that many workers had left and didn’t bother to say they weren’t coming back.
Sawah’s cousin told her one of his friends in Homs was killed because he opened his store in violation of the curfew. The rebels reportedly left his body in front of the store to let everyone see.
“Aren’t these people protesting the brutality of the government and urging for democracy and freedom?” Sawah thought. “I mean, this is just not adding up right.”
A journalist friend told Sawah that he had seen thousands of tents set up and ready for occupancy just across the border in Turkey and far from early protests. To Sawah, that meant the Turkish government knew in advance the unrest would spread, indicating it was planned rather than spontaneous.
“I mean, you wouldn’t go through all that cost to erect thousands of tents unless you know something is going to happen,” she said.
All of these stories convinced Sawah that more was happening behind the scenes than what was evident in news reports. She decided not to trust any single source.
“I realized, perhaps, this is a media war in Syria,” she said.
The audience at Sawah’s well-attended talk listened intently to her firsthand reporting.
“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” said Angela Rioux, 50, a psychology major. “I’ve already learned that you can’t trust the media. If you want the true story, you have to find it yourself.”
Gregory Swatske, 43, a general transfer student, said he had traveled from North Africa to Syria in 2011 and witnessed the beginning of the unrest.
“I really want to know why all these things happened in Syria and who is behind it,” he said.
Sawah thinks there are groups trying to generate a long-standing state of chaos in Syria for their own purposes, possibly to weaken Iran.
She said Arabian Gulf nations, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are ruled by Sunni Muslim families but also have big Shiite populations and leaders may be afraid the Shiites will revolt. Iran has the largest Shia population in the region.
“To weaken Iran, you’ve got to weaken its ally first,” Sawah said. “Guess who is the only ally of Iran in the region?”