Thursday 30 June 2016

Life In Berlin: A Magazine Makes Syrian Women's Voices Heard

Cofounder Yasmine Merei of the Syrian women's magazine "Saiedet Souria."

 'Yasmine Merei was about to start her master's degree in linguistics in Syria when the revolution began. The ongoing bombing destroyed her hometown Homs and forced her to move to safer areas inside Syria.
 "We started moving from a city to another and I needed to do something in order to earn money in one way or another," says Merei, "so one of the friends who I met when I started moving, he called me and said, 'Yasmine, there is a magazine, a local magazine and I think you can work as an editor because you are specialized in Arabic language, what do you think?' And I said, 'For sure.' "
 "We decided on our audience who are the women in the liberated area - what we call it - which is the area not controlled by the regime anymore. In these areas you don't have electricity, so you don't have Internet access, so they are not connected to the world at all. So you feel that you are responsible if you are able to keep giving them the information and the knowledge about life and about what’s going on outside Syria and also give them the feeling that you are interested in what’s going on with them," she says.
 "During the last months, we worked on the women who are living under the control of ISIS. We worked on a file about women who lose parts of their bodies because of shelling and then how they are able to continue to live their lives." '

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