Khabat Abbas is an independent journalist and video producer from northeastern Syria, and the winner of the 2021 Kurt Schork News Fixer Award.

”I can see from my experience that there is a gap between the editors, who are kind of elites in their luxury offices, and the amazing journalists who are in the field, who all sympathize with what they are seeing on the ground and want to cover [it], but they have to satisfy the editors. And this is how we end up having little gaps in the ways of covering in general. It's not a matter of like, they shaped it in this way. The problem, I think, it’s bigger. How this industry is working, how this industry is deciding what they should cover.”

Show notes:

• @khabat_abas
• Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism
• 34:00 "'Belief Allows Us to Move Forward,' Said One Female Soldier in Battle Against ISIS" (ABC News • July 2017)
• 40:00 "The Former 'Caliphate Capital' Is Haunted by Fears of an ISIS Comeback" (Washington Post • May 2020)
• 43:00 "How ISIS Women and Their Children Are Being Left Stranded in the Desert" (Washington Post • Dec 2019)
• 43:00 "ISIS at a Crossroads" (Washington Post • Dec 2019)
• 43:00 "After the ISIS Caliphate: Thousands of Islamic State Fighters Captured in Syria Face Uncertain Fate" (Washington Post • Dec 2019)
• 51:00 "'This Is Ethnic Cleansing': A Dispatch from Kurdish Syria" (New York Review of Books • Oct 2019)
• 51:00 "For Kurds on the Syrian Front Line There’s No Ceasefire" (The Daily Beast • Nov 2019)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices