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The Current Transcript for July 20, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

We have to protect. We have to stand behind the rights of clean athletes. We have to take measures that ensure that clean athletes are at the heart of the Games and that fair, just sport is still possible.

LAURA LYNCH: If anyone knows what’s at stake when it comes to doping in sport, it's Beckie Scott. The cross-country skiing champion faced angry criticism when she decried Olympic officials in 2002 for not doing enough to stop the problem then. She won bronze in Salt Lake City but two years later was awarded the gold when the women who beat her were stripped of their medals for using banned substances. That was over a decade ago. Now the Olympic movement is at a crossroads as it decides whether to ban an entire country—Russia—from the Games in Rio. And later…

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It's very hard to get used to war and horror and seeing dead bodies in the streets. But on the other hand, you find your ways to adapt with it because you do want to stay and you have a duty there.

LL: Home for journalist Zaina Erhaim is Syria. She didn't have to leave her job at the BBC in London, but she says she felt a duty to return to help other Syrians tell their own stories of living through war. As the battle for her country continues, we'll revisit our conversation with her. I’m Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Should Russia be banned from the Olympics following McLaren doping report?

Guests: Dick Pound, Perdita Felicien, Mark Johnson

SOUNDCLIP

I was shocked but I was also highly impressed by the simplicity and efficiency of the fail-safe system the Moscow lab was using.

LL: Impressed might be an unusual word for what Richard McLaren is calling a state-run scheme designed to help athletes cheat. The Canadian lawyer was lead author of an independent report released this week detailing an extensive Russian doping program between late 2011 and August of 2015. The report was commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and it found at least 312 instances where drug test results were falsified across a total of 28 Olympic sports.

SOUNDCLIP

Every single positive result was being set up the command chain and an order coming back down. Save that, which meant falsify the records, or process it in the normal fashion, which any lab would process a sample. What was more surprising for me was going to Sochi and thinking here are all the Russian athletes competing using doping substances because they know the samples they're going to produce at different venues would go to the lab and then be swapped.

LL: The cover up is thought to go as high up as the Russian deputy minister of sports who had so far denied any involvement and has now been suspended. Aside from casting a dark light on the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the report raises difficult questions about what governing bodies can do to clean up international sporting competitions. So far, the International Olympic Committee has promised the “toughest sanctions available.” But the committee has yet to announce whether there will be a blanket ban preventing Russian athletes from competing in Rio. For his thoughts on what the IOC could or should do following the report, I'm now joined by Dick Pound. He is the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency and a two-time IOC vice-president. He is in Montreal. Hello.

DICK POUND: Good morning.

LL: The report—I’m wondering what your reaction was when you saw what was in it.

DICK POUND: Well, I was impressed by how thorough and how clear it was, given the fact that Professor McLaren had had less than 60 days to investigate and produce a report. But as he said, once you figured out what the system was, it was actually deceptively simple even though it was corrupt beyond description.

LL: Were you surprised?

DICK POUND: No. No. I would say disappointed. I mean, you sort of “know” that something's going on, you’re just not quite sure the mechanics until you get the, you know, the forensic evidence of it that you can rely on.

LL: So what should the IOC do now?

DICK POUND: Well, I think… You know, if you have a mantra that, you know, drug-free sport, zero tolerance for doping. You've got to be careful you don't turn that into zero tolerance for doping, unless of course, it's Russia. And I think that's the crossroads that the IOC faces and the elephant in the room is this state-designed, operated and controlled system that affects all athletes in Russia.

LL: So should the IOC ban Russia?

DICK POUND: Well, I think that's the recommendation that came from the World Anti-Doping Agency which you know, its stakeholders are all of the components of the Olympic movement plus the governments of the world. And their unanimous recommendation was that Russia should be banned and Russian officials should not be accredited at the Games.

LL: I've been reading this morning remarks attributed to you saying that you think the IOC is reluctant to do that or may be reluctant to do that.

DICK POUND: As I read both the language used and the words between the lines, I find that there's very little appetite in the IOC leadership to pull the trigger and say look, this has got to stop. If we're going to deter conduct of this nature in other countries as well as in Russia, there has to be a price.

LL: Well, why would it be reluctant?

DICK POUND: I don't know why. It seems to me such a slam dunk, particularly when you get this recommendation from the World Anti-Doping Agency. You should be down on your knees saying thank you, you've taken this burden off my shoulders and we're happy to follow the recommendation.

LL: Well, perhaps the why is about politics or perhaps the why is about money. Both of these things of swirled around the IOC in the Olympic movement for years. Could those be factors?

DICK POUND: Certainly the politics could. I mean, the Russian contribution, in terms of economics, the television rights and sponsorship and so on, is negligible. It bears no relationship to its sporting import.

LL: How widespread do you think this kind of state-sponsored doping is? Is Russia standing alone?

DICK POUND: Well, Russia is the one that's in the headlights at the moment because there is evidence that has been made available. Would I think that in other countries where the state is so involved in all aspects of life, including sport? You know, the system we're looking at is not dissimilar to that that was in play when East Germany and the Soviet Union were active in the 60s and 70s. So you know, in fact, probably a lot of the same people just carried on through that system with the breakup of the Soviet Union. There's no reason to think that the same practices haven’t been exported into the New Republic's.

LL: I actually want to take you back a few years. I remember interviewing you at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and you seemed pretty confident back then that the tide had turned. There was now an anti-doping culture. Those were your words in place. And here we are, 16 years later. It doesn't seem better, in some ways it seems worse. What were you seeing then that made you so optimistic and was that optimism misplaced?

DICK POUND: Well, I think I may have been a little ahead of the time. What we had by 2002 was a fairly well-organized and well-accepted organization called the World Anti-Doping Agency in place that had never existed before and we had been able to catch some of the athletes in Salt Lake using brands of EPO that they didn't think were testable. They weren’t—

[crosstalk]

LL: I know, but—

DICK POUND: They weren’t even on the market.

LL: I guess what I'm trying to get at is if you were too optimistic back then, how can people have any confidence that things are going to get any better anytime soon?

DICK POUND: You've got to hope that the message is finally delivered. I mean, we're getting better at catching people. We’re getting better at educating them to try and prevent the doping in the first place. But there are still pockets of it where the people involved—particularly those in governments—don't care what the rules are and are prepared to try and win using whatever methods seem to be effective.

LL: It's going to be interesting to see what the IOC decides. Thank you very much for your time.

DICK POUND: Anytime.

LL: Bye-bye. Dick Pound is the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency and a two-time IOC vice-president. He was in Montreal. For a deeper look at the implications of this investigation into state-sponsored Russian doping, I'm joined by two guests. Perdita Felicien is a two-time Canadian Olympian and a member of the CBC broadcast team at the Rio Olympic Games next month. She joins me here in Toronto. And Mark Johnson is a sports journalist and author of Spitting in the Soup: Inside the Dirty Game of Doping in Sports and he joins me from San Diego. Hello to you both.

PERDITA FELICIEN: Hello.

MARK JOHNSON: Thanks for having us on.

LL: Perdita, I want to start with you. What's your reaction to the McLaren report on the use of these performance enhancing drugs by Russian Olympic athletes and the state’s involvement?

PERDITA FELICIEN: When you see it in actual writing, it feels like you're vindicated as an athlete and I can say after, you know, more than 12 years on the, you know, the elite stage, you've had these inklings. You've had these conversations. You looked at other athletes sideways and thinking, I know you're dirty. And so to finally see it said out loud and there actually be evidence behind it, I feel like all the athletes have known about this for a while.

LL: But your reaction on a gut level, are you—

[crosstalk]

PERDITA FELICIEN: I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised.

LL: Does it sadden you? Does it disappoint you?

PERDITA FELICIEN: Yeah. And I've said this for a long time, it does disappoint me. Actually, it makes me angry. And I'm retired now, but this to me is an attitude, right. This is a culture. And so what happens when you allow systemic doping is all the people around you start to think and believe this is fine, this is okay and it takes generations to change that kind of thinking.

LL: Mark Johnson, what do you think of a possible blanket ban for all of Russian Olympic athletes from Rio?

MARK JOHNSON: I think that would certainly send a message that there's doping that's going on in Russia as a collective enterprise rather than just the aberrant behaviour of a few athletes. With state-sponsored doping, that has always been the problem, is how do you implicate an entire nation's athletes when maybe one or two of them aren’t innocent?

LL: Do you think it would work as a deterrent though, to other athletes?

MARK JOHNSON: I think more importantly, it would work potentially as a deterrent to entire nations. I mean, in 1978, Russian sports journalists wrote in The New York Times that for the Soviet Union, winning in the Olympics is one of the largest caliber guns in the propaganda arsenal. And as early as 1945, the Soviet Union created 80 state-sponsored sports schools to really create athletes to blast out of this propaganda machine. So it's really addressing the larger systematic state powers and desires that are expressed through Olympic victories that’s difficult. And this could potentially challenge that because if you're not showing up at the Olympics at all, then you're not certainly getting any propaganda advantage.

LL: Perdita, what do you think of this potential for the entire country, all the athletes to be banned?

PERDITA FELICIEN: I'm for it and I don't say that, you know, flippantly or easily. I know there's going to be some innocent athletes caught up in this dragnet. However, the consequence has to fit the crime and for Putin, he—

[crosstalk]

LL: Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.

PERDITA FELICIEN: Yes. He aligned sport excellence and power with how they are as a nation. If you take that away from him and their consequences were athletes and officials are now crying out to him, hopefully he'll think twice. But what happens is, usually these bans only affect athletes. They don't affect the people who are actually in power, who are allowing these things to happen. So the officials have to feel it. The sport ministers have to. Government. And yeah, they're up and coming generations of athletes. You have to send that kind of a message to be a deterrent.

LL: And you heard Dick Pound just now saying that he thinks the IOC is reluctant to do this. What do you think?

PERDITA FELICIEN: And I would agree because I think all these men are connected by power and money and trade-offs and those sorts of things. I don't have a lot of faith in the IOC. And I think that if they do this, WADA has made it clear. You can do this. Here's the evidence. We're throwing it at your doorstep. If they don't do that, then it tells me they’re not really serious about changing the tide here.

LL: And Mark, what do you think? You heard Dick Pound saying that he thinks that the IOC is reluctant. Do you think that's true?

MARK JOHNSON: I think that’s always a tension because even though the Olympics was founded on this sort of fantasy of amateurism, the Olympic Games has always existed in a world of commerce. And so the IOC needs money, multinational corporations to support the Games. And so when you're potentially turning off the spigot from a market as big as Russia, that is potentially devastating to your ability to continue the games going forward.

LL: But I guess the question is will the money still come if people believe that the athletes who are going there are all cheats?

MARK JOHNSON: Well, as far as the Olympics, probably. It certainly has in the United States. We didn’t stop playing baseball when it came out in the 1990s that baseball players were using tons of steroids and American football players had used steroids and amphetamines since the 1960s. And it certainly didn’t stop the magnificent growth of either of those games, those sports. So I think what fans say and what they do are often very different.

LL: Perdita, you have personal experience of going through doping processes in various games and competitions. What does this report tell you about the way they are trying to regulate doping in sports?

PERDITA FELICIEN: I think that cheats will always exist in any industry, not just sports, and I think they will always find a way to stay one step ahead. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and police it. For me, I think what needs to happen is WADA and the IOC has to start engaging athletes in their policies. Sometimes this banned list comes out every September that they enact for the January of the new year. And sometimes I felt as an athlete, my goodness I need a chemistry degree just to read some of these substances, like what is this? For a long time, caffeine was on the banned list. Of course you'd have to take a lot of it to even you know get any type of you know sanction or you know positive test, but I think if you engage the athletes on the most basic level and we help create and understand what they're doing, then you're less likely—hopefully—to tear it down and to go against it. So I think that really is what needs to happen. You just can't leave it in the hands of some of these nations and these sport ministers. You have to start going directly to the athletes and engaging them and having us be a part of that conversation.

LL: Mark, what do you make of the argument that comes up often after these scandals that if it is too difficult to enforce a ban, the IOC should just lift all the bans on substances and create a level playing field. As Perdita said, it gets very complicated.

MARK JOHNSON: Well, I think that the difficulty with that, of just having a free-for-all is really for the young athletes, the 18-year-old kid who finds that they’re a talented hurdler or cyclist, and now you're putting the obligation on them to a) finance and b) take drugs safely in order to ply their trade and pursue their dream. I mean, morally, I think we all find that unacceptable and even though there might not be health risks because if you're taking drugs under doctor's supervision, it may be safe, but it's still expensive and it's unfair. And when an athlete goes to take drugs without a doctor's supervision, it's potentially very dangerous. So to me, that's really the reason why we should continue to try and focus on drugs and on banning them. And what Perdita said is important. Right now, it’s so draconian. WADA just throws everything in there so it's very difficult for the athletes to try and negotiate what they can take and what they can't. Particularly in the United States where we have an unregulated supplement industry and athletes don't have much confidence that what is in the supplements they might be taking is actually accurately on the labels.

LL: Perdita, even if Russia is banned from this Games, what hopes do you have that Rio is going to be clean?

PERDITA FELICIEN: You know, I want to say this that most athletes don't want to take drugs. Even if you were to give us carte blanche and say take whatever you want, horse pills, Nandrolone, Advil, most of us would stay away from it. So what I want the public to know is, most of the results that you see at an Olympic Games are from athletes who are clean and are there because they want to be clean.

LL: I think some people have doubts about that.

PERDITA: Absolutely. I've gotten that all over Twitter and Facebook, let them all take drugs, they all take drugs anyways. That is not the case. And what I fear will happen next is, if Russia is banned, that people will look at the results of the Olympics and think oh it's not as exciting or it's not as interesting, you know. But I think sport is sport and what makes it interesting is for the most part, we want to think that everyone starts off with an equal playing field. But if you think people are taking this and taking that, to me it takes away from why I watch and I want to have faith in all the performances that we see. So if you're watching Rio, it's fine. It's going to be you’re watching good athletes who are there because they want to be there and they worked hard to be there.

LL: But is it going to be entirely clean?

PERDITA FELICIEN: I don't think it ever will, unfortunately. I might have kids in the Olympics and I don't necessarily think they'll face other athletes who are clean.

LL: Mark, what do you think? How much doping are we going to see in Rio, even if Russia isn't there?

MARK JOHNSON: Well, a lot of themselves, they admitted in a report in 2013 that they're only catching one to two per cent of the doped athletes and if they take out the athletes who they're catching with marijuana or—as a medicine, it's less than one per cent. Other research has shown that anywhere from 20 to 40 per cent of Olympic athletes might be doping over their entire life span, so there's no way it’s completely clean. But that doesn't mean just because a project is incredibly difficult, particularly in light of the fact that since professional sports started during the Industrial Revolution, doping was not something that raised eyebrows. It was accepted. It was only really in the 1960s this sort of effort took root to try and cleanse sport of the chemistry that had always been essential to high performance achievement. That effort takes time and it's dramatic and human rights get trampled.

LL: I just want to give the last word to you, Perdita. We've got about 30 seconds left. What are your greatest hope and your greatest fear about what's going to happen in Rio? And I'm talking about drugs.

PERDITA FELICIEN: One: that people watching don't believe in what they're seeing. Two is that you take away an athlete’s opportunity to stand on a podium in the gold medal position and hear their anthem played and four years later, six years later, they get their medal that's been touched and used by somebody else in a ceremony at their mayor's office with their mom and dad. And they've missed out on the opportunity to be called an Olympic champion on the biggest stage ever.

LL: Okay, thank you to both of you. Mark Johnson is the author of Spitting in the Soup: Inside the Dirty Game of Doping in Sports. He was in San Diego. And Perdita Felicien is a former Canadian Olympic athlete and she was in Toronto. Well, coming up.

[Music: Sting]

LL: Since the start of the Syrian civil war, millions have fled the country but Zaina Erhaim ran the other way. The Syrian journalist returned home to train women to tell their stories of surviving the war. That story after the news. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE: Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim shares harrowing stories of life between bombings

Guests: Zaina Erhaim

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. When Syria's brutal civil war broke out five years ago, Zaina Erhaim was living and working in London, England. But as violence intensified and locals began to flee the country, she chose to return home to Syria. When Erhaim spoke with The Current in December, she was the Syria project coordinator for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting working in Aleppo. She produced a documentary featuring the stories of citizen journalists who were documenting what it was like living through war.

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[Bombs exploding]

[Through translator] Men went to the front lines and I went to the front lines too. Men carried weapons, I carried weapons too. Men worked in field hospitals. I did that too.

LL: Since we spoke with Zaina Erhaim, the situation in Aleppo has become more desperate for many civilians who live there. Aleppo is now under siege with government allied forces choking off a critical supply route from a rebel-held area of the city. Zaina Erhaim was visiting the United States when she spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in December. Here is that conversation again.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Hi.

AMT: We couldn't see that clip but I did see it, what we just heard there. You're interviewing a woman and something goes off and you actually see the curtains move because something’s gone off outside. She just looks at the camera.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. And what she was saying is actually an elephant and this is the name of the earth earth missile. This is a local name of it. So she was saying like a missile with a joyful face as if this is a very normal thing to be witnessing.

AMT: Well, let's go back to the start of the war. You went against the tide, you went back into the country. Why?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, I'm not alone. I have lots of friends who actively were outside and they decided that they want to go back. Like even my husband, he was in Russia then and he decided to go back because he felt he was needed. I always say it. I didn't go back because I’m a war correspondent. I never wanted to be one. But I just went back because this is my home and I do belong to the people, I do belong to the peaceful demonstrations who were demanding my rights, my basic human rights against authoritarian regime. I went back because I could do something and I've been trying to do it since then.

AMT: So you grew up in Aleppo.

ZAINA ERHAIM: No, actually. I’m originally from Idlib. I grew up in Idlib but I was living in Damascus until 2010 and I do consider Damascus as my home. And sadly, I’m prevented from going there.

AMT: The choices are pretty stark, huh?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah, I think many of the activists who fled their regime areas to go to the liberated ones that we call that liberated, it’s rebel-held controlled areas, they had these two choices: you're either being captured and killed under torture in the regime presence or you can be accidentally killed by a barrel bomb. So, many choose the second one because at least it's not personally directed against you but is just what everyone is going through.

AMT: Well, it's important that we get an idea from you what it's like to live under those conditions. So first of all, Aleppo is held by rebels? Which ones?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Syrian rebels. Local Syrian rebels.

AMT: Okay, because it was a huge fire fight, right? ISIS had it and then ISIS was pushed out, am I right? Am I right?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.

AMT: So what is it like for you living in Aleppo? Tell us what your day is like.

ZAINA ERHAIM: It's kind of regular, unless there is a fighter jet or something in the sky where everyone freak out and start looking up in hysteria. Some hide, some just don’t. But everyone is just staring as if you know where the barrel bomb or the missile is going to be hit, that would make any difference. It wouldn't because you are going to be killed anyway, even in shelter. And then when it actually hits, everyone just take refuge from shrapnel in a building or so, and then they go back to their lives. Kids go back to streets, playing, shouting. It's as if nothing has happened just a couple of minutes ago and this is even happening after massacres. It's just so surreal like how people get over something as huge as this within a couple of hours and then the streets go back and then the shops open again. You'll find people like fixing the electricity wires that have been damaged or just putting another layer of kind of plastic windows instead of those broken. This is adaption, I think.

AMT: We talk about barrel bombs without really understanding what they are. Tell me what a barrel bomb sounds like. What kind of damage it does.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, it's an actual barrel filled with anything iron. Sometimes we find an iron bowl, sometimes we find the Syrian pennies and coins… like literally crap. They're just filled with nails and screws so the amount of damage that they can cause and the shrapnel that they can create is very huge. Usually they're only being thrown by helicopters, unlike fighter jets that use missiles. They're so indiscriminate and their sound is exactly as the fighter jets. So sometimes you need to be expert as I am—which is very sad—to determine whether this is a barrel bomb or a fighter jet. And they cause a huge amount of destruction because they're heavy and yeah, you can't protect yourself from them and their shrapnel. And the regime has this strategy of doing a second attack a couple of minutes after the first one so, because you have the civilian civil defence and all those rescuing teams who are running towards the scene, mostly are being targeted in a second attack. So because we're kind of becoming experienced in that, we wait for the second attack to happen and then we run to help the people under wreckage or who are injured.

AMT: So the people who are injured know they won't get help right away because they know there's another one coming too. What a terrible thing. How do you get food? How do you get basic survival things? Water?

ZAINA ERHAIM: For the food, we still have lands, we still have farmers, so this is still available. It's much more expensive than it used to be before the war but it's still there. Water is harder. People attempt to dig wells in like main streets and neighbours to be able to drag water off it. Electricity used to come two hours a day, but for the last two months it hasn't come at all. So people counting on generators that are very expensive. But they're trying to find ways. They're surviving.

AMT: So you have been training citizen journalists, particularly women, to tell their stories. Why is that important?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, first because we don't have any foreign journalists who's capable of being there telling the story of us. Sadly, for international media, the foreign journalists are more credible than us. But now because there are none, they are forced to hear the Syrian citizen journalists and they are forced to treat them as credible sources. So what I'm trying to do is just to give them the tool and the skills that I learned through my work and through my master degree. For them to be able to have this credibility, they're dying for this images and for this news to go out. So at least these images could be captured properly and being sourced properly and they can be named, instead of just international journalists taking their information and putting it under their names.

AMT: So you focus on the stories of women in your documentary. Do you think the voices of women get lost in times of war?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, I think in general, women are under different layers of suppression and war. So beside the horrific bombing, the masculine kind of military war, and most of these areas that I’m moving at now is mainly conservative. They have very restricted traditions. So, they're kind of suppressed by different means and I think being a woman gave me the ability to get in-depth in their stories and be able to work with them. I think many of the families would have refused to send their daughters to training if the trainer is man because this is how they raised. So I'm using my gender and my expertise to be able to help them telling their stories. One of the contributors to our woman blog, she was killed in Douma by a regime airstrike. And just now, we're publishing her blog in Arabic and English and she was speaking how she lost her kid and what she felt, with details, and how the society started treating her as someone who wants to work because she's dependent. Like this kind of stories that you really need to hear. And I think men are so much taken by front lines and war but the actual life is only lived by those women. So we do need to document it. This is our history, eventually.

AMT: We heard a bit of your documentary in the introduction. Tell me about some of the women that you profile. We heard one woman talking about working the front lines. There's a woman named Y-eed or Y-ed? Who is she?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. So the idea is trying to document the amazing work that some women are doing despite all the difficulties and the extra layers of difficulties that they're facing because they're women and they're living in these circumstances. So I just filmed whoever accepted to be filmed and I still have lots of women who are on my waiting list. I hope to keep going as well. They're from different backgrounds. Most of them, they actually did couple of revolutions, not only one. So they revolted against the regime, they revolved against ISIS. Some of them were beaten while demonstrating against ISIS as they were demonstrating against the regime. And then they revolted against the tradition and the family tradition. So they had to leave their families before getting married and this is a big taboo for Syrian conservative families. And now they're living in this very masculine, militarized city or an area and they're still trying to provide services and still trying to help others. So one of them, Waed, is a citizen journalist and I think she's the only citizen journalist woman who films in the whole rebel-held areas in the north. One that you spoke about is a nurse. She’s a midwife as well. So she was going to front line to help the injuries. There is another who works in relief and she is a team leader and she's the only woman in the team. She's not only the only woman but she's a leader as well. So they're kind of exceptional women and I believe having something visual to document the women's work is very essential because this is going to be neglected when men are going to be writing our history.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more about them. Waed is a paramedic, is she not? She’s working as a paramedic?

ZAINA ERHAIM: She’s a citizen journalist and paramedic as well. None of them is doing just one job because sadly, many had to flee, especially after the Russian intervention. Even those activists who survived like four years of horror after the Russian intervention, they felt like we're losing and there is no hope and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. So they decided to leave, which puts a huge burden on those who stayed. So, many of those women are actually doing three to four jobs at once.

AMT: The woman who we heard in the clip who says she wanted the Free Syrian Army, instead she got ISIS and all the others and Nusra. Who is that?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Her name is Ahed. She works in relief. She was also a paramedic on front lines at the beginning of the revolution. She was a leader in the demonstrations in Aleppo when they were peaceful. And then when the rebels took part of Aleppo, she joined the field hospital and she was working there and then now she works in relief and she does trainings on first aid for women as well. She's one of the bravest women I know.

AMT: How old are these women?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, I’m the oldest one. [laughing]

AMT: And how are you?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Thirty.

AMT: Hmm.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah, they’re very young. Zein, who was at the beginning of the promo, she gets arrested for 13 months by the regime and she was tortured and she spoke about that in the film. She is 23, 24 years old. They’re very young.

AMT: When Zein was released and she went home, what did she find?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, when she was released, she went home and she didn't find her home because her neighbourhood was completely destroyed by the regime airstrikes. So she didn't know where her family is and she had to look for them for a while to be able to find them.

AMT: You tell a story of a woman who waited outside her children’s school every day. What was she doing?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. Mahmoud. She has six kids. And after two massacres that happened last year in Aleppo that targeted schools, she decided to go and wait for her kids in front of the school. So if a barrel bomb or a missile hit the school, she would be killed with them. So her choice is—she cannot protect her kids—but her choice was, I don't want any of our family member to grieve on his own or on her own. So we either killed altogether or live altogether.

AMT: You know, I can't even imagine how you move forward in the day and in life with that much grief. You talk about a woman who loses not just one, but more than one child, you talk about you losing friends and never knowing who's going to get hit. How do you process that? What goes through your mind?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, I don't think we are sane. I think we're all insane in a way. But we have each other. I think the main support that we get is from the activist who are still surrounding us and who are still trying to do something. Those are the main strengths. For my friend, for example, he’s a teacher. He tell me that he’s desperate from the current, he’s desperate from the present. So he only hopes that he could help those children in the future to be better persons or at least not get lost. So that's his mission. For me, I see the achievement through the stories that are written by those who I train and like my biggest happiness is when I actually help them getting jobs and getting salaries and help them to get financially independent. So, this is personally for me. Maybe for my husband, no, he’s still determined that he wants to go back to where he belongs to. He is actually from a regime-held area and yesterday, he was telling me how much he misses it and he thinks that he won't be able to go back to his home ever.

AMT: You say you have an agreement. You have to check in with each other.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. I force him to check in every two hours to let me know that he's still alive and fine.

AMT: Can you actually sleep at night? Do you wake up scared like—

ZAINA ERHAIM: [chuckling] Yeah. I’m coward person, unlike my husband. So usually, I woke up. He’s used to the fighter jets and the sound of missiles. I didn't. So I usually wake up and then he would just feel that I woke up. He would just give me a hug and tell me that everything is going to be okay and then I'll go back to sleep. And this goes on.

AMT: Well Zaina, I have only met you today through the radio lines but I will tell you now, you are no coward. [chuckling] You're in the States right now. You can see how this whole conflict is seen from the outside. What do you make of the way the international reaction goes, especially in the United States?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, this is the hardest part. I am excited to be stateless because I wouldn't have to come to the West and to the US anymore because I really would rather run away from a barrel bomb and hearing what's going on here again. And the perspective that they have about us… They forget about the regime, it's all about ISIS, although ISIS only kills less than four per cent of the Syrian civilians compared to the regime that is killing 96 per cent. They're forgetting about the civilians, the moderates. They’re just so scared about ISIS and despite their decision to interfere in Syria and bomb us. They know that ISIS are taking Syrians as human [unintelligible] but they just don't care and they bomb us and despite that they're preventing those affected by the bombing to come to their country. How could anyone be that much inhuman and waiting to see who committed the massacre to determine whether you're going to be condemning it or not?

AMT: You know, you've worked for BBC Arabic service. You're a journalist. Did you ever think that a war of this scale could be so ignored on so many levels? So… I want to say misunderstood but almost not even misunderstood, not even people just not wanting to know.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. Like even with the refugee crisis, we’ve had more than four million people who are in neighbouring countries. And that wasn't considered as a crisis until it hit the EU doors. So even whatever is happening, as long as it's not in their areas, it is not happening. But the very sad thing is that just because you were born there, you are being treated—you are being victimized. You are being hit by the regime rations and international coalition targeting ISIS and ISIS itself. And despite all that, we the Syrians are being treated as suspicious terrorists. Even me. In all the international airports, I have been investigated as a potential terrorist despite the fact that I have 20 visas on my passport. It's so ridiculous. I started losing hope in everything. I started losing even belief in the UN. The only thing that happened recently and made me again believe a bit in humanity is what happened with Canada and the refugees. That brought tears into my eyes because I really felt like no, it's not done. Someone cares.

AMT: So that mattered to you.

ZAINA ERHAIM: A lot.

AMT: When you saw just, the arrival that has begun here.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. That was very touching, despite all what's been going on by having all those [unintelligible] and the way that they treat refugees and the way that they're speaking about them and then having Canada declaring that we're welcoming them. They're not only taking them but they're proud to be taking them. I really felt like I'm going to be starting believing in humanity again.

AMT: How do you imagine your future looking in Aleppo?

ZAINA ERHAIM: I can't imagine any future, neither for myself nor Syria, at all. It's very black.

AMT: Because I noticed even in the short promo of your documentary, you see babies in incubators. People are still having children. They're still trying to live their lives.

ZAINA ERHAIM: They are, still. But those children are born stateless. They don't have IDs, they are not recognized and they are not existed in any kind of registration or papers. So this is another problem as well.

AMT: Have you thought about children? Having children of your own?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yep. I'm on my way.

AMT: You're on your way. You're pregnant.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah.

AMT: And when is your baby due?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Very soon.

AMT: And do you have more concerns for your safety going back in?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Yeah. We've been discussing that, me and my husband, for a while. After a massacre that happened in the next door school that is very close to our house, he rescued more than five to 10 girls and the two latest girls that he rescued, he was so touched by them. One of them was crying and she asked him, uncle, am I dead? And when he went back home, he was covered with dust and blood and he told me if I've ever asked you to bring our little girl to Aleppo, hit me with a shoe. But now he forgot that. And now he’s nagging to bring her back to Syria. Until now, I think I will maybe take her for a short visit but mostly I will leave her with my mom in Turkey because I can't, I can’t bear the fear.

AMT: So you will hopefully raise your daughter in Turkey.

ZAINA ERHAIM: I'm going to take her back with me sometimes, but mainly, yeah. I don't want her to recognize the sounds of missiles and barrel bombs. Like one of my friends, he even taught his two years old boy that the barrel bombs sound is something joyful. I don't know how. So whenever a barrel bomb feels very close to their house, the little boy cheer and laugh. I don’t want her to go through that.

AMT: How do you think this war has affected those then who are still in Syria? Those who have not left?

ZAINA ERHAIM: Well, besides being crazy and traumatized, I don't know. But I don't think anyone of us is still the same. We have lost lots of people, homes, work. Even if the war ended today, it would take us years to be able to just stand again.

AMT: Zaina, it's really important to hear your voice.

ZAINA ERHAIM: Thank you.

AMT: Please take care of yourself as best you can.

ZAINA ERHAIM: [chuckling] Yeah, I will. Thank you.

LL: Zaina Erhaim spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in December. She now has a baby daughter and is living in Turkey. Her husband Mahmoud Rashwani remains in a besieged rebel-held area of Aleppo. That is today's edition of The Current. I'm Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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July 20, 2016 full episode transcript

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