Over a period of 40 years, the Syrian regime created a network of police informers and intelligence agencies that suffocated the country with fear. Many of those brave enough to speak up were caught in this web of state surveillance and silenced by Assad’s infrastructure of detention and torture.
That is the context in which a young lawyer and journalist called Mazen Darwish set up the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression in 2004. He did this not from the safety of exile or the anonymity of the internet, but under his own name from an office in the heart of Damascus.
