Professionals again: How a UK project is giving refugee journalists experience, belonging
When Abdulwahab Tahhan arrived in the UK from Syria, he didn’t anticipate how much he would need personal connections to work in journalism. But, as he asked when sharing his story with OpenCanada, “Where do you get these connections, if you’re a refugee?”
Abdulwahab Tahhan didn’t always want to be a journalist. The youngest of seven children, Tahhan spent most of his life in Aleppo, Syria. During his university years he studied English literature, improving his language skills by watching Western films, and even shows like Desperate Housewives — though he drew the line at Grey’s Anatomy. Tahhan planned to become a teacher, leaving Syria for the first time in 2010 for a teaching job in Beirut.
But as anti-regime protests kicked off in Syria in early 2011, he was pulled home. “I just couldn’t stay away,” Tahhan said over coffee one July afternoon in south east London. “I never expected there would be war, we were a bit naïve… We saw it as a peaceful demonstration, and that’s what I wanted it to be, and then it turned into kind of an armed conflict.”
As protests turned into a brutal civil war, and with all but one of his parents and siblings having made new lives for themselves outside of Syria in Turkey, Germany and the United States, Tahhan was forced to leave Aleppo in 2012, finding work as an English teacher in a refugee camp on the Turkey-Syria border.
It was there that Tahhan got his first taste of journalism work — never really an option at home. “The whole idea of journalism in Syria is a very new concept, because the concept of journalism before the uprising was that journalism had only one purpose, which is to serve the regime’s propaganda, that’s it.” Outside of school hours, Tahhan worked as a fixer and translator for visiting correspondents, and landed a job as production manager for a documentary, The Suffering Grasses, which went on to win eight international awards.
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