A WOMAN’S WAR PAINT
A Snapshot of Syria’s Subversive Cartoonist
“Do you have experience drawing cartoons?”
“Yes, of course. I can show you my work.” She hoped the eagerness of her words masked the hesitancy in her voice.
“Send me some samples and we’ll be in touch.”
In reality, among the piles of sketching paper, paint brushes, and used-up graphic pens sprawled out on her bedroom floor, Iman knew nothing about political cartoons—let alone, had a portfolio to share. But Ahmed was warm and encouraging, and her trip to the (then undercover) Media Center in Kafranbel filled her with a sense of gravitas and purpose she hadn’t felt in years.
Standing and breathing in a liberated part of her war-ravaged country for the first time was weighty and hard to digest. She wanted to channel the maelstrom of emotions she felt into something tangible.
“I’ll send it as soon as I get back home.”
On the drive back to her home in Aleppo, Iman sketched a caricature of Bashar Al-Assad on the back of an old receipt she found in her purse. She had left home temporarily to the rural town of Kafranbel in Idlib province once her battle-raging neighborhood had become unlivable. A working attorney with a law degree from Aleppo University, the 34-year-old was surprised by her own boldness. What was she getting herself into?
She knew well the terrifying stories of young people kidnapped and killed at her nearby alma mater—some who were involved in protests, others who were deemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hearing the graphic details about the violence they were subject to, and knowing that her neighborhood was notorious for hosting regime informants, Iman grew used to holding her tongue.
“I used to be afraid to even ‘like’ something on Facebook!” she recalls. “State security could track everything back to you—or they scared us into believe they could.”
Iman wasted no time after returning back to Kafranbel. She practiced drawing cartoons on pieces of scrap paper. Joining the satirical legends in Kafranbel, the town dubbed the creative center of the rebellion, was her chance to do something for the resistance without incriminating her loved ones. She had frequently seen images of the town’s popular protests pop up on her Facebook newsfeed. Her face lit up when Ahmed told her that he could use some help making political posters to keep up with the town’s public actions.
She had always been an artist at heart. But her brushes and pens were accustomed only to painting portraits, emulating photos she set in front of her where she paid precise attention to proportions and symmetry to bring a face to life. These pieces could take her weeks to finish, and she worked on them on her own time for fun.
But now the pressure was on. Not only was this an entirely new art genre for her, but there was also the question of what message she would send in this pilot piece. The idea of her first cartoon came alive as the ink flowed onto the canvas: a marathon of runners with a victorious Assad at the finish line, his clothes drenched in bloody sweat as he waves a knife in one hand and the international community struggles to keep up behind him.
Once she was satisfied with the piece, she realized that that was the easy part.
Iman laughs as she recalls this first survival story of many. “Getting that poster to the Media Center in Kafranbel was harder than trafficking drugs!”
But being a young woman in a university town worked in her favor. She crafted a careful plan with friends of hers who attended Aleppo University. She decided she would put the poster in a briefcase and give it to her friends, who would then stuff the bag with their personal items and take it with them on their next visit to their hometown. With the University under the strict clutch of state security, the risks for both she and her friends were grave. Students deemed “suspicious” were routinely stopped and searched on campus based on the whims of security agents.
Miraculously, Iman’s master plan worked.
“I fooled them with my child-looking face. I just smiled innocently as I passed by them, and they never stopped me,” she recalls slyly, chuckling with relief.
The briefcase made it to her unsuspecting friends at the University, who traveled with it to Kafranbel. Eventually, the poster reached Ahmed’s desk in one piece and he contacted her immediately.
She got the gig.
For months, Iman continued this covert process from her home in Aleppo. Not even family living with her knew what she was up to. It was too risky. She sent more and more posters with her friends traveling to Kafranbel, where Ahmed, now her fellow artist in crime, and later Raed, the founder of the Kafranbel Media Center, were the only other people who knew of her involvement. They would receive the posters and distribute them to the lead organizers of protests that day. Soon after, pictures of the posters would go viral on Facebook.
Following a sustained bombing campaign against Seif El Dawla, Iman’s neighborhood grew so broken that she had to flee again—this time for good. The choice was obvious. She moved to Kafranbel, where some of her relatives had already relocated. There, she was able to work with the Media Center more directly. Although she was the only woman working there at the time when the Media Center was still new, she recalls her work being praised and valued, especially by those who had held up her posters at protests for months without ever meeting here.
Working closer to the headquarters opened a reservoir of fresh ideas for Kafranbel’s banner and poster campaign.
“Working alone in Aleppo in secret, I had no one to get feedback from. Now, I could sit in on meetings and hear everyone’s ideas for posters for the next action. It was a very cooperative process between writers, artists and activists.”
Iman says this synergetic culture was a result of Kafranbel’s revolutionary aura. “It made me think of all the other possibilities that could come about as a result of Kafranbel’s liberation, but also of Syria’s (more broadly).”
Even while in liberated Kafranbel, Iman did most of her drawing alone in her flat rather than at the Media Center. She feared retaliation against her family in Aleppo and Damascus should the office be raided, which happened multiple times by Assad’s shabihah, and soon after, by Daesh fighters. Despite frequent electricity cuts that made it difficult to work, she produced hundreds of caricature posters for the town’s demonstrations, often relying on a single gas lamp to meet deadlines. All her posters are inconspicuously signed with only “Iman” written in English, even for her Arabic posters.
Last December, the Media Center was attacked by Daesh fighters, who kidnapped some of its workers, including its founder, Raed Fares. “Things have become much more dangerous. Before, there used to be a regime and an opposition. Now there are multiple perpetrators who are attacking us from all fronts,” she says.
Some of Iman’s posters are sharp-witted; others are chilling. She pours her emotions and experiences into all of them. Her politics are principled and consistent, calling out all ideologies and leaders who use Syrians as pawns for their proxy violence. Everyone is fair game for her critiques—and the melange of caricatures in her cartoons (including Putin, Ahmedinejad, Obama, Daesh, Gulf leaders, and Erdogan) is evidence of this.
The hardest piece for her to draw, Iman tells me, is a series of posters titled the “University of Death” about the 2013 massacre at Aleppo University that killed more than 80 students on campus. One poster features a menacing shabihah officer standing at the gateway of the University, which has coffins spread out on its grounds as students holding their books outside the University look at what they are about to enter. Iman drew this piece to commemorate people she knew personally: students from Kafranbel who were studying at Aleppo University’s medical school when state security showed up one day and kidnapped them.
“They died from torture by security forces. They were killed so ruthlessly, and the regime simply told their families, ‘please help yourselves to your children’s corpses.’”
Halfway through our conversation, I ask Iman about the impact of her work. I tell her that I first saw her drawings at a museum in Michigan as part of an exhibit on the Arab uprisings. I congratulate her for having her work spread globally so quickly.
She thanks me but is uninterested. “To me it doesn’t matter that my work makes it to galleries in the US and Europe. What matters is that our struggle is heard and responded to. That the sacrifice of each martyr is preserved. It is not enough to have drawings on a wall.”
She explains that the small and previously overshadowed town of Kafranbel was able to gain international recognition because of its media and art mobilization. “Since the very beginning, the regime made it clear that it was unleashing a media war alongside its tanks. We have always been fighting more than one war.”
Iman says that although she’s never seen destruction and violence of this scale in her country, she’s also never seen this level of media activism. She stresses the importance of preserving the collective memory of the uprising’s origins through this sort of storytelling.
“You can’t discount the role of civil and media activists, even in this bloody armed conflict. Once that stops, there is no uprising. We are preserving the roots of the uprising, of how it began.”
With international media reluctant to send journalists to Syria, and with growing geopolitical attempts to control the war’s narrative, she says the burden on Syrian media activists is greater than ever.
The Kafranbel Media Center has support from different communities, Iman says. It has no problem remaining relevant or generating an audience in and outside of Syria. “The fact that we are still working means that we have a following. But between the weapons and massacres, we have have to fight for this space.”
Since its inception in early 2012, the Kafranbel Media Center has expanded into a vibrant civil society organization. It offers media trainings and issues certificates to its students, and brings together seasoned activists, lawyers, and journalists. Besides its official campaigns, the Media Center has also become a platform for activists to launch their own projects. It houses a live radio station, called Radio Fresh, run by Raed, as well as Al Mantraa Magazine, an independent e-zine managed by Ahmed and others.
With its impressive growth comes an equally potent attempt to quash it. In Kafranbel’s recent actions, some protesters holding the Media Center’s posters have started to cover their faces entirely when posing for photos, something uncommon since the town’s liberation in late 2012. As Daesh fighters continue to harass and detain Media Center workers, Iman recently fled Syria altogether to a nearby country.
She continues to draw, but being far away make its difficult to send her work to Kafranbel’s demonstrations.
Being displaced multiple times has made Iman more bold and independent with her work; she now posts pictures of her posters directly onto her Facebook page where it circulates widely. “The messages are still political, but now I am working more on my own rather than with any group.”
As Iman’s situation has evolved, so too has her audience, and subsequently, her work. “I’m around a lot of refugees now—families and kids. So I’ve started to draw picture stories for children.” With friends in her new home, the young caricaturist started a creative artist collective that publishes magazines and books for Syrian refugee children. The project is financially backed by a German NGO.
Leaving home has been difficult. Iman still struggles to understand how she got to where she is today. “The war has changed everything. One day I am a lawyer living in a flat in Aleppo. Today, I am a refugee.”
But leaving home has made Iman more invested in her work. Whether by painting posters used on the frontlines to mobilize or photobooks children read at night to heal, she says she needs to do something, anything, to support her people.
“As long as Syrian blood flows, I must continue,” she says.
As long as Syrian blood flows, so too will her ink.
Zeinab Khalil is a freelance writer and anti-violence organizer based in New York. She is the co-founder of QUWA, a collective healing program for displaced Arab women. You can follow her on Twitter: @zaynabon
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