The sound of a gunshot rattled against the back of Mitch Swenson’s teeth as he sprinted across a Turkish field. If the guards had fired to scare rather than wound, the warning had its intended effect.
Swenson, a 26-year-old in his final year of a creative non-fiction course at Columbia University, was utterly terrified. As he and his three accomplices pressed through a tight hole in the fence, stepping into an unexpectedly peaceful Syrian pomegranate orchard, the relief was palpable, even if it was short-lived.
This was not, as Swenson describes his journey into a war zone, his “first rodeo”. In 2011, he found himself in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the first day of the revolution that helped instigate the Arab Spring. Since then he’s visited a clutch of troubled nations: Libya, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I've been around men with guns before," he says.
Even so, this murky night was different. “Syria is a type of conflict that humanity has never really seen before,” explains Swenson. “All of the rules are out of the window.”
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/22/1000-days-of-syria-war-journalism-online-game