Zaina Erhaim: On feminism, activism and empowering female journalists

By Tracey Cheung

“Just being a woman there on its own is dangerous. You might be killed while you’re shopping for groceries, going to work, or while you’re asleep at night.”

Zaina Erhaim, 40, is speaking about her home country, Syria, and life in the rebel-held areas during the Syrian conflict. She was in London when the conflict began in 2011, having moved to the city a year earlier to study for a masters in international journalism.

The plan was always to return, but she was forced to reconsider when the conflict broke out and she learned that many of her friends had been arrested and that her name was on the regime’s wanted list.

In 2012, she started working for the BBC. A year later, she joined the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and, despite family concerns for her safety, returned to Syria and the city of Aleppo to report on the war. 

Erhaim believes she was likely the only Syrian woman journalist from an opposition-controlled area working in the war zone. Originally from Idlib, in northern Syria, it’s also likely that she was one of only a handful of journalists with international experience. “I think many international institutions, not only individual journalists, were looking at me as a bridge to connect them with the local journalists,” she said in an interview with Making Peace Visible, published in 2022.

Besides the harrowing dangers posed by war, women and marginalised groups faced additional risks. “Everything was challenging for them,” says Erhaim. “Their daily movement, ability to take public transportation, travelling, dress code. The risks ranged from being lashed in the street to being assassinated.” Women journalists faced unique dangers. “There is this extra pressure that specifically women journalists face and their male comrades don,” she says, highlighting the online trolling and sexualised bullying she experienced.

At one point, she was kidnapped and held for two days by militias working for the Assad regime. Families were targeted too, leading to what she describes as “loving pressure” on women journalists to step back.

To survive, she resorted to self-censorship. “I had to change my look, put on a headscarf, and do all the things that I thought would extend my ability to stay in the rebel-held areas because I didn’t want to leave Syria again.” While some Syrian journalists used pseudonyms, Erhaim chose not to. “I wanted to write with my name to encourage others to participate in the uprising,” she says. “I need my name to be on things to be credible.”

Her feminism is central to her work and life, shaped by her upbringing and the influence of the six women - her mother and aunts - who raised her. This background is partly why her reporting focused on the human stories of women living through war rather than stories from the battlefield. It also explains why, after realising that her workshops were predominantly attended by men – who did not need family permission to travel - she began offering sessions specifically for women who were eager to report on the events happening around them. “The woman’s perspective is much more into a human rights approach because they are more able to see the hierarchy of oppression and focus on the most marginalized groups,” she says.

In 2015, Erhaim received the Peter Mackler Award from the US branch of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) for Courageous and Ethical Journalism in recognition of her work in Syria. It was one of many awards she received over the years for her brave reporting during the conflict and her work since. By that point, she had trained close to one hundred citizen journalists, and Syria was ranked 177 out of 180 on the RSF’s 2025 World Press Freedom Index, a position it still holds.

That same year, 2015, she was forced to flee Syria for Turkey after she was sentenced to death by Sharia courts. Her offence was to publicly support journalists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, who were murdered in Paris because of the magazine’s controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. “I tried to stay, but the fear of being assassinated became too high. I had to check my car for grenades being implanted every day, even in Turkey. The fear became unbearable.” 

In reality, she had not escaped danger and was still within reach of the Syrian regime. During a visit to the UK to speak at an event for Index on Censorship in 2016, her passport was seized after the regime falsely claimed it had been stolen. Fortunately, she managed to return to Turkey using her old passport, but it was only due to the strong advocacy of press freedom and human rights groups that, in late 2017, she was able to return to the UK on a visa and claim asylum. She now lives there with her daughter.

Erhaim received her British citizenship in January 2025, coincidentally just a month after the fall of the Assad regime. Although applications usually take around six months to process, she had to wait a whole year, but with her new passport, one of her first trips was to Syria. “When you go back to Syria, you see how people appreciate your background and trust you, even those who used to be on the regime’s side, trust you for being a human rights defender and journalist who stands with the victims,” she says.

That year, she co-founded the Women Journalists Alliance, an organisation dedicated to helping women access the support they need to stay in journalism. “What I’m aiming mostly through the objectives of the alliance is to be with them when they are being bullied, attacked, or gaslighted, so they won’t be alone, they won’t leave the space, they will stay there.”

The alliance began its work in Syria and now supports women journalists across the region. She hopes it will provide the same valuable learning experiences she gained while working with journalists across the SWANA region and with press freedom organisations. She wants women journalists who fear the toxic nature of the “public sphere” to feel encouraged by knowing they can protect each other. “One of the Egyptian woman journalists told me she joined for one reason: if she gets arrested, she knows others will be screaming for her to be released,” she says. It is clear how much this means to her. “This is really the core,” she says. “On the ground, I had my comrades, but it wasn’t like an established network. This is the gap I identified, and I’m trying to fill through the Women Journalists Alliance.”