Thrown into the heart of war, young Lebanese reporters learn on the move—building skills by necessity, not training. With every frame, every word, they document destruction in real time, navigating both danger and disbelief. Their role becomes urgent: to bear witness when others cannot, to remember when others might prefer to forget.

When you find that picking up a camera instead of a gun, shooting, not bullets, but pictures, is what rescued you from the worst of war.&nbsp; And yet, you find yourself drawn to the front lines, to talk to people, to record, to capture the story. Your life is&nbsp; contingent on luck, hunches, leads, waiting at the right spot, sneaking into the right room, being at the right place at the right time, and not getting killed. The picture is taken twice, when you click the button and when you develop the photograph. Sometimes you don&rsquo;t recognize what you see, as the picture&nbsp; develops, have I ever seen this man before? Do I know this person? The story, the photograph, without them there is no news. As much as the news depends on photographers and journalists, the warring parties and politicians depend on photographers and the press for their stories to be told, voices to be heard, messages to be received.&nbsp; In the end, what purposes does war journalism serve? A source of income, provide a point of view, show a perspective, collect testimony, give&nbsp; evidence, change public opinion, send a message, stop a war? If in the end you only end up perpetuating the images of violence? 
&nbsp;

S2 EP1 - And The War Erupted

Drawn to Beirut’s allure, francophone foreign correspondents arrive to cover conflict—enticed by Beirut’s chaos and elegance alike. Privileged in comparison to their Lebanese colleagues, they see the war from balconies as well as barricades, capturing fragments while being detached and yet deeply affected.

Hotels turned into beehives of foreign journalists; glamorous base camps, separate havens, with exclusivity and access to VIPs. Come to Beirut, they said. Chaos and lawlessness creates a sense of intense freedom, no rules. The only thing understood is that you can&rsquo;t understand anything - and - anything is possible in the absurdity of war. In Lebanon, 4 or 5 wars happening at the same time, in the same place, sometimes just one street away. Too detailed, too confusing. You might not know who is who on the street, or why they are fighting, but you know who gave the orders. The surrealist encounters, the contrasts, real life &quot;Top Gun&quot; characters; is this fiction or reality? To get the scoop, you need the connection. The right person, the right number - do you have that number? Getting the images captured, getting the story through, getting to the wire, getting to the traveler, everything to get the news out. You yourself become a conduit to the outside world. A life of extremes, of passion, of being only in the moment. You become attached, you fall in love, make love, make friends, make money, party all night - while others go fight, others die. The life of an ajanib (foreigner) is easy, charming even. With a panoply of press cards, status, authority, respect, and importance, French journalists had undiluted laissez passer. Big fish in a small sea.

S2 EP2 - Je Suis Où Là?

For anglophone journalists, Lebanon’s war unfolds as both assignment and awakening. They arrive as outsiders, but the city's rhythm pulls them in. With time, their stories shift from distant dispatches to something more personal that is grappling with the particularities of life during war - this strange intimacy of prolonged conflict.

Land in Beirut, find a footing, navigate the spider web of connections, decode who is who, who&rsquo;s killing who, who&rsquo;s friends with who, who&rsquo;s married to who, who lives where, where do you need to be? Baptism by fire, walk the streets, hunt for stories, fall into a story, live for the story, put your life on hold. In survival mode, get to the front of the line, fill in the media gaps, report the stories never told, or no one will remember. Get the break, the hostage taker communique, before the other agencies do, resist becoming a spectator to hope for the &#39;bang bang&#39; pictures; get material, visit, interview, witness, collect, then before the deadline, synthesize, write, telex. The next day: rinse and repeat.

Surreality becomes reality, party all night at Backstreet, picnic at Burj al Murr, knafi from Bohsali, laugh, meet the woman you will marry, eat incredible chicken, get home at 2am under shelling. You are living your invincible youth, nothing can get to you, but you are not from &quot;here&quot; - are you a spy? - who are you? Get out of here, narrow escape.

S2 EP3 - Do It For The Picture

The war becomes addictive. The smell of fear, the thrill of existing on the fine line between life and death. For some, the only way to survive is to lose themselves in the high of survival, to lose their senses, loose their mind, while simultaneously being 100% alert.

You run on adrenaline, get high on risk, forget life. The war becomes your dealer, the story, the photograph your next fix. And yet you cannot get high or drunk, you must be lucid, 100%, your senses on high alert. Your life depends on it. You are in tune with the rhythm of military fire, know the sound of an incoming or outgoing shell, know the time from launch to impact, know the number of shells that can be fired in a round to make an escape to your car in the time it takes to reload.

You&rsquo;re both scared to death and exhilarated by fear; you drive fear, fear drives you. One minute you find yourself walking through minefields, the next, in the crosshairs of a sniper&rsquo;s line of sight - from below and above, you&rsquo;re exposed on all sides. You&rsquo;ve had too many close calls with death, too many brushes, felt the rush, rise to the thrill,&nbsp; and then it sinks in deep. You ask, how did I survive, why him and not me?

S2 EP4 - Addicted

Crossing lines, East to West, checkpoint to checkpoint, becomes routine. Getting the story means navigating a maze of snipers, militias, and shifting allegiances. Journalists become cartographers of a severed land, risking everything for a headline that might never be read, in a country cleaved by invisible borders and relentless uncertainty.

A country severed into pieces, a city cut into halves at Khat al-Tamas, the green line. This Rubik&rsquo;s cube of a country can never be solved, a futile, yet deadly struggle to place people into community, sectarian, and ideological boxes. You are part of it, whether you like it or not, because who they say you are, where you come from. To others off limits, but to you, a matter of fact, you must cross the line to bear witness to what&rsquo;s happening and how people live on the &quot;other&quot; side(s).

You know the checkpoints networks like the back of your hand. Know which line&nbsp; you can cross when, know the handlers and their moods, map your route depending on who is at which post when. Today, it&rsquo;s Khaldeh to Kfarshima, tomorrow, it&rsquo;s Babir to Mathaf, lines shift all the time, depending on what happened that morning, what orders come in, who&rsquo;s in the car with you, what allegiances switch, what seemed secure a minute ago, is now off the table.

To survive, you can&#39;t get caught on the wrong side - whatever side that may be. You build networks, communities of fellow journalists, find fraternities and sororities so that no matter what your religion, your accent, your birthplace, or your press card, crossings can be crossed. You build a support system, meet regularly, break the idea of &quot;the other,&quot; become more than colleagues, friends who help get each other out of the cross fire and from crossing the line between life and death.

S2 EP5 - Fragmented

From respected foreign press to political pawns—French journalists recount the surreal shift from covering war to being caught in it. Kidnapped and held hostage, they become bargaining chips, naïve prey at the mercy of their captors, revealing how quickly power flips and how fragile our position really is.

And then it happens, all comes crashing down, a fall from grace, first a friend welcomed, now a suspect, hunted prey. The charm of the 70s, a naive dream, becomes a permanent state of anxiety in the 80s. Anxiety is reality - taken hostage, hand-cuffed, blind folded, psychological terror, threats of torture, torture, fear of death, holding on to life, decoding noises, tracking patterns - shifts changed, photos taken, coffee served - all senses on high alert. You dream of escape, plan to escape, fail to escape because you are paralyzed by fear. Held hostage both in mind and body.

In the meantime, fellow journalists scheme and connive to cover the release story, who gets there first, who knows who gets released when, agencies compete, hope for rival&rsquo;s mistakes, technical failures, and for what? To catch the scoop, to get the story, does the story matter more than the person?

Once released, you realize you are a pawn, a tool for political negotiations, somehow the reason for concessions that had to be made, a liability. Feelings of failure, leaving other hostages behind, survivor&#39;s guilt, a weight of responsibility. And still, you go back, back for more, for the love of the work, the hunger for it, and before you know it, you are back in the field.

S2 EP6 - Les Yeux Masqués

The myth of war’s glamor collapses. Journalists burst the “rock and roll” narrative, speaking plainly of brutality, senselessness, and the monsters war makes of people. Through visceral memories and painful clarity, anglophone journalists confront what it means to report atrocity without becoming numb to it.

A war correspondent, dashing to the front lines, wearing a flak jacket and Ray Bans, chain smoking, full of grit, living on the edge. But on the ground, in the end, covering a war, you find nothing glorious about it. It&#39;s messy, it&rsquo;s bloody, gruesome, gut-wrenching, horrific: invasions, sieges, famines, massacres, atrocities. Year after year &ndash; 1976, 1982, 1986 &ndash; what kind of phenomenon is war that turns normal people into monsters? People become divorced from themselves, become capable of things you could not dream up in your worst nightmares.

How do you cope, watching ordinary people struggle to survive, while militaries sweep through in waves, one receding as the other advances? Warlords, whose soldiers killed each other&rsquo;s people last week, now cozy up together as politicians in designer suits, only to fight each other next week. War is so easily framed as a story of good guys versus bad guys, you pin everything on this, but there is no good and bad, everything is gray and nothing is clear. &nbsp;

And then what happens when the war ends, what happens when a war journalist has no war to cover? Can you go on vacation, ever? Can you go back to your life, what is your life without war? You have a sense of relief, but are at a loss, and you ask yourself, what happens now, what happens with all the accumulated trauma? As politicians sing &ldquo;no victor, no vanquished,&rdquo; as if the peace justified the war, when in fact the only senses triggered are those of futility, hopelessness, and burnout. Is it worth it?&nbsp;

S2 EP7 - It Catches Up With You

Francophone journalists look back—on the futility, the savagery, the lives lost in vain. They reckon with what they saw, what they wrote, and the role they played in it. Their memories are testimonies, but also confessions: of helplessness, of trying to find meaning in the meaningless, of normal life alluding in the aftermath of war.

Listen. Listen deeply, document, and then capture these observations accurately in words to describe what you witnessed. You are an observer, a foreign journalist, an outsider, you are not supposed to feel, or show any emotions. But then you are there and not there at the same time, you are not part of it and right in the middle of it, living it, feeling it, how can you not feel it? You have the reach, the reach to get the stories into the world, you ought to, because it will make it all better, will make it stop, won&rsquo;t it?

Of all wars, civil war seems the most destructive. When neighbors kill neighbors, communities viciously turn on each other, become intoxicated on blood, commit atrocities, drive massacres, as Saturn devours his children. As a witness, it changes you, you can&rsquo;t go back to being the person you were before. So what happens to the people who killed? How does killing change them? How can they go back to life without war, when war gave them the divine power to decide who lives and who dies? When they will live forever in the kingdom of the dead? And where will you be who witnessed it all?

And for what? Did the images, the words help anyone? Making sense of something without meaning, war has no meaning. Nothing is accomplished by war, nothing is ever gained,so much lost, and nothing can ever be the way it was. There is darkness, so much darkness, and yet you move further, and even if you can&rsquo;t see the sun, all you can do is keep your eyes open, to maybe catch the stars.

S2 EP8 - Si Tu Ne Vois Plus Le Soleil

Lebanese journalists lived the war they were tasked to report. Their words and images became both their weapon and wound. They documented their own country's collapse, carrying grief not just through print or film, but across generations. As survivors and witnesses, they still bear the war’s weight.

How can you take a photograph through tears? With a front-row seat to tragedy, massacres, innocents killed, deaths, and burials, how do you contain your feelings, how do you compartmentalize them, keep them separate from your work? Can you? Should you? If you don&rsquo;t feel, if you don&rsquo;t care, you can&rsquo;t be a real journalist, you can&rsquo;t take real photographs. But if you feel too much, you can&rsquo;t get the story, you can&rsquo;t do your job. How do you balance?

Why are you a journalist? To tell the human story, to report the challenges faced, to give people faces, names, lives. But how do you keep your sanity when the war shifts to a new level of absurdity, when former allies start killing each other? When communities turn in on themselves, when neighbors kill each other? How much will you sacrifice for that perfect photograph? How much of your mind, body, and soul are you willing to give for it? How long will you regret not having gotten the perfect shot where the red of the blood matched the red cross on the tank?

The body might heal, but does the soul ever recover? You lived war not from above, not from a birds-eye view, but from below, close to the ground like a cockroach, every event a mountain to climb, and in the process, losing your home, losing your friend, losing a piece of your humanity. And still it lingers, many years later, seeping into everyday life, visits in numbness and carelessness, flashbacks, nightmares. The reach of trauma is far, extending across time and down through generations. Is there a photograph worth that much?

S2 EP9 - Inside Job

Listen to Season 2

Credits

This season features episodes in Arabic, French, and English, capturing the experiences of local and foreign journalists who covered the Lebanese Civil War. Though their perspectives varied, all faced the same blurred line between bearing witness and the struggle to stay alive, between professional duty and survival.

Maabar is created and Produced by Anthony Tawil and Cedric Kayem

Executive Producer: Jenny Munro.

Oral History Advisor: Maria Bashshur Abunnasr.

Production Assistant: Yara Murad.

Visual and Animation: Teddy Tawil.

Sound Assistance: Melanie Daher El Khoury.

Translation and Transcription: Leila Maroun and Maya Massaad

Special thanks to all the photographers and reporters&nbsp;who shared their stories, without whom this podcast would not have happened:

Acil Tabbara, Aline Manoukian, Anwar Amro, Dalal Saoud, Dominique Roch, George Azar, Gilles Delafon, Jack Dabaghian, Jamal Sa&iuml;di, Jihan Tahri, Jim Muir, Joseph Barrack, Maria Chakhtoura, Nabil Ismail, Nora Boustanym, Patrick Baz, Philippe Rochot, Ramzi Haidar, Roger Moukarzel, Samar Kadi, Salim Yassine,&nbsp;Tomas Alcovarro.

Thanks to the support and advice of Hassan Salha and Mona Hassouna.

This season of Maabar was produced in partnership with <a href="https://www.propeace.de/en" target="_blank">Pro Peace / forumZFD</a> and was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).