Sulome Profile picture
Jun 20, 2018 10 tweets 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
On #WorldRefugeeDay I'd like to remember and thank every displaced man, woman and child I've interviewed. They did not owe me their stories, but gave them freely. I will never stop being grateful for and honored by their trust in me. I only wish I had more to give in return.
The best I could do for these people was try my hardest to share their stories with the world and I will continue to do so. In that spirit, here's a collection of my refugee pieces from over the years:
This is my @villagevoice piece from last year on asylum seekers in NYC. One gay man from Burkina Faso was beaten almost to death in his country. When I met him, he was living in terror of being deported under the Trump administration. villagevoice.com/2017/05/09/ref…
My 2016 @ForeignPolicy story on Syrian refugee children in Lebanon attempting suicide due to the terrible conditions here. One 12-year-old girl swallowed rat poison and almost died because she said she didn't want to be a burden on her mother anymore. foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/29/syr…
I wrote this piece for @VICE in 2015 about Syrian families in Lebanon whose camp was bulldozed by the police while they were sleeping in it. They ended up in a tannery where they were breathing in toxic chemicals. Two kids died after my story was published vice.com/en_us/article/…
My 2013 @Atlantic piece on Syrian refugee child brides. One 14-year-old I met was marrying a 45-year-old Lebanese man because her family couldn't afford to feed her and wanted to protect her from being raped, as so many Syrian women have been. theatlantic.com/international/…
In 2015, I wrote this @foreignpolicy piece about refugee smugglers based out of the Palestinian camp of Ain al-Hilweh in Lebanon. One Syrian Palestinian woman lost her entire family when their boat capsized on the way to Europe. foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/05/the…
My @NBCNews piece from last year on ISIS's indoctrination of young boys in Iraq. "I see the men who taught us in school in my dreams," one boy told me, with tears in his eyes. "I can see their beards and their eyes. Everything about them was frightening." nbcnews.com/storyline/isis…
My first refugee story was in @ForeignPolicy, about Syrian Palestinians fleeing to Lebanon. One Palestinian girl supporting her siblings let a Syrian family stay in her tiny house. "If we don’t take care of each other, who will take care of us?" she said. foreignpolicy.com/2013/01/09/syr…
I understand that so much suffering is overwhelming to take in, so I'll just end with this video of Syrian girls dancing in Lebanon, because amid the pain and poverty, there have always been brief, blinding flashes of joy and humor that leave me breathless. #WorldRefugeeDay

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More from @SulomeAnderson

Oct 8, 2018
No one knows for sure if Khashoggi is dead and Friedman revealed him as an anonymous source who provided quotes critical of the Saudi government with no concern for Khashoggi’s friends and family who could be targeted in retaliation. Unbelievably careless. nytimes.com/2018/10/08/opi…
Nowhere in this Tom Friedman piece will you find an apology for or retraction of that saccharine “Saudi Arab Spring” column. In fact, this reads more like a long justification of that column than a plea on behalf of his dead or kidnapped friend. What NYT editor let this through?
If Khashoggi is still alive, do you think he really wouldn’t mind being revealed as Thomas Friedman’s anonymous source for quotes critical of the Saudi regime? Perhaps not, but his torturers probably will.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 20, 2018
@SusanSarandon @ejbeals @jimmy_dore Ms. Sarandon, I don’t doubt you mean well. But you need to listen to people who’ve been reporting on this war since it started and have seen these things with their own eyes, not propagandists with an agenda. Our friends died there, not yours. Please have some respect for them.
@SusanSarandon @ejbeals @jimmy_dore The people you’re promoting constantly attack and harass journalists risking their lives to report on Syria, just like James Foley did. Most of us are freelancers like him. Some physically endanger me by calling me a liar and a spy and reporting me to Hezbollah for my work.
@SusanSarandon @ejbeals @jimmy_dore Most of us who report on this war from the ground are no fans of U.S. policy in Syria. But if you believe the corporate American media has an agenda in Syria, you must see that media directed by Russia and the regime has its own agenda, and that includes obscuring war crimes.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 18, 2018
#MeToo, except it was 11 years ago and he succeeded. I didn’t tell anyone either. Why are we letting old men dicate the conversation about how abused women should handle their assaults? How about we just listen to the women?
*dictate, you all know what I mean
Powerful men have controlled the narratives of abused women for too long. The past year has shown us ample evidence that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing with these stories. It’s time for us to take back ownership of our trauma and decide what should be done with it.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 26, 2018
Went to an NFL game for the 1st time in years. Heightened security was unsettling. Only clear plastic bags allowed, hands in the air at metal detectors, armed police everywhere. Such militarization of a recreation venue is more suited to a war zone. We live in unacknowleged fear.
An unspoken acceptance that we’re always at risk of being targeted by a mass shooter when we gather in groups is now ingrained in our culture—just an everyday reality of our lives. We station snipers at entertainment centers. We arm teachers at school. And we change nothing.
We regulate explosives. We constantly anticipate terror attacks by Islamists and make harsh policies to monitor and prevent such activity. But a guy named John can buy a semiautomatic weapon in America as easily as a guy named Jihad. People keep dying and still we change nothing.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 19, 2018
This is insane. Money from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries has been funneled to radical Islamist groups in Syria for years, including those fighting the U.S. independent.co.uk/news/world/mid…
A little story about Gulf funding in the Syrian conflict: in 2013, I reported a story for @foreignpolicy on Roumieh, a notorious Lebanese prison that was being overrun by Islamists. Many had been caught in transit to or from Syria to fight in the war. foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/02/bei…
@ForeignPolicy When I went there, these Islamist prisoners, many belonging to groups that were starting to coalesce into ISIS, were running a kind of powerful mafia in the prison, with the help of wealthy donors in the Gulf, who used their influence to make sure the Islamists were comfortable.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 12, 2018
I’d love to see Brian explore a very important, usually overlooked aspect of our current media environment—the gradual death of foreign news and the gaping hole in coverage left by the complete unsustainability of freelance journalism
Seriously @brianstelter has one of the smartest media analysis platforms out there but I just Googled “Reliable Sources CNN foreign news” and came up with zip. The decline of foreign coverage, especially in the Trump era, is a hugely important piece of the modern media landscape.
I know I endlessly harp on this but that’s because I was raised by and around foreign correspondents of a different generation and as a result have an acute awareness of exactly what we’re losing with the destruction of a sustainable business model for that kind of coverage.
Read 10 tweets

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