Special Recognition Award: Documenting life in ravaged Aleppo

Waad Al Kateab is a young citizen journalist whose films from inside Aleppo drew the attention of the world to the horrors of the Syrian city under siege.

Much of her reporting, broadcast on UK television’s Channel 4 News, was filmed in the emergency room of the Aleppo hospital where her husband, a doctor, worked.

Here she captured unimaginable suffering – the dazed, bloodstained children brought to the hospital, the families learning of the deaths of loved ones, the exhausted doctors trying to cope.

She did this without intruding, a skill that takes seasoned journalists many years to master. It's this skill that has been recognised by the Thomson Foundation, who presented the filmmaker with a special one-off award for Outstanding Coverage of a Continuing Story at the UK Foreign Press Association (FPA) gala awards night.

“There was no time to think that I was brave when I was there, but always I found a strength that I never knew before,” she says. “Belief in a cause gives you the courage.”  

Story of hope and survival

Amongst Waad’s work viewed by the judges at Thomson Foundation and the FPA was a film documenting the suffering of a pregnant woman, injured on her way to hospital by a barrel bomb. In labour and with shrapnel lodged in her stomach, doctors performed an emergency C-section. After failing to locate a heartbeat, doctors pumped the newborn’s chest, gripping him by the feet and vigorously rubbing his back until finally, after 20 minutes, there was sign of life: a cry.

On a day when 45 people were killed in the attack, Waad’s story of survival and hope reached more than a million views immediately after it was uploaded to YouTube.

Inside Aleppo: A new life in a deadly city (distressing scenes)

Dedication of the ill-equipped doctors to save nine-months’ pregnant, Mayissa, and her baby

 A woman’s perspective

“Waad filmed beautifully in Syria; self-taught, mother of a toddler and gave birth to a baby during the whole business of filming, and that informed the beauty of what she did. It took us right inside a woman's perspective of what it is like to be inside Syria,” said Jon Snow, presenter of Channel 4 News, who accepted the award on Waad’s behalf.

“Her work has been seen by 500 million people around the world. An incredible feat for someone who literally picked up a camera, taught herself and produced the most wonderful images in the most terrible conflict.”

Waad has done that most important thing in journalism: she humanised the victims.

Inside Aleppo: The last hospital (distressing scenes)

Trapped and injured in a tiny piece of a broken city, bombed from the air and surrounded by rebels

Inside Aleppo: The tale of the flower-seller

Amidst the destruction and grief in Aleppo, a garden centre, supplying plants and blooms

Young Journalist Award

Now in its fifth year, the Young Journalist Award is one of the highlights of the UK's Foreign Press Association Awards. The competition reopens in July 2018. For notifications and updates on this award and Thomson Foundation's other journalism competitions, sign up to the newsletter.

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