SBS Dateline video-journalist Yaara Bou Melhem explains how she secured a rare interview with the leader of the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Riad al-Asaad, and tells of how she was smuggled into Syria where she filmed in secret tunnels under Idlib.
YAARA BOU MELHAM: It took about three months to get access to Colonel Riad al Asaad, the head of the Free Syrian Army. He's quite a difficult figure to get in touch with, only because there have been several attempts on his life. Which is why we have heard so little from him as well. He's not someone who enjoys the limelight, so to speak. He prefers to be operational and work on the ground, as it were, and keep in touch with some of the fighters on the ground. So I did seek him out for an interview and he was more than accommodating for that.
NICKY CANNING, SBS: I gather you caught up with him in Antakya in Turkey…
YAARA BOU MELHEM: Yes, he's being held under Turkish military protection in a camp just along the border, actually about twenty minutes from Syria. And he doesn't go to Syria at all, everywhere he goes if he does leave the camp, he's under Turkish military protection or intelligence protection so I also caught up with him in Istanbul at one stage and he had three or four Turkish guards with him; watching him or accompanying him from one place to the next
NICKY CANNING: I gather you were with him at the time that the bombing went ahead in Damascus that killed four senior figures of the Syrian regime?
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YAARA BOU MELHEM: Yes it was an interesting time to be in his military camp while this incident happened because he was trying to figure out just as everyone else was trying to figure out, exactly what happened. Who had been killed - obviously he's not in Damascus, he was waiting for his people to report back to him about how successful the operation was - who's been killed, who's been injured, when can they start claiming that it was them. So he was frantically on the phone trying to figure out what had happened so that he could report back to the media, because they wanted to claim responsibility for the bombing, so it was quite an extraordinary time to be there.
NICKY CANNING: And also I think viewers are going to be very interested to see these tunnels you've been filming under Idlib province. What can you tell us about those?
YAARA BOU MELHEM: I'd been given no clues as to what I could expect when I was going to be taken to these tunnels, but when we got there it was just this amazing labyrinth of caves and tunnels, some which you could walk standing up straight through, others that were so tight you could only leopard crawl through them. They were ancient, dating back thousands of years apparently according to the rebel fighters that were taking us around. We saw human bones at one stage and animal bones that were quite old, looked like they were from another era. But there were several entry and exit points, these tunnels they ran for kilometres and they run under Idlib province.
So in guerrilla warfare, which is what these rebel fighters are conducting, these tunnels are quite strategic so it was quite an eye-opener into some of the strategies and tactics being used by the free Syrian army in Idlib province.
NIKKI CANNING: The Free Syrian Army is largely ex-Syrian military aren't they, so I would assume that if the Free Syrian Army knows about them, the military does too - how are they holding them?
YAARA BOU MELHEM: Well it seems that the Syrian army sends out its conscripts to areas where they're not locally from, so any of the Syrian army that would come to Idlib would probably be from another province so would not know the lay of the land the way that the locals do.
So the free Syrian army most of the defectors go back to their hometowns so they would know about these tunnels for instance, so they'd be able to keep these hidden from those conscript soldiers that are coming from other provinces.
WATCH Yaara Bou Melhem's report on Dateline at 9:30 PM on Tuesday on SBS ONE
