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<divstyle="color:red; font-size:14px; text-align: center; font-style: italic;"><p>This text is a transcript of a radio program about a self-organised radio station in Syria during the conflicts, called Radio Fresh.</p><p> Some parts of the text have been removed.</p></div>
He says the response is very simple. Have you heard anything on Radio
Fresh that sounds like we're supporting the Americans? We're always
trying to prod them on the radio, with our banners. We have opinions
about them, and we don't hide them. Raed's vision of democracy meant
everyone in Kafrenbel had an equal say in what was happening, including
women.</p><pbegin="00:50:03.76">He wanted their voices on the radio
too. Although that was such a daring idea for Kafrenbel, even his friend
Hadi wondered whether it was possible.</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="subject"><h4>Hadi Abdullah</h4><pbegin="00:50:11.47"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:50:12.78"> And I was like, how? He was like, "Easy. You find women, we hire them, we train them."</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:50:18.82">
This was bold, because almost no women in the village worked outside
the home. They took care of the kids and the homes. That was it. And it
was bold because of who was running Kafrenbel at the time. Raed was
always offending the local leaders, including just about everyone who
was in charge of Kafrenbel over the last eight years.</p><pbegin="00:50:36.74">First,
the Free Syrian Army was offended by a banner, so they came to the
radio station and kidnapped two guys. Next, ISIS attacked the station in
2013. A couple weeks later, they shot Raed multiple times, almost
killing him. But when Raed was deciding to put women on the air in 2015,
two years after Radio Fresh had started, Kafrenbel was run by a new
extremist Islamist group, Nusra, al-Qaeda's branch in Syria. Raed knew
they wouldn't like this, but he went for it anyway.</p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Hiba Abboud</h4><pbegin="00:51:07.42"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p><pbegin="00:51:08.88"></p></div><divclass="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:51:17.05">
That's Hiba Abboud introducing the afternoon newscast. She's now the
director of the women's division of Radio Fresh. She talked to me from
the women's office over Skype.</p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Hiba Abboud</h4><pbegin="00:51:26.26"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:51:34.00"> I never imagined that I would hear my own voice, or that I would be a reporter. Never.</p></div><divclass="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:51:40.10">
Hiba was a young newlywed who had just moved to town when she heard
that Radio Fresh was recruiting women to go on air. She'd been listening
to the radio and was curious what it was like to make it. So she, along
with 20 other women, went to the first training. They did icebreakers,
spent three days on voice technique.</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="subject"><h4>Hiba Abboud</h4><pbegin="00:51:56.77"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:52:01.87"> I don't know if you know this one, but when you put your pen in your mouth, this is a way to open up your voice.</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:52:08.08"> I did not know this one. Neither did most of the people at <i>This</i><i>American</i><i>Life.</i></p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:52:12.01"> And how to be as a presenter, and how to take breaths from your belly.</p></div><divclass="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:52:16.43">
Hiba passed the training and began working at the station, made news
shows, programs about women's rights, interviews with local women who
had lost their husbands in the war. By the time Raed put Hiba and the
other women on the air in 2015, the Islamists in charge of Kafrenbel,
Nusra, already hated Radio Fresh.</p><pstyle="color:LightGray;"begin="00:52:35.17">The station
poked fun at them in all sorts of ways. For being illiterate,
hypocritical. One satire depicted their religious police rushing people
to the mosque without actually understanding the rules of prayer. Nusra
assigned people to listen to Radio Fresh in shifts. They issued regular
warnings and threats to the station whenever they heard something they
didn't like.</p><pbegin="00:52:55.42">Now Radio Fresh got a lot of
warnings for having women on air. Nusra considered their voices
shameful, a form of nakedness. Finally, in January 2016, Nusra had had
enough. They burst in one morning to shut the station down, broke down
the door, faces covered, carrying machine guns. They took everything--
laptops, the transmitter, Hadi's hookah, flash drives. Hiba and the
other women watched the Nusra guys ransack the main station from another
building, the women's office just up the hill.</p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Hiba Abboud</h4><pbegin="00:53:27.03"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p><pbegin="00:53:28.49"></p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:53:30.29">
And we looked out the window when we heard a lot of noise. So us girls,
we just started gathering everything and hiding it. Because we said,
you know, they were going to come to us next.</p></div><divclass="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:53:38.76"> They quickly rearranged the office to make it look more like a home.</p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="subject"><h4>Hiba Abboud</h4><pbegin="00:53:41.85"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p><pbegin="00:53:42.96"></p></div><divstyle="color:LightGray;"class="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:53:44.58">
So we were preparing lies, you know, just in case that came in and they
started questioning us. And you know, we were going to say like, "Oh,
we're just girls here hanging out at her house, and we're just having
breakfast together. A morning coffee or a mate.</p></div>
So we were having a meeting, and he came and he told us that they
wanted to transform our voices. You know, now we were going to use
something to change our voices from female voices to male, and that you
wouldn't be able to tell that it was a female in the first place.</p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Hiba Abboud</h4><pbegin="00:56:58.04"> [SPEAKING ARABIC]</p></div><divclass="subject"><h4>Interpreter</h4><pbegin="00:57:04.29">
So when we first heard what our voices sounded like, we were laughing.
And it was so strange, because we were like, really? This is what people
are going to listen to? But after a while, it just became normal, and
it literally got to the point where I could tell you which girl was
which voice.</p><pbegin="00:57:20.73">[CHUCKLING]</p><pbegin="00:57:22.93"></p></div><divclass="host"><h4>Dana Ballout</h4><pbegin="00:57:23.81">
But these days, Hiba just feels annoyed at the voice. And because the
voice is so hard to listen to, Radio Fresh reduced how long women speak
on the air to a fraction of what it was. By this past fall, the Assad
regime had retaken swaths of the country. And in many other places,
including Kafrenbel, extremists like Nusra were gaining power. People
like Raed, people who didn't want Assad or the extremists, they barely
