Spies and Censorship Life as a journalist at Assad's state news agency

After 21 years, the day Farouk feared had finally come. An envelope sealed with red wax made its way through the hallways of Syria's national news agency, Sana, and landed on his desk.

- William Christou

Inside was what employees called a penalty, the contents of which could range from a reprimand from the editors to a summons to one of Syria's brutal security branches.

"I found a mistake before the article was published and I brought it to the editors' attention," Farouk, a journalist on Sana's foreign news desk, said under a pseudonym. "I thought this would be a good thing but they punished me."

Farouk was lucky; he faced only an administrative consequence. Other co-workers had not been so fortunate. One day in 2014, Mohanned Abdelrahman was in the break room chatting with other colleagues as he prepared tea. During the conversation, it dawned on him that all of the employees in the group were from the same religious sect, something that could arouse the suspicion of authorities. Quickly, the group disbanded and headed back to their offices.

A week later, he and the other employees found an envelope with the feared red seal on their desks. Inside was a summons to Branch 235, AKA the Palestinian branch, one of the country's most infamous detention centres, where Abdelrahman and other employees would be kept and interrogated for the next 15 days.

They recounted their respective arrests while seated around a desk in Sana's foreign news department 10 days after the fall of the Assad regime, seemingly still dazed that they could speak freely.

For the past 13 years, journalists had not been allowed to report freely as their news agency was on the frontline of the Assad regime's propaganda effort.

The Sana homepage, not updated since Assad's ousting on 8 December, still bore the last headline issued by the regime. "President al-Assad assumes his work, national and constitutional duties," the news ticker read, despite the dictator's flight to Moscow hours earlier.