"The country was completely closed, under cover. So we decided to go there, take the risk and enter the country illegally," recalls Karim Hakiki, then special envoy of France 24 in Syria.
At the beginning of 2011, the protest movement that started out from Tunisia spread to Syria, as it did in several Arab countries.
The demonstrations there are harshly repressed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
In order to report on the situation, a team therefore went to the country without accreditation, which had been refused on several occasions.
"It was shown that it was a grocer, a doctor, who had dropped everything to go and demonstrate first, because it started from peaceful demonstrations that demanded more democracy, and who then decided to take up arms, sometimes without know how to handle them ", explains Karim Hakiki in this video.
Matthieu Mabin, special envoy to Libya in spring 2011, also noted the lack of equipment for revolutionaries, sometimes wearing simple sandals.
The latter witnessed the fighting, especially in Misrata, in the west of the country.
"Absolutely incredible fervor"
"We discovered what the world suspected at the time, that is to say a real butchery, a real bloodbath perpetrated by this artillery of the regular army of Colonel Gaddafi", he recalls .
These popular revolts faced severe repression, sometimes bloody, but also experienced moments of apotheosis.
"What was the key moment for me was Tahrir Square, when we announced the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and there it was an explosion of joy, a kind of incomprehension, cheers in all directions, an absolutely incredible fervor, "recalls Virginie Herz, special correspondent in Cairo, Egypt, in February 2011. Ten years later, the memories remain poignant.
Click on the video at the top of the page to discover the testimonials of our reporters.
See also, our Reporters: "2011, a story of Spring: the Arab revolutions as seen by France 24"
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