"City of Ghosts" is a powerful corrective to the notion of a travel ban as an effective way to make the U.S. safer
There is one thing that ISIS, the mainstream U.S. news media, and the Donald Trump administration have in common: a preference for focusing on violent stories about Islamic conflict. While each of these groups hypes the conflict for different reasons, the outcome is the same. The Western-based public simply has few, if any, stories that contradict the narrative that the Islamic world and the West are at war.
A new documentary by “Cartel Land” filmmaker Matthew Heineman is set to disrupt that view. “City of Ghosts” follows a group of citizen journalists from Raqqa, Syria, who eventually flee their homes due to death threats from ISIS. The film is a moving account of courageous journalism, but even more important, it offers a powerful counterpoint to the logic of the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. By focusing on Syrian victims of ISIS who are using journalism to fight back, it tells a story that is almost entirely absent in the mainstream media.
The film is at both uplifting and heartbreaking as it follows the life-and-death challenges faced by a group of friends from Raqqa who had participated in the Arab Spring only to later watch as ISIS tanks rolled into their city in July 2014. They founded “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently” — RBSS — a website of citizen journalism that was designed to tell the story of the assaults by both ISIS and the Assad regime on the civilians of Raqqa.
