Paul Wood
Paul Wood (2017) is a BBC foreign correspondent who reported on Syria over four years of the civil war there. He was smuggled over the border many times to cover the armed uprising, winning two Emmys as well as the US Radio and TV Correspondents’ Association award for foreign reporting, twice.
He had a digital record running for almost every conversation inside Syria — not just for the formal interviews. The transcripts are the basis for his book. It is a record of how the uprising failed, starved of support from outside but also weakened by the rebel commanders’ opportunism and greed. It is a story not just about Syria but about the corruption of war and the peculiar evil of civil war.