Falling Border

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Three years into the Syrian Civil War, ISIS launched an attack on Kobanî—a Kurdish city along Syria’s northern border. Within weeks all foreign journalists had left the city. In their absence, daily reports from citizen journalists detailed territorial shifts that resulted from the fighting, while satellites periodically captured images of the battle’s toll.

Across three screens, the film combines these sources to document the siege of Kobanî, the migration it provoked, and how the city’s proximity to a border affected both militants and migrants.

SCREEN 1

The Siege of Kobanî began on 15 September 2014. By October, 200,000 people had fled from the Kobanî Canton into Turkey, where the largest refugee camps were built in Suruç. Satellite images captured during this time show car tracks emerging from the city and stretching across the border into Turkish farmland.

Using these tracks and existing roads, routes used by the refugees can be mapped.

In screen 1 a car is animated across one route, starting at a small village to the east of Kobani and ending at a refugee camp in Suruç.

SCREEN 2

Using satellite images, historical maps and found footage, screen 2 traces six events across a century to the role they played in the siege:

1912—Berlin-Baghdad Railway construction reaches northern Syria

1915—The Armenian Genocide

1918—Partition of The Ottoman Empire

1957—Turkey begins to lay minefield along border with Syria

2011—Students arrested in Daraa by Syria's secret police for anti-government graffiti

2013—ISIS splits from Al-Qaeda in Iraq

Workers constructing Baghdad Railway somewhere east of Aleppo, between 1900 and 1910

The Sykes-Picot Map drafted in 1916 by Britian and France to guide the partition of The Ottoman Empire

SCREEN 3

Screen 3 follows the same route as screen 1, but from the perspective of a car's windshield—a low resolution view of the landscape refugees drove through.

The terrain is rendered using elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission…

…and then draped with an image captured by Landsat 8.

Researched and written by Shaheer Tarar. Sound Editing by Annie Patiño-Marín. Advised by Lewis Nicholson and Ali Shamas Qadeer. Supported by Shixiao Yuan, Tucker McLachlan and Jana Ghalayini. Public Domain, 2017.