“Covering Syria means facing a multifaceted set of problems, from bombardments to snipers to kidnappings by the government, Islamic extremists, or criminals. It is a place where journalists and Syrian activists must operate in a free-for-all conflict of staggering destruction and desperation and where no side believes in the benefit of truth-telling any longer.”

If that’s not a disincentive for becoming a journalist, I don’t know what is.

In the recent years, so many journalists have been captured, beheaded, raped, tortured, and crucified to the point where reporters are (rightly) too afraid to enter the battleground of Syria. Indeed, sending reporters from the USA or Britain or anywhere else to conflict zones has become too dangerous to continue, and the practice is frankly on its way to obsolescence anyway. The cost of training, equipping, transporting, and housing (not to mention salaries) a foreign reporter is thousands of times greater than the alternative: encouraging local Syrians to report for themselves. A photo on Facebook of one’s son pulverized with shrapnel along with a caption in one’s native language of the horror and emotional tribulations will have far greater an impact on the international community than an Englishman trying to remain unbiased.

War is a terrible scourge of our humanity, and it is the product of defective logic, xenophobia, and miscommunication. As the CPJ wrote, “In war, there is no other work.” And no other work there ought to be until that war has ceased. But old-school journalism of boots on the ground is outdated and ineffective against new-school forms of conflict (terror, guerrilla tactics, etc.). It’s time to approach the battleground with new methods and play the smart game rather than winning by sheer numbers and force. Conscript the locals and have them use the weapon they all possess: their smartphones. Let each photo be bloodier than the last so that the world may know of the blight that plagues the nation of Syria, and that their collective consciousness be altered in the direction of justice, empathy, and charity. It’s time for foreign journalists to leave Syria and for a new wave of journalists to take their place. Fortunately, they’re already there — they just need the bravery to go out and document as much as they can.

With their help, maybe we can see an end to this atrocity.

Written by Aaron Mayer