BEIRUT — Reporting from Syria has become an ordeal of illegal border crossings, where journalists face all sorts of restrictions from both the Syrian government and neighboring countries.

I started covering Syria from Damascus at the very beginning of the uprising in March 2011. I didn't apply for a press visa, as it would have just meant further restrictions on my movements by security forces. During my five-month stay, I reported on demonstrations, circumventing the regime's checkpoints, driven around by an aging taxi driver sympathetic to the opposition.

Despite having been arrested and taken for interrogation twice, my laptop remained "clean" of any evidence of my job thanks to ciphering programs, and I left Syria "on both feet" at the end of August 2011.

Unfortunately, this didn't mean the intelligence branches were totally unaware of my work. In November 2011, a Brazilian colleague was detained in solitary confinement and expelled from the country. His interrogation was based on an interview we conducted with the opposition veteran Michel Kilo and an accusation of having spread rumors about Alawites seizing Sunni lands in Dummar. Actually, these were just the complaints we heard from Dummar residents.