QAMISHLI, Syria — On the top floor of an unfinished concrete building in the northern Syrian city of Qamishli last week, a group of journalists milled around a video camera trained a few hundred meters away across the Turkish border to the city of Nusaybin. With the steady dull thuds of shelling in the background, the reporters, who were camped out to document the bombing in Nusaybin, smoked, drank tea, talked quietly around the recording equipment and ducked out to the balcony to snap photographs as a laptop showed a live feed of the action.

On the screen was construction equipment, beginning what they guessed was an extension of a separation wall between the two cities by Turkey. After one particularly loud explosion, the camera zoomed out past a foreground of destroyed residential buildings to catch a fast-rising white plume of smoke.

While state-imposed curfews have made it difficult to document the fighting in Turkey's southeast between Kurdish militants inspired by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkish state forces, residents and local journalists in Qamishli have witnessed over two months of siege on neighborhoods in their sister city of Nusaybin. Amid the relative calm in a standoff between the dominant People's Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian regime forces, Qamishli residents have had a unique window into the wider conflict in Turkey.

The group No More Silence, which was formed in April by local Syrian journalists, has been recording from its location in Qamishli in 12-hour shifts, occasionally facing bullets and harassment from the Turkish side while receiving updates from Kurdish sources inside of Nusaybin.