QAMISHLI, Syria — “I didn’t want to come to Syria for two weeks and then leave,” Thomas McClure, a young freelance journalist from Manchester, England, told Al-Monitor. “I was interested in northeastern Syria’s political project. I wanted to do more research and to contribute to the media field.” To that end, McClure, along with Joan Garcia, Koni Docolomansky and Chloé Troadec, co-founded the Rojava Information Center (RIC), an independent media organization celebrating its one-year anniversary this month.

When in December 2018, President Donald Trump declared victory against the Islamic State (IS) and announced a US pullout of troops from the area, McClure and his colleagues felt that another war might soon erupt in the area. In January that year, Turkish armed forces had launched Operation Olive Branch in majority-Kurdish Afrin, which had been under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). 

“At that time, I wasn’t in Syria, but we knew there was little [media] coverage and less than 10 members of the foreign press covering the war in Afrin on the ground,” McClure said. “After Trump’s announcement in December, we thought we had to soon start work, and so we opened the office with our own small resources.”

The goal of RIC is to provide journalists, researchers and the general public with accurate, well-sourced and transparent information from on the ground in northeastern Syria under the political control of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES), a de-facto autonomous area better known as Rojava, its Kurdish name. Arab-majority regions outside Rojava, including Raqqa, Manbij and Deir ez-Zor, are also under NES administration.