A crew from Channel 4’s Unreported World, has just returned from Syria as one of the only teams to have gained access without official permission to the country and filming undercover.

Reporter Ramita Navai and producer Wael Dabbous spent two weeks undercover, with members of the opposition as they tried to overthrow President Assad’s dictatorship.

The film produced by Quicksiliver Media is due to broadcast on Friday 14 October and sees the team meeting protestors, victims of the crackdown and visiting clandestine hospitals in private homes.

Navai and Dabbous encountered three of the country’s most wanted men trapped in a safe house, soldiers who have defected to the opposition and doctors who have been targeted for treating protestors.

The crew managed to travel to many different parts of the country, while other TV crews operating in the country have been with government minders and restricted to Damascus. The Unreported World crew used a network of underground opposition activists to guide them through the various towns starting with Duma, north of Damascus. George Waldrum is series editor for the strand. Syria remains high on the news agenda following protests since March.

Navai said: “Syria has really dropped out of the news and one of the reasons is that it is really hard to get any information out of Syria and anything that does come out doesn’t give you a sense of what is really going on - as it is not the full picture, that is why we thought it was so important for Unreported World to get in there.We made contact with Syrian dissidents in London and that was the way we were fully able to do what we did by being embedded with Syrian activists out there.”

Other films in the series include Uganda’s Miracle Babies on 21 October. C4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy will introduce each programme for the first time.

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