"It was very frustrating to me outside of Syria, before I was able to go, to be looking on Skype and looking on YouTube and seeing these grainy images where you can’t quite work out what’s going on, or what happened in the moments before. You know it’s terrible, you know from even the Russian Ministry of Defense’s own records that they are dropping thousands of bombs a month, but you have no idea what it looks like, what it feels like, what the people are going through. That was my primary objective in getting into this part of Syria: What is it like for the people living under the bombs?

"Less than 24 hours after we arrived, the bombs started falling right where we were. They hit a fruit market; it was just horrifying. The scenes of carnage are just — you never get used to seeing something like that. We were at the hospital and there was a little boy who was brought in and his head was all bandaged and he was moaning. Then, the doctors told us 20 minutes later that he was dead. So, it felt like such an important story that we wanted to do it, even though the risks were not insignificant."

What is it like working as a woman in Syria?

"It’s so interesting, because people often assume, Oh, you're a woman working in the Middle East. Yikes! And I'm like, ‘Actually, there are a lot of advantages to being a woman.' I truly believe, as talented as my male counterparts are, I don’t think that a male Western journalist could have done this, because the whole cloak-of-invisibility thing is pretty important. So, just on the superficial level, that makes a huge difference.

"I can wear a niqab and people don’t even look at me, because I’m wearing a niqab. It’s like a gesture of respect. You don’t look into the eyes of a woman who’s dressed like that, because she’s making a statement by wearing that outfit that she doesn’t encourage that kind of eye contact with men. So, that was crucial.