BI No. 1 May God Have Peace and Rest on Your Father

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MAY GOD HAVE PEACE & REST ON YO U R FATH ER

How Abdallah Omeish helped televise the revolution in Libya WORDS BY JAMES KAELAN IMAGES BY ABDALLAH OMEISH

In Ajdabiya, Libya, a revolutionary with an AK-47 walks through the square named for the late Tim Hetherington—the British photojournalist killed in Misrata during the uprising.

On the morning of December 17, 2010, a 26-year-old Tunisian produce vendor named Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was pushing a cart of fruits and vegetables through the streets of Tunis. Just after 10:30 a.m., a group of municipal police waylaid him—as they did every week—and demanded a bribe. Bouazizi, who had for more than a decade acquiesced to this extortion, refused that morning to pay. In retaliation, Faida Hamdi, one of the officers, overturned Bouazizi’s cart, slapped him, spit in his face, and confiscated his electronic scales.

After the confrontation, enraged and humiliated, Bouazizi entered the governor’s office to file a complaint against Hamdi and reclaim his scales. When his petition was rejected, he left the building, purchased a can of gasoline from a nearby station, and returned to the street in front of the government building. There, standing in the heavy flow of cabs and motorcycles, he doused his clothes in petrol and lit himself on fire.

Bouazizi’s self-immolation ignited protests throughout Tunisia, whose citizens for years had suffered under a corrupt, oppressive leadership. After Bouazizi succumbed to his injuries on January 4, 2011, demonstrations engulfed the country. On January 14, Zine alAbidine Ben Ali abdicated the Presidency and fled with his family to Jedda, Saudi Arabia.

On January 25, hundreds of thousands of Police Day protestors in Cairo, inspired by Tunisia’s revolt, seized Tahrir Square. Less than a month later, on February 11, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned his post, ceding control to the military. The Arab Spring had begun.

“When it happened in Tunisia, and then when it happened in Egypt,” says Abdallah Omeish, the Libyan-American filmmaker and activist, while we’re having tea in his brightly lit apartment overlooking Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, “I still didn’t think anything was going to happen in Libya. Even compared to Mubarak or al-Abidine, you can’t imagine how oppressive Gaddafi was. So I never in my wildest dreams expected Libyans to go out and do something.”

Nevertheless, as early as mid January 2011, on Twitter and Facebook, anti-Gaddafi sentiment was surfacing publicly in a way it never had. “Seeing photos on Facebook at the beginning of the revolt,” says Omeish—anti-Gaddafi graffiti; groups of protestors occupying government housing buildings—“was a surreal, thrilling moment.”

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Two of Omeish’s uncles had been arrested during Gaddafi’s reign.

One was held and tortured for four years. The other remains missing.

“I know a lot of other people,” continues Omeish, “who have had relatives of theirs either killed, or disappeared, or sentenced to prison. So suddenly to be thinking, this might be our chance to get rid of this guy we’ve all suffered under? I had to go.”

Of the men and women who emerged as the early faces of the revolution in Libya, the one that most intrigued Omeish was the young citizen journalist and activist Mohammed Nabbous who, within days of the uprising, from a purloined courtroom in Benghazi, founded Libya Alhurra TV: the first independent satellite network in the nation’s history.

“He was the only English-speaker,” says Omeish, “talking directly to the Western audience, bringing attention to Libya. I was immediately fascinated by him, but I never really expected to meet him.”

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bdallah Omeish has the square build of a rugby player, closecropped hair that he often hides under a newsboy cap, and the forearms of a stonemason. Born in 1974 in Tripoli, he lived in Libya until the age of eight, when his father, Salem—a member of the Libyan Foreign Service—accepted a post in Washington, D.C. and moved his wife and six children to the U.S. on December 27, 1983.

“We landed right after Christmas,” says Omeish, “so you can imagine: snow and then lights, and I was coming from a place where neither of those things exist!” On the ride home from the airport, he sat beside the young daughter of one of his father’s diplomatic colleagues. “She was speaking English so fast,” Omeish remembers, “and I was just giggling because it was something I had never heard before.”

Salem’s assignment was only scheduled to last two years, and he didn’t intend to keep his family in America permanently. Omeish, along with his siblings, were educated at a Libyan school housed in the embassy in D.C., where instruction was conducted in Arabic. But at the end of 1985, Salem’s position was renewed. Then in 1987, the job was extended another two years. By 1992, Salem’s return to Libya had been postponed four times. Omeish, now 18, had spent longer in the U.S. than he had in Libya.

“My father had not expected to get citizenship,” Omeish tells me.

“He felt he was being disloyal. His generation was extremely patriotic, because they were the ones who’d shaken off colonialism.” And for his part, Omeish felt uncertain about his national identity. He had mastered English and graduated from an American high school, and he had a path to citizenship through his two natural-born brothers. But he identified as Libyan. So, in the summer of 1992, he returned to his family home in Tripoli, intending to fly in the Libyan Air Force.

“My older brother had gone back to Libya,” says Omeish. “So he introduced me to one of his buddies who was a fighter pilot. This guy had lived in America as a kid, but now he wasn’t allowed to go back.

One day he told me, ‘Just between you and me, Abdallah, don’t come back here. If I had your chance, I’d get the hell out.”

In Libya, demonstrating exceptional talent—whether as a pilot, a soccer player, or a baker—was a challenge to the presidency. “Nobody could be more popular than Gaddafi,” says Omeish. “Anybody stronger than him—anyone smarter than him—was a threat.”

At the end of summer, 1992, Omeish returned to Virginia. “I’d grown up wanting to be a pilot,” says Omeish, “but now that was out the window.” He sat his parents down and asked them to grant him

time to rediscover his calling in life. “‘Give me a year away from school, away from work, away from everything. Let me figure out what I want to do.’ So American, right?”

Salem, and Omeish’s mother, Samira, weren’t receptive to his existential angst. “If I wanted to live at their house,” says Omeish, “I had to get a job or go to college.”

For the next three years, Omeish attended community college where he completed his general education without knowing exactly what field he planned to apply it to. In 1995, he enrolled at George Mason University, where he majored in International Affairs and minored in Sociology. “I thought maybe I could go into the FBI or the DEA,” he says. But even that career path felt nebulous.

Then in his final year at university, Omeish took a video production class as an elective. “The professor I had told me, ‘You seem like you’re really talented,” Omeish remembers. “‘You’re good at this. Maybe it’s something you want to get into.’” Omeish, who had been diagnosed with ADD in high school, had difficulty focusing on English, math, and science, but had excelled at photography.

“In the culture I come from, though,” Omeish tells me, “you don’t pursue film or photography—not as a job. Those are hobbies. Be a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer or an accountant.”

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hen Omeish graduated from George Mason in 1998, he was by no means certain he wanted to pursue filmmaking. But he felt increasingly drawn toward what he saw as the political and social potential of cinema. “I had started to realize the negative power of film, and I was sick and tired of seeing images of Arabs and Muslims vilified.” Even in the late 1990s, before the War on Terror comprehen-

sively purged complex Arabs from Western media and entertainment, the majority of Middle Eastern characters in film and television were terrorists or tyrants.

“These are not my people,” says Omeish. “We don’t do this, we don’t act like that.Terrorists, radicals: they represent such a small portion of the Arab world, and yet they’ve become the primary image in people’s minds.”

As this line of thinking crystallized for Omeish—that Arabs were misrepresented in Western narratives, and that film could help rectify their image—he began to feel more and more as if he’d identified his purpose. “I had seen a lot of films that inspired me through the years,” he says, “that gave me a different perspective. So I told my parents, ‘You guys have got to give me a year. I have to figure out what I want to do. I’m going to work for the rest of my life and I don’t want to jump into it. I know what happens: work, marriage, family. So give me one year to figure it out.’”

A few weeks later, with his parents’ temporary blessing, Omeish flew to Los Angeles, where a friend from college was living in the Westwood neighborhood near UCLA. For the next few weeks, Omeish slept on a couch and commuted around the city by bus.

During his time at George Mason, Omeish had the occasion to hear a talk by Moustapha Akkad, the director of Lion of the Desert—which tells the story of Omar Mukhtar, the Bedouin leader who united the Libyan tribes against their Italian occupiers in the years leading up to World War II. One of the first Hollywood studio films about Arab history directed by an Arab filmmaker, Lion of the Desert was a symbol of great pride in the pan-Arab movement of the 1980s (and would later become a rallying narrative for anti-Gaddafi revolutionaries in 2011).

When Akkad spoke at George Mason, Omeish approached the direc-

Left: Between Ajdabiya and Brega, Libya, a man walks over the wreckage of a tank following a NATO airstrike against Gaddaf i’s forces.

Right Facing: Mohammed Nabbous’s grave in Benghazi, Libya, marked with a cinder block.

His close friend and right-hand man, Amerajah, visits him here every Friday.

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Left: Abdallah Omeish atop the courthouse in Benghazi, Libya, where Mohammed Nabbous’s satellite network Libya Alhurra TV broadcast its online feed of the revolution.

Right: The remains of a police station in Benghazi after the officers themselves burned it to the ground. Fearing the revolutionaries would use off icial evidence against police who’d brutalized the citizenry of Libya, Gaddaf i ordered many stations destroyed.

tor after the talk and got his card—which he carried with him to California.

During his trip, without making an appointment, Omeish took the bus to Akkad’s office. To his surprise, Akkad agreed to meet with him. “Honestly, he was very blunt,” remembers Omeish. “Maybe a little too blunt.

‘This is very hard,’ he said. ‘It’s almost impossible. It’s constant rejection. People will be ruthless.’ Looking back now, he was trying to be honest with me. And I think he was testing me out, to see if I had the resolve to make it.”

After a month in Los Angeles, and emboldened by Akkad’s challenge, Omeish returned to Virginia determined to prove he could survive as a filmmaker—despite having never made a film. “I sat my parents down again and told them, ‘I think I’m going out to California permanently to pursue film,’” Omeish recounts.

“And my parents were like, ‘Are you crazy? Did you get a job?’” Amongst first generation Arabs in the U.S., it isn’t uncommon for a man to live with his parents’ until he’s in his 30s. “They have these very specific ideas,” says Omeish. “You have to get a job, get married, and then you can move out on your own.”

Without his parents’ permission, Omeish felt he had no choice but to stay in Virginia and look for work. He wanted a job in film production, but with no experience, and few references, he ended up as a photo coordinator for Time-Life Books, managing and editing archival photo assets for their catalogue of titles. (Books in the Time-Life library include The Art of Sewing, Understanding Computers, and The Time-Life Book of Family Finance.)

“I remember,” Omeish says, “being in a cubicle for six months, and I just felt dead. I told myself, ‘If I do this for the rest of my life, I’m going to die. So I need to get the hell away from here and figure something out.’”

One day, dismayed by the tedium of the job, Omeish called his brother, Mohammed, who was running a relief NGO providing aid to Kosovo, and on a whim volunteered his services as a documentarian. Omeish told Mohammed, “‘I’ll do everything for free, just buy me the equipment. Just buy me the camera, the ticket, and I will shoot everything you guys are doing over there, and you can have the footage. I just need to get out of here.’”

Omeish flew Kosovo a few weeks later, three days after the NATO bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosovic’s army had forced hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees to flee. When Omeish arrived, the displaced Serbs were pouring back into the country.

“I’d say 75 percent of the country was destroyed,” says Omeish. “And it was the first time I’d seen the effects of war.” Equipped with a video camera, Omeish traveled throughout Kosovo, intending to film for a week. But he ended up staying a month. “Random people I met were so kind. They just opened up extra rooms in their houses for me. I made quick friends with the locals, and they took me around the country to interview people about life, about their country, about the effects of war. That was the first time I can honestly tell you that I knew I had to do this for the rest of my life.”

When Omeish returned to Virginia, he sat his parents down for a third time. “‘I came to you about a year ago,’” Omeish says, recounting the conversation, “‘and you guys said I couldn’t leave your home. But I’m going to explain something. I did the job thing, and I hated it. All I’m asking is for your support and blessing. I don’t want a penny from you. Just tell me that I can do it.’ And my parents saw that I was very serious. They were scared because in our culture, it’s very difficult to let your son go out on his own with just a dream to support him. They were scared, and understandably so. But they gave their blessing in the end.”

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fter his first foray shooting in Kosovo, Omeish commuted from Los Angeles to the Middle East and North Africa throughout the next decade. When the Izmit earthquake struck Northeastern Turkey in 1999, killing 50,000 people, Omeish filmed at the epicenter. “A year later,” Omeish says, “there was a famine in Ethiopia in the south, and I went there. And then came the Chechen/Russian war, and I went to Georgia—where 7,000 refugees had gone to escape the

“I just wrote a simple will saying, ‘If anything happens, blah-blah-blah. Forgive me, blah-blah-blah.’ Because we both really thought that might be it, that we might never see each other again.” violence—and filmed in the camps.” He began shooting his first feature film, Occupation: 101, about the historical and political roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the early aughts. In 2005 and 2006, it toured the international festival circuit, and remains a curriculum staple at colleges around the world.

When the Arab Spring effloresced in early 2011, Omeish was working on a documentary about the 2008 Israeli bombing of Gaza City, told from the perspective of the only western journalists—Aymun Mohyeldin and Sharine Tadros—that didn’t evacuate during the threeweek siege. But after al-Abidine’s ouster, with Mubarak disempowered in Egypt, and protests flourishing in Libya, Omeish knew he couldn’t stay in California. By the time revolution stirred in Tripoli, though, Omeish was married with two young children.

“But I told my wife,” says Omeish, “‘I think I need to go. I need to do something. I don’t know what it is, but I need to go and do something and show what’s going on in Libya— to be involved in any way that I can. This is my chance.”

Omeish’s wife, whom he asked me not to name, supported her husband despite the consequences. “We made the decision that I was going to go to Libya,” says Omeish, “and that I might not come back. We really

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didn’t talk about it much. When I’m in that mindset, I don’t necessarily want to think a lot about it. I just wrote a simple will saying, ‘If anything happens, blah-blah-blah. Forgive me, blah-blah-blah.’

Because we both really thought that might be it, that we might never see each other again.”

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n February 22, 2011, Omeish landed in Cairo, which was itself still in the throes of the January 25 uprising. Two hundred thousand people were camped out in Tahrir Square, and Mubarak was only days away from officially ceding power to the military. Both Mohyeldin and Tadros were on assignment for Al Jazeera English in the Egyptian capital (Time magazine would later name Mohyeldin one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2011” for his reporting), and though both were eager to travel to Libya with Omeish, Al Jazeera nixed the trip, claiming that to send correspondents to Benghazi—where Gaddafi had placed $1 million bounties on the heads of Al Jazeera journalists—too dangerous.

But Omeish was undeterred, and with the help of Mohyeldin hired a car, first to Mersa Matruh on the Egyptian coast, and then Al Salum on the Libyan border. “On our way to the border,” says Omeish, “we popped three tires. So, I was kind of feeling nervous. Like, ‘Three tires? Am I not supposed to go in?’” But after 20 hours on the road, he reached Al Salum, where a column of vehicles was streaming out of Libya. “There was a mass exodus going on,” says Omeish. “The only cars going in—and there were very few—were carrying aid. I didn’t really know how I’d get through.”

Omeish didn’t have a contact at the Al Salum crossing, but his driver asked around, looking for someone ferrying men across the border. In less than an hour they’d located an intermediary, who shuttled Omeish to a running car. “He literally was like, ‘Just go in this car and they’ll take you through,’” Omeish recalls. “And he stuffs me in this car with a bunch of people I’ve never met.”

Amongst the passengers were two Egyptian doctors carrying antibiotics and anesthetics. “They were just coming in to help,” says Omeish. “I asked them what they were doing, and they were like, ‘We’re all brothers, and we have to help each other out against these tyrants. We know what it’s like; we just had our revolution. We want to help you guys succeed.’ So there was a lot of brotherly love. It was really amazing.”

At the checkpoint, where Omeish had expected to encounter skepticism and bureaucracy, the soldiers weren’t even checking passports. “All there was,” says Omeish, “were men—Egyptian and Libyan—honking their horns, giving the victory sign, and waving the liberation flag. It was completely surreal.”

After crossing into Libya, Omeish transferred to a truck. A few weeks earlier, at an anti-Gaddafi protest in Los Angeles, Omeish had met a man whose brothers helped smuggle people and goods in and out of Libya via the coastal city of Tobruk. The man had given Omeish an intersection, a phone number, and a password: “May God have peace and rest on your father.” Now in country, after an hour on the dark road to Tobruk, Omeish reached the designated traffic circle, and stood in the dark by the side of the road. “I call this number I’d been given,” says Omeish, “and the guy doesn’t answer. So, I called him again, and he didn’t answer. I was just standing in this roundabout at night, waiting, thinking, ‘I hope I don’t get shot or killed.’ I call him a third time, and finally this time—this time!—he answers.

‘May God have peace and rest on your father!’ I say. I couldn’t believe it. In five minutes the guy was there to pick me up.”

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“That was the first time, I’d say, that I totally risked my life for a film. And felt that it had to be done that way, that there was no other way.”

After spending a few days in Tobruk, Omeish hitched a ride to Benghazi. When he arrived, the revolutionaries had just won a battle again Gaddafi’s cadet forces, and the mood in the city was jubilant.

“Seeing these guys,” says Omeish, “how they fought all of Gaddafi’s men and beat them—people were very intoxicated.” On Omeish’s second day in town, a man gave him a tour of the makeshift command center of the revolution. “This guy led me into the courthouse where all the main operations were going on. And then he took me upstairs. Lo and behold, I meet the guy that I had seen on the Internet, Mohammed Nabbous, who’d been working to set up an independent satellite channel.”

When Omeish entered Libya, he intentionally didn’t know what part of the revolution he planned to document. Over the next few days, he travelled to the frontline, 100 miles outside the city, where a number of other documentarians were stationed. “But I didn’t want to be like the other twenty guys that were shooting at the frontline,” says Omeish. “It was kind of pointless for me to try to reinvent the wheel. I felt that I needed to shoot something that people were not covering, to have something special.” When he’d left Los Angeles, Omeish tells me, “I thought to myself, ‘God, help me find something to do so that I can be useful.’

And the more I hung around Nabbous’ offices, the more I felt that was where I was supposed to be. That was the story I was supposed to tell.”

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Mohammed Nabbous had the commitment and energy of ten people,” says Omeish. “And he didn’t want to take anybody’s bullshit. If someone said, ‘I can’t do it,’ Nabbous would be like, ‘Don’t lie to me.’” In Libya, where circumspection and obfuscation were facets of the national character—to trust, and therefore to fulfill commitments, to the wrong person could be treasonous—an honest, outspoken man was almost impossible to find. (Omeish was even taught growing up in America to keep Libyan expats at arm’s distance. “You never got close with them,” says Omeish. “You never talked politics, because you couldn’t be sure where their allegiances lay.”)

In the climate of ripening optimism that accompanied the revolution, though, people gravitated toward Nabbous in a way that would’ve been unthinkable even a month earlier. “They recognized a very idealistic man whom they could trust,” says Omeish.

By the time Omeish arrived in Libya, Nabbous’ fledgling satellite network, Libya Alhurra TV, had been operating online for less than

a week. Gaddafi’s forces succeeded, largely, in knocking down the Internet throughout the country. But Nabbous managed to engage a two-way satellite connection, by which he was able to broadcast live video around the world—of protests, of Gaddafi’s assaults against civilians, and the rebels’ subsequent counter-attacks—from nine constantly-recording cameras, 24 hours a day, using little more than a DVR receiver and an old PC as servers.

This unprecedented profusion of free speech transmitted from Alhurra’s headquarters in Benghazi, seen online and rebroadcast in Western and Middle Eastern media, was amongst the first proof of Gaddafi’s war crimes—indiscriminate shelling, bombing, and executions—and helped galvanize the eventual NATO response.

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or nearly a month, between late February and the middle of March, 2011, Omeish worked and filmed around Benghazi and in the Alhurra headquarters, documenting Nabbous as he managed his guerilla network. All the while, Gaddafi’s forces were fighting their way across the desert.

On the morning of March 18, rumors began to spread that a battalion of Gaddafi’s army was approaching the city. “It was Friday,” says Omeish, “and none of our cell phones were working.” The word circulating around town was that Gaddafi had managed to block the cellular network to halt any reports about troop movements west of Benghazi. But late that morning, Al Jazeera began broadcasting a stream of unsettling images.

“The report came through,” says Omeish, “and we couldn’t believe it.” On the screen was footage of a column of tanks, and other heavy artillery. “They were less than 60 kilometers from the city center.”

As word about the Al Jazeera report spread, the citizens of Benghazi went into a panic. “I went out into the street,” says Omeish, “and people were making Molotov cocktails. People were pulling out their guns. I even saw people with swords.” During the melee, Omeish helped barricade the neighborhood around the courthouse. “We started blocking off the streets with cars so the tanks couldn’t roll through. It was terrifying, but everyone was working together.”

For the rest of the day, the residents of the city prepared for the siege. As night fell, Omeish retreated to his aunt’s house, where he and his cousins were taking refuge. “That night,” says Omeish, “until about three o’clock, everybody was just waiting. I got so tired that I actually fell asleep for a few hours. But then around five o’clock, I started hearing the glass shake. It was like Godzilla, you know? From far away: boom, boom. And I remember waking up and thinking, ‘What the hell is that?’” The concussions were the first

Top: A truck full of weapons and ammunition headed for the frontline near Ajdabiya.

Bottom: Mohammed Nabbous (left) discusses the day’s programming agenda with his team at Libya Alhurra TV.

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Gaddafi, through one of his generals on the frontline, announced a temporary truce.

Omeish would later learn that Nabbous was covering the ceasefire with a phone, sitting in the back of a truck, when he was shot in the head by a sniper. “My cousin, who was very well connected in Benghazi, got a phone call,” says Omeish. “‘Listen,’ he told me, ‘Mohammed Nabbous got shot. He got shot earlier today and got killed.’” Omeish called everyone he could think of, trying to confirm the report. “We didn’t want to believe it,” he says, “because in Libya, there are a lot of rumors that Gaddafi puts out. Lies to break your morale.”

But a few minutes after 3 p.m., Nabbous’ wife, Perditta, seven months pregnant with their first child, addressed the Libya Alhurra TV audience. “I want to let all of you to know,” Perditta said, fighting off tears, “that Mohammad has passed away for this cause. He died for this cause, and let’s hope that Libya will become free. Please keep the channel going, please post videos. There’s still bombing, there’s still shooting, and more people are going to die. Don’t let what Mo started go for nothing, people. Make it worth it.”

O Outside of the courthouse in Benghazi, a crowd of women gather to protest Gaddaf i after he claimed they were afraid to leave their houses because of the “rats”—his pet term for the revolutionaries.

heavy artillery rounds landing in the city limits. “Before the army arrived,” says Omeish, “they would shell the city and then drive in and shoot everything up. Shell it, scare everybody out, drive through, and spray it. To make sure that no one survived to fight back. And that’s what we were hearing: the first shells landing, fired from 50 kilometers away.”

As day broke, the electricity grid in Benghazi was unstable, and satellite and cell phone coverage was intermittent at best. To learn what they could about troop positions, Omeish and his cousin went up onto the roof of the house. They could see smoke in the distance from the shelling, and an old MIG fighter jet patrolling the perimeter of the city. “We weren’t sure,” says Omeish, “if it was a Gaddafi plane or one of the rebels.”

As it turned out, though, two defected pilots had commandeered a pair of jets that were mothballed in Benghazi, and with a few rounds of machine gun ammunition, began attacking Gaddafi’s convoy. “Eventually,” says Omeish, “they didn’t have any ammo left and were just flying low, harassing the tanks. A lot of people don’t know this story, but those two men held back the army for maybe a couple of hours. They saved a lot of people’s lives.”

In one of the great ironies of that day, one of the rebel planes, returning to Benghazi after an assault on the convoy, took fire from rebels in the city and crashed. “It was friendly fire,” says Omeish. “But people in the city didn’t know. They just saw a plane and got scared. There was panic in the city. So they ended up shooting it down. It was bad.”

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y the afternoon of March 19, as the military convoy bore down on Benghazi, whoever had the means to flee, did. “We were still up on the roof,” says Omeish, “and this missile goes over my head.

That’s when I was like, ‘Oh shit, they’re getting close. So we all went down to the street-level.”

Omeish’s aunt’s home sits off a rutted dirt road, down which people usually drive at idle speed. “But people were just jetting,” says Omeish, “bouncing over this road at 50 MPH.” In the late morning, the feed from Al Jazeera, which had been disrupted all morning, unscrambled. On the screen was live footage that Nabbous himself was transmitting via his Alhurra feed. In the video, Nabbous was on the street in a neighborhood a few miles from Omeish, filming with a cell phone as Gaddafi’s troops and tanks rolled down the streets, firing indiscriminately into houses.

“That’s when we knew they were closing in,” says Omeish. “There were people fighting in the streets, and the military was shelling. At that point, we were really just waiting to die.” The shelling was so close, Omeish remembers, that he felt certain any minute a round would hit the house. “Part of me was like, ‘Shit, we’re going to die,’” he says. “And another part of me was thinking, ‘This is a joke, this can’t be happening,’ and the rest of me was praying, ‘Please God, save us.’”

The fighting continued unabated until just before noon, when NATO fighter jets roared in from across the Mediterranean and began firing on the Libyan military, driving them back from the city. Fifteen minutes past noon, after the air assault had overwhelmed his fighters,

meish stayed in country for another month after Nabbous died.

“I got some good footage here and there,” says Omeish, “of Nabbous’ funeral, of the efforts to keep Alhurra running. But I had come to the realization that I needed to get out.” A producer from Al Jazeera—who’d helped Omeish enter the country in the first place— called and pleaded with him to leave. Omeish remembers, “He said to me, ‘Listen, it’s a stalemate right now. The war’s not moving anywhere.

Misrata”—where the photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire—“is still under siege; it’s the same day after day. It’s really important that you come out now and tell Nabbous’ story.”

Omeish thought and prayed for a few days on the idea of leaving Libya. He was caught between what he felt was his allegiance to the unfledged revolution, and the duty he had to tell Nabbous’ story to the world. “Finally,” says Omeish, “I called the producer up and said, ‘Okay, I’ll come out under one condition: that I stay there for ten days and come back. Because I need to come back.’”

Omeish retraced his steps, from Benghazi to Tobruk and back across the Egyptian border to Cairo, where he caught a flight to London.

Al Jazeera had commissioned a half-hour documentary on Nabbous, but Omeish had spent more than two months in a war zone, filming and assisting the revolution. “It took me a couple days to get my head straight,” says Omeish, “and when I finally sat down with the producers, they were like, ‘What footage do you have?’ And I said, ‘Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t had time to watch it. I’ve been just shooting!’”

After reviewing the video Omeish had shot, Al Jazeera revised their request and ordered an hour-long documentary. Omeish began editing with the producers immediately. The ten days he’d planned to spend out of Libya and away from the revolution quickly turned into a month.

“We started cutting the film; cutting it, cutting it, cutting it. It was so brutal. Television is very cutthroat. ‘Don’t leave the shot for too long, people will change the channel.’ That kind of stuff. I had to adjust really quickly. It was a story that needed to be told. This way. Now. There was no time for perfection.”

As Omeish began to work on the documentary, it became increasingly clear that, with the civil war still raging in Libya, he wasn’t simply making a film. “It was something that could affect the hearts and minds of people,” Omeish tells me. “It was a very powerful time. I felt very honored and privileged that I could put out a film against Gaddafi at a time when he was still in power.”

B

y the time Libya: Through the Fire aired on Al Jazeera the afternoon of May 6, 2011, fewer than two months after Mohammed Nabbous’ death, Omeish had had very little time to reflect on his personal experience. “The whole time I was in Libya after Nabbous died,” says Omeish, “I was very numb. You have to keep going. You can’t feel sorry. We have time later to mourn, but right now we need to work.” It was not until Omeish was sitting alone in his hotel in London, watching the documentary on TV, that he finally broke down. “I actually felt emotional,” says Omeish, “and actually cried for him. Even at his funeral I was behind the camera, working. Not until the film aired— not till then did I finally mourn for him.”

Libya: Through the Fire would go on to win, later that year, the 2011 Rory Peck Award—one of the highest honors bestowed to freelance cameramen. (The previous year, for his work with Sebastian Junger on Restrepo, Tim Hetherington had won.) But to Omeish, the greatest triumph was that Libyans, still fighting in the streets against Gaddafi, watched the film and took strength from it.

“I remember telling the producer at Al Jazeera,” Omeish recalls, “‘You’ll never know how grateful I am to have the opportunity to get this story out.’ And when we put it out there, the film said a lot of important things about the revolution that when I look back, in the context of the revolution, are pretty incredible.”

“For people who don’t know about Libya,” Omeish tells me, “they may never understand how big of a deal that is, to shoot an antiGaddafi film while Gaddafi was still in power. We grew up in a society where you had no right to speak your mind, you had no right to share your thoughts, you had no right to show your disapproval of the regime and their corruption. We were basically cattle. ‘Stay in your place, do as you’re told, and shut up.’ If I had made this film in 2010, when Gaddafi was still in complete power, he would have killed me for it. There’s no doubt about that.”

“That’s the type of environment we were in,” continues Omeish.

“It’s not like America where you can make whatever you want, whether it’s critical of the government or not. But for us, a film like this was only possible because of the revolution. Still I expected that I might die. And that was the first time, I’d say, that I totally risked my life for a film. And I felt that it had to be done that way, that there was no other way.”

——— After his time in Libya, Abdallah Omeish devoted himself to his documentary about the 2008 siege of Gaza City, The War Around Us, which would go on to win top honors at the Newport Beach Film Festival in 2012. Omeish is now working to make Tripoli Street, the first-ever narrative film funded

by Libyans, and shot in Libya. Production is scheduled to begin in 2014.

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