Project
Syria, if Not Now, Then When?
Illustrations and testimonies from those who had been silenced by the Assad regime
George Butler travels the world drawing places and people touched by conflict. He shares his return to Syria in the weeks after Assad fell
We talk of old souls, but the illustrator George Butler is truly a man from another time — his solid name, BBC English, russet beard and gentle good manners make him appear straight out of central casting for a Great War epic.
Not for him the churn of modern journalism — the frantic filing, the snapping, the immediate posting. This is someone who illustrates the news: he stops, looks, looks again, makes friends with his subjects and then draws them solicitously while drinking tea and chatting the day away. He often finishes his scenes weeks later, colouring and refining them back at home in Peckham, south-east London.
Butler, who grew up near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, is only 39, but he has already made a career out of travelling to countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine, Libya, Angola and, his great passion, Syria, documenting, in his distinctive ink on paper, the stories of those affected by monstrous regimes and the fallout of war. His work appears in newspapers, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has some of those drawings from Syria and Ukraine in its collection, and he was commissioned by the National Army Museum during the Covid crisis. He doesn’t have a gallery, preferring to represent himself, but he sells independently to collectors, usually those with an emotional connection to the countries he is portraying. In his 2014 TEDx talk he offers a heartfelt argument for the revival of illustration as reportage, a tradition made nearly extinct by the instant gratification of photography.
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Talking of which, while journalists, photographers and TV crews (many of whom he counts as friends) are compelled to shoot bulletins, get quotes and move on, Butler argues that he has the privilege of being able to linger (he calls it “slow news”). The very nature of his work means that he can really get to know his subjects, speaking in his beginner’s Syrian Arabic or through a translator. His models don’t have to be the key figure in a front-page news story; they might be a bereaved child, a long-suffering mother or a shop owner who, for fear of being shopped by regime spies, is wary of traditional media.
That he and his models must be safe enough to set up for the period it takes to complete a drawing means he is rarely in any real danger, unlike war reporters on the front lines. Butler has been on hostile-environment courses over the years and took the body armour he required in Ukraine with him on a recent trip to Damascus, thinking that it might still be “a kinetic place”, but found no need to put it on. He is light on his feet thanks to minimal gear: a knackered £12 A2 portfolio case that he got on Amazon, loose paper, pens (he uses Gillott nibs, numbers 303 and 404, and Indian ink). He doesn’t use sketch pads as he doesn’t like the expectations they carry (if something isn’t good enough you feel you must rip it out).
This gentle medium certainly lends itself to conveying the reverberations from the epicentre of conflict. It’s no surprise that he cites the American war reporter and writer Martha Gellhorn, who sought out human stories, and Ronald Searle, who drew while incarcerated in the notorious Changi Gaol in Singapore in 1944, as two of his biggest influences.
I first met Butler a few years ago at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he was promoting a children’s book he had illustrated, When Fishes Flew by Michael Morpurgo. He also illustrated the 40th-anniversary edition of Morpurgo’s First World War classic War Horse.
More recently, Butler has drawn the aftermath of another war, one still fresh in the mind. He returned last Christmas Eve from a trip to Syria, where he had been documenting the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the people’s surprising, messy, joyful liberation.
Today he is talking to me about that trip from Madrid via a video call — the screen fills with his huge smile. He acknowledges that his visit came during the honeymoon period for Syrians and the new caretaker government, led by Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir. “It was fantastic, a wonderful time to be there. It was joyous and jubilant and all of those things. People were handing out sweets and flowers and everyone wanted to talk to you on the street,” he says. He also suggests that recent talk of bread shortages should not detract from these moments of blissful reprieve.
What he chose to focus on during that recent trip was a surprise even to himself. He returned to Syria imagining he could make “dark and scary drawings” and did attempt it. “I tried to draw in the morgue at the Damascus Hospital where 11 bodies remained, anonymous, waiting for loved ones to come and collect them,” he says. “But the reality of that scene was that the bodies which lay poking out of black and white body bags were unrecognisable as humans; it seemed so futile and sad to record it in that moment, and I gave up when the hospital attendant politely asked to keep the door shut because of the smell.”
Moreover, after a week of news sites capturing the horrors of Sednaya, the infamous prison north of Damascus known as the “human slaughterhouse”, he decided to allow himself to be “led by the stories that people had not been able to tell”.
So instead Butler interviewed and drew Salah el Essa, a man living at his home with his mother, Maryam Ali Belal. He had recently been let out of Sednaya, where nooses, a torture chamber and an alleged “crushing machine” have since been discovered. “I sat and drew him for a couple of hours and he told me his story, line by line, each one explaining the scars, the chipped teeth and the limp he carried,” Butler says. “I was conscious of his mum, Maryam, who was sitting behind him. All that time she would have had to wait for her sons to come back. Two of them were in prison. She was allowed a seven-minute visit every six weeks.”
The artist makes the point that it is so often the mothers, the sisters and the daughters who silently absorb the suffering of their families. “That was something we all learnt about the Syrian regime, everyone was being punished for everyone’s crimes, in families, in towns. I got a real sense of the regime’s reach on every corner,” he says.
Butler insists that while the people he meets are always very respectful of what he does, they don’t always understand it and, while they often ask to be drawn, they don’t have the same need as his models in the UK might to own the work. In fact, on his recent trip, while he was drawing in Umayyad Square in Damascus, people asked Butler if he could stop his own work and paint the new Syrian flag on their faces instead. “Everyone wanted the three stripes with the red stars and there was complete confusion about why I couldn’t do it: was I not physically able to? I think they respect the drawings as my object, but they don’t see it as being of value. They have so many other things to worry about. Creating is different when you are worried about where the next meal comes from, culture is a very low priority.”
On that visit, wherever he drew, those he met would almost always mention their struggle to feed their families. The Syrian economy has contracted by 85 per cent since 2011. “You have to bear in mind that these are very proud people who would usually be giving you more than you are giving them,” he reflects.
The trip felt a long way from his first visit to the country in 2012, as a 27-year-old journalist trying to cut his teeth in the world of reportage. “I was kicked out of my house for the Olympics in east London, and went to Kilis, on the Turkish/Syrian border, and plucked up the courage to walk across the border on my own and meet the Free Syrian Army at the checkpoint.” They welcomed people with open arms, in those days. “This is when we thought that the moderate opposition was going to walk into Damascus and take control,” he says.
That didn’t happen, and with Assad’s regime in force trips to the country became impossible. Instead Butler and some friends raised money from the UK for the doctors and teachers in the north of Syria, eventually setting up a charity in 2014, now run by Rose Essam, called Hands Up Foundation (which became Action Syria last year). “It was a way of staying connected, drawing was the initial way but then [it became] sending money and reporting back to the people who had given so generously — and then we weren’t allowed to visit for 12 years. We weren’t allowed anywhere near because aid was used by the regime as a tool.”
I wonder what has particularly connected him to Syria. “I ask myself this question all the time,” he says. “The Syrians are wonderful, and brilliant at connecting and telling their stories, which they did very movingly.” Visiting in his mid-20s, “it was the first time I had sat opposite people who had suffered so much”.
Butler still has the drawing he made around that time, in Turkey, of a Syrian woman called Mama Nazak. One of her sons had been killed while launching a rocket, shot in the head; another was shot in the arm trying to save his brother. Then, at a different time, a third son was left paralysed from the waist down after being shot in the stomach. Yet Mama Nazak had done an extraordinary thing in her grief. “She had part-adopted Khaled, this 10-year-old kid who witnessed his mother and father being killed in front of him [in Syria].” His father was shot and his mother beheaded. “Even though there was this great tragedy and horror and suffering, they found each other in a refugee camp and found hope. It feels like everyone in Syria has been waiting for this moment [of liberation] ever since then.”
Does Butler share the view of many that sanctions on Syria should now be lifted? He nods. “Lifting sanctions would, I think, be a show of good faith in the political process, and that would be extremely welcome. But the greatest sanction was that applied by the regime on the north-west of the country [where more than four million people lived or were sent], which it starved of aid, phone signal … This [lifting international sanctions] will make a huge difference.”
I ask how Butler compares himself to other conflict reporters, and how they feel about him. “The more I do my job, the more I realise that there is a divide between what I am doing and what more traditional journalists are doing. I think I can be really slow and — with my page open for people to see — much less threatening. But also I am trying to dig a little deeper. A drawing allows space to interpret, in a way that is more deep than photographs — which can be quite aggressive.”
Butler inherited his love of art from his mother, Amanda Cooper, an artist and art teacher. (His father, Sam Butler, is an estate agent.) “She taught art in the living room on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Oxfordshire. I was never involved, maybe to model sometimes but not to draw,” he recalls. When I ask him where he went to school, he changes the subject. When I follow up in an email, I discover why. “I went to a posh school that I’d prefer not to have listed; it hasn’t helped the creative career yet!” he writes. (He is listed as an alumnus on the Eton College website.)
School was followed by an art foundation course at Kingston University, after a teacher at said school, Ian Burke, suggested it might suit him (so it wasn’t all bad). And when he realised they did degrees in illustration he signed up. It wasn’t until his final year that he realised perhaps reportage or drawing on location might have a purpose. “My uncle was in the Army and I wrote a proposal to go to Afghanistan to unofficially document them on bases. They were the stories of young British men and women waiting to go to war.” It was 2006, he was 21 and for two weeks he joined the 16 Brigade, drawing in the British and American bases from Helmand to Kandahar to Kabul.
Travel is made less complicated by the fact he doesn’t have a family of his own yet (“I haven’t got that far”), but he does have two brothers and three nieces, whom he clearly adores. “London feels nice to come back to with them around,” he says.
Meanwhile, the plan is to return to Syria as soon as possible — the dream would be to put on an exhibition in Damascus this year “if it is in any way socially acceptable”. I ask him what he means by that and he says: “If it is at all appropriate to put on art exhibitions in a place recovering from a trauma, but it might be a gentle way of bridging people back together.”
As I write there are many people voicing worries about Syria’s future — Syrians returning to desperate poverty, a land riddled with mines and concerns about a new police force being trained under the isolating principles of Islamic law. “I think anyone who has reported on or who has worked with Syria in the last decade is cautious because the habit has always been to fear the worst,” Butler says.
Yet he believes firmly that it is not our role to be too cynical — the Syrian people deserve some hope. “It’s a crass comparison,” he says, “but it’s like the evil headmaster has left the building and everyone is getting along fine for as long as they can. They don’t really know what to do, but they know it will be better than what’s been before.”
