We are not journalists but our reality has forced us to report the suffering of our people,” says a contributor to Sinai News 24, an amateur news site run on Facebook.
For a strategic border region in its third year of a brutal war between armed militants and national security forces, North Sinai receives remarkably little coverage in Egypt’s mainstream media, with foreign journalists fearing attacks and local reporters forced to contend with a tightening security crackdown.
Brief updates from the official military spokesman have become the main channel of information to the outside world, but as tensions escalate, residents have become increasingly unhappy with these impersonal and one-sided reports of a war that has overturned their lives since 2013.
