IVA: Building Trust in a Troubled World
HOW A SCARY SCENE BECAME IVA’S BEST INTERVIEW YET
DECEMBER 24, 2020 — EDWIN VAN DE SCHEUR & HANNAH RICHTER
“It was like a bad movie: we were completely alone on the road with nothing or no one around us. It was dark, the moon was out, and me and my fixer were about to meet this Salafi imam who refused to join the Islamic State. He met us parked in his car and from there he lead us to his house.”
”We were all scared to meet, but then… it became one of the best interviews I’ve ever had.”
When we know so little about a person, or a community, trusting them does not come easily. But for Iva Mrvova, a Slovakian journalist who travelled to Iraq, she had to immediately place her trust in the hands of the strangers around her — including a ‘fixer’ who guided her around the country so she could gather stories about the region, its challenges, and its conflicts with the Islamic State and the West.
Iva first travelled to the Middle East in 2017, whilst the war was still ongoing in the north of Iraq. After speaking with the Yazidi girls and women but keeping their identities anonymous, she knew she wanted to return at a later date to interview them openly, and compile their stories in a book. As Slovakia had provided financial help to these women during the war, and after, Iva decided to write this book “as the Yazidi girls legacy”.
She was keen to show people in Slovakia that their country was a part of the rescuing process in the war with the Islamic State, as she often feels that her country has “a little bit of the mentality that we are only concentrating on ourselves sometimes”. Her main aim was for her people to “open their eyes and perceive more about the different cultures and countries around Slovakia”.
“He’s afraid? Oh, come on. I’m afraid!”
Iva returned to Iraq and Syria in 2019. On both occasions, when first arriving, she didn’t feel completely comfortable: “When you have a white face, they automatically think you are American, so they really don’t like you”. Initially, she worried about being taken hostage, raped, or killed, however soon found that the people weren’t necessarily violent against her but merely not pleased about her presence there.
This was why Iva had to put her trust in a fixer, who knew the culture, the places, and the issues. Once her fixer was able to set up interviews for her, she found that the people’s view of her changed and they were actually able to get along well.
Iva recalls one particular meeting with a Salafi imam who had refused to join IS. She was a little scared to meet him. However, during the text exchange setting up the meeting, the imam said that he, too, was afraid of meeting in public and requested to meet in his house when it was dark instead. The text threw her off guard: “He’s afraid? Oh, come on. I’m afraid!”
“I gained their trust. And that was very powerful.”
When Iva, together with her fixer, finally arrived at the imam’s house, he began by saying how much he hates Western people, refusing to shake Iva’s hand or even look at her. But then the interview turned out to be one of the best she had — providing her with a lot of information on the structures and inner-functioning of IS and the remaining sleeper cells.
Despite the imam’s hatred for Westerners, his conflict with IS was even more apparent. Iva noticed his struggles, describing the meeting by saying: “it’s not really black and white, there are lots of grey zones within people. At first I was scared of him but when we were leaving the house, I thought this was really a lesson to me of how we work, how people work, and what goes on inside our heads”.
Journalists are there to conduct research, to bring knowledge, and to spread it to the people around them. In order to do this, journalists have to visit the places that suffer from many preconceptions, places they may be hesitant to go to, or may even be afraid of. But often what they will find, is that the locals are just as afraid of the journalists as the journalists are of them.
This was especially the case with Iva, but after some time she noticed that; “they were glad that I came, that I wanted to listen to them. That I wanted to hear about the problems that they were facing. People weren’t immediately open to me — I probably even asked some stupid questions as well. But as I continued my conversations, and started understanding more and more, I gained their trust. And that was very powerful.”