| Episode | 10 |
| Season | 1 |
| Category | People |
| Listen | Full Episode #10 ↗ |
Episode: 10 — "Libya on the Screen vs. Reality" · Full Episode #10
Date: 2019 (Season 1 finale)
Language: Libyan Arabic (predominantly), occasional English terms
Recorded in: Berlin
Osama Alfitory (أسامة الفيتوري) was 37 at the time of recording. Born and raised in Benghazi (family originally from western Libya). At 27, he was working in construction administration when the 2011 revolution began. He became a fixer — the local who makes foreign journalism possible — entirely by accident. He went on to win the Rory Peck Award for Fixer of the Year. He later transitioned to documentary filmmaking. Based in Berlin, married, expecting his first child at the time of recording.
Osama's younger brother, volunteering at a field clinic near the Benghazi courthouse, helped a disoriented foreigner — Robert Worth, a New York Times Magazine journalist. Worth asked if someone could help him understand Libya. The brother called Osama. He walked into a hotel lobby full of international journalists with no fixers and no local access. He introduced journalists to each other, explained Libya's political geography, and organised access. This was the start of his career. He and his partner Suleiman became so well-known that journalists nicknamed them "the A-Team."
When told he had won the Rory Peck "Fixer of the Year" award, his response was: what does fixer even mean? He had spent a year doing this at the highest level without knowing it had a name.
See: Becoming a Fixer
Osama was embedded in Sirte for the final weeks of fighting. He describes being at a mass grave site when people started shouting "we've got Gaddafi." A fighter ran past holding a gold-embossed pistol. He reached the field hospital — a chaotic, violent scene. He saw Gaddafi being beaten. He did not feel joy. The mode was documentation and numbness: "I was used to corpses by then."
He later interviewed Mansour Dhao, one of Gaddafi's last close guards. Dhao told him: Gaddafi and his son Mutassim were estranged in the final days. Gaddafi was reading the Quran obsessively, with no internet, no laptop charger, only a satellite phone to call someone in Syria who relayed news from Arabic TV. When family members once asked him to step down, his reply — word for word — was: "I stepped down in 1978," referring to the Jamahiriya declaration.
See: Gaddafis Capture at Sirte
A photographer Osama worked closely with was injured in Ras Lanuf and again in Misrata. Brown had come to Libya shooting on an iPhone, at a time when iPhone photography was just emerging as serious journalism. He survived. A French journalist alongside them, Martin, was killed in the same Misrata incident.
Post-revolution, Osama made a documentary (for ARTE and DW Arabic) following three elderly, retired military men defusing World War II-era landmines in residential Benghazi. One had lost both legs to a mine. One of the men died during filming. The documentary screened in Germany to significant response.
See: The Landmine Clearers of Benghazi
In 2015, living alone in Amman, Jordan, Osama started dreaming every night of the same person — a decomposed body in a military jacket he had photographed during the revolution. He had not consciously remembered the photo. One day he opened an old hard drive and found it: the exact image from his dreams. He had photographed it mechanically, moved on, stored it. Four years later it returned nightly — in high-definition clarity, with tactile sensation. He woke crying. He sought therapy, continuing by Skype when he had to travel.
He explicitly challenged the Arab/Libyan cultural reflex of attributing trauma to supernatural causes — jinn, sorcery — rather than treating it clinically. He referenced Anthony Bourdain: even people whose lives appear enviable can be destroyed internally.
See: The Corpse on the Hard Drive, PTSD and Collective Trauma
He stated with clarity that he had once calculated his daily chance of death while filming landmine clearance at 60–70%. After marrying and expecting a child, he decided not to return to that level of risk.
"الإجابة معمر كانت بالحرف الواحد أنه متعناحيت في 78."
"Gaddafi's answer, word for word, was that he stepped down in 1978." — via Mansour Dhao (EP 10)
"اللي جاتها بدري أحسن."
"The ones it comes to early are the lucky ones." — on PTSD (EP 10)