Excerpt:
The team’s interrogation lasted more than two hours, during which all our phones and laptops were examined, and many photos - including personal ones - were deleted. The officer threatened us with worse consequences if we approached the frontier from the Syrian side again, and said that they know everything about us and would track us down if any hidden or un-deleted photo was ever published.
Personal photos as understood by me means photos that were not from this trip at all, actual personal photos from other areas of these photographers life.
In those other cases you mention did a military invade force invade another country to destroy these photos they claim you are not allowed to take, while not even being within their territory or subject to their laws?
From my perspective your adherence is not to objectivity, you are actively bending over backwards to justify unreasonable militaristic force into another nation.
You can interpret personal photos that way, certainly. That is not necessarily what it means though. A selfie is a personal photo after all.
I’m not justifying military force against a nation anywhere. Nor am I really justifying anything, just because something is common does not make it just. I’m saying that the “they’re covering up a warcrime by deleting photos” line of thought is unlikely, based on what we’ve seen.
Seems to me that everyone else is bending over backwards a lot, lot more than I am. Thinking the personal photos cannot have been from this trip is an unusual requirement.