Ian Birrell

Trapped in hell

In an understated gem of a book, Marwa al-Sabouni, an architect from Homs, describes a country ripped apart. Foreign correspondents Janine di Giovanni and Charles Glass do the same.

The mechanic, blinded in one eye by shrapnel, spent three days searching for his family in the destroyed buildings and broken streets of Darayya. Finally he found his father’s body in a farmhouse, alongside those of three boys, already starting to decay. ‘Can you tell me why they would kill an old man?’ he asked, before adding: ‘This is not my Syria. When I see the sorrow that happens in our towns, all I think is — this is not my Syria.’

Yet it is. Indeed, one mystery of the darkness that has descended on Syria is that so many gut-wrenching depravities could befall a place of such bewitching beauty, history and apparent tolerance. Even now, after so much blood spilt and so many lives destroyed, there seems something unreal about how demands for democracy ended up in such a sordid maelstrom of death, devastation and sectarian horrors.

The veteran war correspondent Janine di Giovanni does not solve the conundrum. But her elegant dispatches from six months in 2012 offer a snapshot of the time when naive hopes spiralled into nightmare. The wealthy enjoy opera and drinks by Damascus pools as smoke from shelling rises nearby, insisting that their president would never kill his own people. Yet a student protestor rounded up by government goons tells of terrible torture, doctors even slicing open his body and forcing him to sleep on corpses. ‘One night they tossed him on top of a body and when he turned his head, he saw his dead brother,’ she writes.

Di Giovanni, who covered the Balkan conflict with distinction, does not hide emotions as she explores the use of rape in war once again and her stories, such as that of a shattered young woman detained after publicising protests on social media, are deeply disturbing.

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