16 March 2021
Syrian writer and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh talks revolution, Europe’s Syrian diaspora, and being “tragically hopeful” with Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad on the occasion of ten years since the Syrian uprising.
Turkey
Despite holding all required legal documents, our writer was detained at an Istanbul checkpoint and jailed for two weeks alongside dozens of other foreign nationals, all locked up for trivial paperwork issues, many suffering violent beatings and other indignities.
The famine looming today in Syria is caused not by a lack of food, but by policies consciously adopted by the Assad regime for many years, argues Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
In his fourteenth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes that he now identifies with his late mother, paying tribute to mothers around the world who bear the anguish of disappeared loved ones.
For each husband killed in Aleppo, there is a widow struggling to provide for her surviving family. Our writer heard dozens of these women’s stories first-hand; an experience that sent him into an "abyss" of drugs and mental disturbance.
A young member of Syria's Türkmen minority, living as a refugee in Istanbul, writes of the fears sparked by the Turkish government's new crackdown on Syrians, and his broader disappointment at the breakdown of communal relations between Turks and Syrians, brought on by xenophobes left and right.
Over 400 Syrians have been killed trying to cross the border into Turkey in recent years. A writer with personal experience traversing the border charts its transformation from an open door to a deadly sealed fortress.
Al-Jumhuriya details the short but unique life of Abd al-Basit Sarout, the Syrian goalkeeper, protest leader, and militant killed fighting the Assad regime this month, and examines the meaning of the “narrative war” that erupted following his death.
Like many genocidal regimes before it, the Assad regime is now formally engaged in a pseudo-academic re-writing of history. A genocide researcher outlines how a credible and rigorous study of the Syrian conflict might instead be approached.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
A new documentary shines rare light on a private battle waged quietly by millions of Syrian women, forced to balance responsibility for their children’s wellbeing with a sense of duty to their community under attack.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.