Wejdan Nassif, a friend and former cellmate of Samira al-Khalil, the Syrian democracy activist imprisoned by Hafez al-Assad and then abducted by Islamists, recalls their time together inside and outside prison.

[Editor’s note: This article was produced as part of Al-Jumhuriya’s 2017 Fellowship for Young Writers. It was originally published in Arabic on 29 March, 2018] To live today in half a city; to live confounded between death and life, between the Damascus of the regime and the Damascus besieged by the regime, means being overwhelmed by guilt about your safety, and your obligatory silence in…