Thoughts on Justice, Revenge and Forgiveness

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.

“Do you see how beautiful the moon looks?” I ask you while we’re on our way home at night, crossing between the last minibus stop and our house in Qudsaya Suburb. “You’re even more beautiful!” I rush to answer my own question before you do. Other times you don’t let me finish the question, finishing it yourself straight away, biting on your lower lip with…

Five years on from the kidnapping of the ‘Douma 4’ activists, Elia J. Ayoub pays homage to another Damascus suburb symbolic of Syria’s peaceful, democratic revolution.

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 9 December, 2018] Five years. Sixty months. 260 weeks. 1,826 days. Sammour, I must have thought a thousand times about what I would do if I found myself face to face with the monsters who abducted you. I’d abduct their souls, in a nutshell; those dead souls that subsist by ruining life and restlessly spreading…

[Editor’s note: This article was first published by Amnesty International. It is also available in Arabic.] I listen to your favorite song: “Oh dawn, when you rise,” in the voice of Nahawand, and I think of you. Wake all people / my beloved before all! I cannot stop myself from wondering as those who believe in fate do: Why did all this happen to us? Could…

Earlier this year, between the summer and fall, I spent several months in Turkey following up on the case of the “Douma Four” activists—Samira al-Khalil (my wife), Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamade, and Nazem Hammadi—who were abducted and disappeared in Douma, east of Damascus, in December 2013. My aim was to interview as many as possible of the people forcibly displaced from Douma and Eastern Ghouta…

[Editor’s note: This article is the fourth in a series of four originally published in Arabic by Al-Jumhuriya during the siege and bombardment of Eastern Ghouta, Damascus Province, and the subsequent forced displacement of over 100,000 of its residents. The first, second, and third in the series may be read here, here, and here. The original Arabic version of this article, published on 11 April,…

[Editor’s note: This appeal is also published in Arabic] As tens of thousands of Eastern Ghouta residents are in the process of being displaced, with more likely to join them; and great numbers placed in temporary shelter centers, subjected therein to physical and socioeconomic humiliation by the Bashar al-Assad regime’s security apparatus; those in the hardest position of all are the Douma Four, the civil…

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 3 April, 2018] Are you aware of what’s happening around you, Sammour? No doubt you can hear the sound of bombardment, and perhaps you can guess from the noise, and the behavior of your captors, that something is different this time. Very different, Sammour. It appears the Jaysh al-Islam emirate is gasping its last breaths,…