This is a document, not a work of literature. It is the transcription – as faithful as possible – of two notebooks I kept during a clandestine trip to Syria, in January of 2012. These notebooks were originally intended to serve as a basis for the articles I wrote when I returned. But little by little, because of the endless periods of waiting or of idleness, the countless pauses generated, during conversations, by the translation, and a certain feverishness that tends to want immediately to transform life into text, they took on a new dimension. This is what makes their publication possible. What justifies it is something quite different: the fact that they give an account of a brief moment, one, furthermore, that occurred almost without any outside witnesses, the last days of the uprising of a part of the city of Homs against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, just before it was crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.
I would have liked to present this text in its raw form, as it was in the notebooks. But certain passages, because of the conditions under which I wrote, were too confused or fragmentary and had to be rewritten. Elsewhere, memory was tempted to compensate for lack of attention. But aside from the footnotes, and the necessary explanations or commentaries, set in italics, I have tried not to add anything.
The Syrian government, as we know, has almost completely forbidden foreign journalists from working on its territory. The few professionals who obtain a press visa are carefully guided and supervised, limited in their movements and their opportunities to meet ordinary Syrians, and subjected to all kinds of manipulations or provocations – sometimes murderous, like the one that took the life of the French reporter Gilles Jacquier. Some have been able to work on their own, either by entering with a tourist visa and then “escaping” surveillance, or by crossing the border illegally, with the support of the Free Syrian Army, as I did together with the photographer Mani. Here too, as we’ve seen in the past few weeks, the risks are not negligible.3
I got the idea for this assignment in December 2011, after my friend Manon Loizeau returned from Homs, where she had just filmed a documentary. I discussed it with the editors of the newspaper Le Monde, who accepted the project and then suggested I team up with Mani. Mani had already spent over a month in Syria, in October and November 2011, and had published a first series of photographs, groundbreaking ones at the time. That we were able to get into Syria quickly and with relative ease, and work in Homs as freely as we did, was thanks to his contacts and his previous knowledge of the field. Faced with the near impossibility of finding a translator locally, Mani, who speaks fluent Arabic, also translated most of the conversations for me. Our report, in text and photos, was published in Le Monde in five parts, from February 14 to 18.
Mani, of course, appears regularly in these notebooks. Because of the clandestine conditions, we had both adopted “noms de guerre” (mine was Abu Emir), and here I keep the one Mani chose, Ra’id. Similarly, most of our Syrian interlocutors appear under pseudonyms – either the ones they chose for themselves, or ones of my own invention. Those who appear under their real names expressly authorized this. I am not, furthermore, publishing the names of the people I saw wounded or killed, from fear of possible reprisals against them or their surviving families.
This reporting would not have been possible without the trust and support granted me by Le Monde. I would like to thank all those at the paper who took part in the project, especially Serge Michel, deputy editor-in-chief, and Gilles Paris, the international news editor. Finally, I would like to express all my gratitude and admiration for the many Syrians, civilian militants, and combatants of the Free Syrian Army, who lent us their aid, spontaneously and often at the risk of their lives.
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3 Note to the Verso Edition: These words, written in the spring of 2012, were a reference to the then recent deaths of Anthony Shadid, the New York Times Middle East correspondent who on February 16, 2012, suffered a fatal asthma attack while being smuggled out of Syria by the Free Syrian Army; and of Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémy Ochlik, killed on February 22, 2012, in a Syrian Army rocket attack against the Baba ‘Amr rebel press center in Homs. Two other journalists, Edith Bouvier and Paul Conroy, were severely injured in the same attack, but survived.