Syrian Notebooks

Syrian Notebooks:Inside the Homs Uprising

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A blistering firsthand account of the conflict in Homs by the internationally acclaimed author of The Kindly Ones

“We fight for our religion, for our women, for our land, and lastly to save our skin. As for them, they’re only fighting to save their skin.”

In 2012, Jonathan Littell traveled to the heart of the Syrian uprising, smuggled in by the Free Syrian Army to the historic city of Homs. For three weeks, he watched as neighborhoods were bombed and innocent civilians murdered. His notes on what he saw on the ground speak directly of horrors that continue today in the ongoing civil war.

Amid the chaos, Littell bears witness to the lives and the hopes of freedom fighters, of families caught within the conflict, as well as of the doctors who attempt to save both innocents and combatants who come under fire. As government forces encircle the city, Littell charts the first stirrings of the fundamentalist movement that would soon hijack the revolution.

Littell’s notebooks were originally the raw material for the articles he wrote upon his return for the French daily Le Monde. Published nearly immediately afterward in France, Syrian Notebooks has come to form an incomparable close-up account of a war that still grips the Middle East—a classic of war reportage.

Reviews

  • The force and clarity with which Littell renders the physical realities of war and mass murder are simply astounding.

    Time
  • There are still some journalists, photographers and writers who were courageous enough to report from opposition areas and remember those early days of the revolution … There was never any magic or mystery to the emergence of Isis—it was born from levels of grotesque suffering that would be hard to imagine had they not been witnessed at first hand by individuals such as Littell. Reading his account, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of climbing into bed with Assad becomes clear.

    Anthony LoydTimes
  • His writings capture a beleaguered but defiant resistant movement … Syrian Notebooks are immediate and vivid … he has an eye for small, heartbreaking details.

    New Statesman