In Al-Wujuh al-Bayda’ [White Faces], Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury recounts the fictional murder of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a telecom worker residing in Mazraa, West Beirut at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. Jaber was gruesomely tortured, his body beaten and burned. The murder is depicted from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, a political science graduate and travel agent residing in Beirut…

By Yassin Swehat, translated from the Spanish by Joey Ayoub, itself a translation from the original Arabic by Naomí Ramírez Díaz.  What is happening in Ukraine is not alien to Syrians who oppose the Assad regime. We see this not only in the media coverage and the intensity of social media activity, but also in the participation of Syrians in the diaspora protests against the…

A Policy of Disengagement Furthered Apathy Towards Syrians

I have hesitated to write about Samira al-Khalil, or to write to her. Samira’s story is a shared open wound for Syrians, a symbol of our crushed revolution. For me, it is also a source of deep personal pain and grief. I carry memories of 15 years of intermittent encounters with Samira. Encounters that took place during critical formative moments for me, moments that came…

On the eve of the German elections, Sham Al-Ali meets with Syrian-Germans and discuss with them their options, arguing that there’s hardly anything uniquely “Syrian” about their highly political choices.

Writing in the dark without electricity, Bissan Fakih recounts the blast that devastated Lebanon’s capital one year ago, and charts the country’s dizzying collapse into utter dysfunction and despair ever since.

From her ancestral homelands in the Eastern Mediterranean to her new home in Canada, a descendant of genocide survivors discovers the ghosts of mass murder are with us wherever we go.

After Denmark’s recent steps to deport Syrian refugees, calls for similar measures are now on the rise in Germany; Syrians’ largest European haven. Is Europe steadily abandoning its human rights obligations?

The prevailing Western discourses about Syria are fundamentally flawed, and should be discarded in favor of “new, emancipatory” alternatives, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh.

[Editor’s note: This article was published on Al-Jumhuriya Arabic on 6 July. It is also available in Arabic.] A Danish court issued a ruling to deport me to Syria by April 4th of 2021. This ruling followed three court sessions: the first resulted in the refusal to renew my Danish residency; during the second it was ruled that I would be deported to Syria; and during the…