The Raqqa Diaries by Samer (February 2018)
This extraordinary book went through a journey like few others to make it into print. First, the author, Samer, maintained a detailed account of daily life in the Syrian war zone. Then, he managed to smuggle this book out of the country despite the difficulty of getting anything in or out of the area. Finally, when the book reached sympathetic hands in the UK (I can’t recall if they were aid workers or journalists) the story was finally put into print. Each step in the journey came with significant risk to the author – if his book had been intercepted, Samer would surely have suffered dire consequences at the hands of the oppressive regime he denounces in his Raqqa Diaries.
The book is written in the style of a journal but entries are understandably sporadic. It mostly details the deterioration of daily life in his war-torn home city. This simple idea results in a book that fills an important gap in how the media presents a place like Syria to the outside world – usually, since the focus of news coverage is on the political or military aspects of the area, the accounts about daily life are lost or ignored. This style of media coverage separates the international community from the reality of the human rights violations that happen everyday in war zones.
Most people who follow present-day wars via media outlets are unable to relate to what is going on in a place like Syria. Such viewers are used to being granted rights by their own governments and cannot fathom what it is like to live in the midst of a war that puts those very rights into question. A book like this helps by framing the situation in the context of daily problems we can all relate to – separation from friends or family, uncertainty about work, or just a constant sense of unease. When Samer describes the way the war makes these concerns the consistent reality of his experience, we readers get a better sense of how today’s war impacts people’s lives and understand the importance of bringing these conflicts to an end.
This book also demonstrates how badly a country can fail its own people. A country embroiled in war is almost always putting its own self-interest ahead of concerns about innocent citizens. The case of present-day Syria is no exception. The challenge posed by excessively self-interested governments asks a huge question to the international community – how do we communicate across compromised borders in order to separate the refugee from the oppressor? If we cannot come up with a good answer for this question, we run the risk of supporting failing or oppressive foreign regimes at the expense of solving less important problems closer to home.
