Al Jumhuriya - Translated by Alex Rowell The only day I’ve ever celebrated since your disappearance has been your birthday. I spend it, alone, with you. For weeks leading up to your birthday, Sammour, I have been thinking of how often a love of experience brought us together; a wish to take a risk; to…
Letters to Samira (11)
Al Jumhuriya 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 death…
Letters to Samira (10)
Al Jumhuriya – Translated by Murhaf Fares On this day, twenty-seven years ago, you were released from prison, after four years, one month, and eleven days of a shorter absence. Today, you also complete four years, eleven months, and seventeen days of a longer absence, during which time I have known nothing about you, nor…
An update on the Douma Four
Al-Jumhuriya - Translated by Alex Rowell 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…
Syrians need a fresh start, not ugly appeasement
Rime Allaf and Yassin al-Haj Saleh in Al Jumhuriya US President Jimmy Carter has dedicated much time in the last decades to building homes for those in need. He has laid foundations, put up walls brick by brick, and provided solid roofs over many people’s heads, helping them secure the basic human rights of shelter,…
The world at the fascist moment
Al Jumhuriya - Translated by Suneela Mubayi In his foreword to Theo Horesh’s new book, The Holocausts We All Deny, Yassin al-Haj Saleh decries the present “lack of a global vision or project” capable of resisting the crisis of democracy from China through the Middle East to Trump’s America. Genocide is rare, or that is…
A critique of solidarity
Al Jumhuriya - Translated by Alex Rowell There is no reason why one shouldn’t be able to imagine Syrians, or Palestinians, or Kurds, expressing solidarity with the victims of a political or natural catastrophe in Western countries. Yet the direction of solidarity seems almost always to be the contrary; it is those in affluent, powerful,…
State extermination, not a “dictatorial regime”
Al Jumhuriya – Translated by Alex Rowell To refer to the Assad regime in Syria as “dictatorial” is a great mistake—indeed, it is the mother of intellectual, political, ethical, and human rights-related errors perpetrated against Syrians at the international level. The Assadist state is based on extermination, not mere “repression,” and as such it is…
Defeat and the state: June 1967 and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria
Al-Jumhuriya - Translator: Omar El Adl Half a century has passed since the June defeat, a period during which Syria has fallen under the rule of a dynasty built by the defense minister of the June 1967 war, Hafez al-Assad. This fact is enough to show that we are living political realities that are organically tied…
Living in the temporary
Al Jumhuriya - Translator: Suneela Mubayi The day I left Syria in the fall of 2013, I published a short essay titled, ‘On Bidding Syria Farwell… Temporarily.’ I could not leave my country for the first time without saying something, and without pledging that this was a temporary departure. Four years and five months have…