April 6, 2018
Rania Abouzeid's book, Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, was reviewed by the New York Times.
In early February of this year, a Syrian rebel group with historic links to Al Qaeda shot down a Russian fighter jet near the small town of Saraqeb. A few days later, the journalist Rania Abouzeid posted a message on Twitter from someone suffering there beneath the relentless Russian and Syrian government retaliation:
“The airstrikes are beyond what u can imagine, beyond what u can believe, beyond what seems possible. Everything is gone, but we still persist & we still know how to laugh & cry. There is no one here except the men of the town. We will not leave.”
Few people in the wider world have ever heard of Saraqeb, but those who read Abouzeid’s “No Turning Back” will come to know who those men are. Year after year, Abouzeid followed one of them as he became a warrior and his children grew up under fire, then in exile and then as he made forlorn efforts to return to his home and rebuild. He and his family are part of the story Abouzeid set out to tell about “how a country unraveled one person at a time.”