Opinion | In Syria, an account of life under al-Assad
From Ghouta, Mrs. Al-Khalil has held a diary, fragments of her experience under bombing and siege. Like about 113,000 Syrians who have been forcibly disappeared since 2011, it was kidnapped on December 9, 2013. We still don’t know where it is or if it is even alive. His neighbor found the pages from his diary scattered around his house after his kidnapping. For the Syrians, memory is often a disordered room full of scattered papers, fragments of time and experience that need a narrative.
Mrs. Al-Khalil’s husband, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a writer, helped publish her diaries in different languages and entrusted me to translate them into English. The act of translating his writing has contributed to giving words to the story that, in exile, I could never tell about my country. His chronicles of Ghouta are an account of the crimes committed by the Assad regime and also serve as a testimony of the power to attend the witness. It is as if his diaries said: this really happened and Syria will not forget. “These images will not be deleted by other memories of life,” he wrote. “They can be deleted from my mind only for death.”
Mrs. Al-Khalil reached Ghouta in May 2013. These are extracted from her handwritten diaries-some, others published on her social media-dope her arrival there. A few weeks after reaching the suburb besieged and held by the rebels, he had witnessed hunger, malnutrition and bombings.
July 18, 2013
Today marks the end of my second month in Ghouta. Here, an hour is the same as many hours in the outside world where there is no siege. Life does not resemble life. I thought my memories of the prison were the most horrible and cruel violations of the soul and body that my eyes would ever see. But to attend an entire area with its homes, streets and violated people, to feel completely defenseless and unable to protect your family, to make them starve while you are not able to provide them with food, sick without medicines, to attend a shell through the walls of your home, unable to stop it to steal one of your children, everything I have seen and listened to will not be canceled from memory.
A few weeks later, Mrs. Al-Khalil writes to attend the attacks of nerve gases of degree of arms in Ghouta.
August 5, 2013
