Syria - Woman in the Crossfire/ Planet of Clay

Country: Syria         
Book: A Woman in the Crossfire/ Planet of Clay
Author: Samar Yazbek
Publication Year: 2012/2021
Genre: Journalism/Fiction

Before the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, Samar Yazbek was already something of a household name in her country. As well as a novelist and journalist, she had appeared on several programmes on Syrian State TV and presented her own series, Library Story.

Yazbek was also something of a controversial figure for being a woman living in a conservative Islamic country. She left home at 16, very much out of kilter with traditional values. She was also raising her daughter alone, without living with the father.

All of this might have given someone else pause when the series of demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011 Being a face known to many, not to mention a woman, was bound to put her in harm’s way. But Yazbek is not anyone. Throughout the first 100 days of the demonstrations and retaliations by the security forces, she recorded her experiences, as well as firsthand accounts of those witness to massacres and of the victims of the beatings and torture.

A Woman in the Crossfire is the result of those recordings. If we want to get highbrow and overly effete about it, we can compare A Woman in the Crossfire to Goya’s Disasters of War, the series of sketches Goya made depicting the atrocities carried out by Napoleon’s forces following their invasion of Spain in 1808. Yet the two have a lot in common. Quick, vital sketches that describe the daily indignities committed by the aggressors on the general population. 

A scene from Goya's Disasters of War

From the start, Yazbek was recognised by the police and military officers. She received countless death threats and not just from the authorities. As an Alawite, a minority Shīʿite Muslim sect, of which Bashar al-Assad and his family are members, Yazbek was considered a traitor by many of her own people.

Bravery comes in many forms. Yazbek does not portray herself as some stoic, impassive observer. She took Xanax to be able to sleep at night. She often had crying fits and worried most for her daughter, who, as teenager, was most in danger from the kinds of sexual violence committed in all wars and conflicts. As the demonstrations begin, she witnessed her first dead body. It was far from the last.

But bravery is not about action without fear. It is about action in spite of that fear. Yazbek was threatened and intimidated but kept writing regardless. The authorities frequently appeared at her door and, hood over her head, took her to be shown the mutilated bodies hanging in the cells of the Syrian torturer chambers. They made her strip to the waist at one point, but a combination of defiance and a fainting fit prevented (perhaps) the sexual assault that was to follow.

A Woman in the Crossfire is a reminder how important female voices are in such moments of revolution and conflict. It is a snapshot of what was happening in Damascus and elsewhere in the country at the moment when the revolution began. At the end of July 2011, Yazbek left the country, more for the protection of her daughter than any regard for her own safety. 

It was perhaps a fortuitous escape. From July and into August 2011, members of the Syrian military started to rebel (Yazbek records instances of whole units being massacred for refusing to serve or fire on civilians). New factions formed, hostile to Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Revolution was over. The Syrian Civil War had begun. It has been in progress ever since.

More than 600,000 are estimated to have been killed in Syria in the last 13 years, including 55,000 tortured to death in the same cells to which Yazbek was taken. It is a war in which all the usual global political suspects interfere and make political capital. From the UK, USA, France, Russia, Iran and Israel. no one comes out of it well. Only this week as I write, 5 SAS soldiers are being investigated for potential war crimes committed while on active service in Syria.

War, as Smedley Butler once said, is a racket (see: War is a Racket). It is also a business. Since the end of the Second World War, many of the world’s major economies have been dependent on their arms manufacturers. Syria is just the latest country allowed to go to rack and ruin to feed the cannibalistic war machine.

Bashar al-Assad is culpable for much of this of course, but the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the unleashing of Isis and other Islamist forces is as significant to what has happened to Syria in the last decade. And like the 8 year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which both sides were kept well armed by the same global cannibals, Syria lies in ruins as much from external interference as internal strife.

Samar Yazbek has returned to the Syrian conflict in her writing multiple times since leaving the country. I have not read all of the works, so I can't comment on which is the most impactful. Yet her 2021 novel, Planet of Clay, must be near the pinnacle of what she has written in that time.

Planet of Clay is told through the eyes of Rima, a girl unable to speak. In reading A Woman in the Crossfire, one can’t help but think of Rima as an analogue of Yazbek’s own daughter at the time of the initial Syrian uprising. Although from Yazbek’s descriptions of her daughter, she was far from silent at the time. The landscape in which Rima travels is also not the largely intact Syria at the beginning of the crisis. No time is specified, but the wholesale destruction suggests we are closer to 2021 than 2011.

The plot is Kafkaesque in its outlook. Rima is dragged from one basement and safe house to another by a series of relatives and other actors. First her mother ‘disappears’ (an Orwellian tern for ‘shot’). She ends up in a hospital filled with torture victims. Her brother rescues her and drags her from pillar to post, until he also ‘disappears’. It is then the turn of her brother’s friend to bring her to safety.

Anyone who’s ever read Kafka or Orwell knows how this ends. Yet as we have said before during this project, fairytale endings are a myth. There is no restoration of the status quo for Syria. A tentative ceasefire has been in place for the last couple of years, but not much of Syria remains standing. The west and its media have long since moved on to other conflicts, because in a world financed by arms sales there are always new flames to fan with bombs and bullets. It doesn’t seem like we will ever learn.

Samar Yazbek