LIBRARY OF HOPE
AT FIRST, Ahmad Muaddamani was a distant voice coming through my computer speakers: a fragile whisper from a hidden basement.
When I made contact with him on Skype, on 15 October 2015, he hadn’t left Darayya in nearly three years.
Located less than eight kilometres from the Syrian capital, Damascus, his town was a sarcophagus, surrounded and starved by the regime. He was one of 12 000 survivors.
They had been under fire from rockets, barrel bombs and even a chemical weapon attack for many months. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had besieged the town since November 2012.
Like many others, Ahmad’s family had packed their suitcases and escaped to a neighbouring town. They begged him to follow. He refused – this was his revolution, his generation’s revolution.
He had joined one of the first demonstrations in Darayya calling for change, in 2011. He remembered everything about his “first time”: his heart on fire. Losing his voice from shouting slogans. The joy of being there. It was his first sensation of freedom.
Ahmad and other young rebels had stayed, not to defend their city, but to keep something in it alive. In the city under siege, he got hold of a video camera and finally realised his childhood dream: he would expose the truth.
He joined the media centre run by the new local council. In the daytime, he roamed the devastated streets of Darayya. He filmed houses ripped apart, hospitals overflowing with the injured, burials for
