Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising

By Jonathan Littell

"We fight for our religion, for our women, for our land, and lastly to save our skin. As for them, they're only fighting to save their skin."

In 2012, Jonathan Littell traveled to the heart of the Syrian uprising, smuggled in by the Free Syrian Army to the historic city of Homs. For three weeks, he watched as neighborhoods were bombed and innocent civilians murdered. His notes on what he saw on the ground speak directly of horrors that continue today in the ongoing civil war.

Amid the chaos, Littell bears witness to the lives and the hopes of freedom fighters, of families caught within the conflict, as well as of the doctors who attempt to save both innocents and combatants who come under fire. As government forces encircle the city, Littell charts the first stirrings of the fundamentalist movement that would soon hijack the revolution.

Littell's notebooks were originally the raw material for the articles he wrote upon his return for the French daily Le Monde. Published nearly immediately afterward in France, Syrian Notebooks has come to form an incomparable close-up account of a war that still grips the Middle East-a classic of war reportage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781781688250

Jonathan Littell

Jonathan Littell was born in New York to American parents, and grew up in the United States and France. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Book preview

Monday, January 16

Tripoli, Lebanon

I arrived in Beirut on Friday, January 13. Mani joined me the next day, and immediately began telephoning his Syrian contacts to arrange our passage. Abu Brahim, a respected religious authority from the neighborhood of al-Bayada with whom Mani had stayed in November, asked his contacts in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to organize passage for us. On Monday 16, around 5:00 PM, Mani–henceforth called Ra’id–received a phone call asking us to come to Tripoli that very night.

10:30 PM. Reached Tripoli in the rain.⁴ Met at the agreed-upon spot by three strapping fellows, then brought to a nearby apartment. Unlit staircase, naked electric wires bulging from the walls. Freezing apartment, but huge and beautiful, with stone floors, paintings, and Arabic calligraphy on the walls, gilt velour furniture, a big glass chandelier. D., a young activist who came out of Homs a week ago, is chatting on Skype, his laptop resting on a low table. It’s a bachelor’s apartment, sorry! A TV, up on a dresser, is tuned to the People of Syria channel, an opposition network based in Great Britain.

D. immediately talks to us about Jacquier. The regime deliberately assassinated Gilles Jacquier in order to dissuade journalists from coming. He was killed in Akrameh, a pro-regime Alawite neighborhood, in al-Jadida, in front of the Al-Butul supermarket. The false information about the place of the attack was broadcast by the regime and a traitor journalist. He means Muhammad Ballout, from the BBC’s Arabic service, a Lebanese member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The BBC apparently

Reviews for Syrian Notebooks

[lkernagh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Written more like a travelogue/journal, Littell admits upfront in the Introduction that he has reproduced the notebooks as a collection of his observations, thoughts and feelings from January 16 to February 2, 2012. Thankfully, the Verso edition I read includes and epilogue where Littell admits that as bad as he thought things were in Homs while there, it was after Littell was safely evacuated to Lebanon and back in Paris that "things in Homes really went haywire. I thought that what I had seen was violent enough, and I thought I knew what violent means. But I was wrong." If you have been living under a rock for the past few years and have no idea of the Syrian conflict, Littell does a great job encapsulating the various factions involved, the manipulations of the Bashar al-Assad government, and the countless senseless atrocities. The notebooks were used as a basis for the Le Monde articles Littell wrote - Littell went into Syria to record events for the newspaper - but I think the very raw, disjointed nature of Littell's notes do a better job of communicating the chaos and the horrors. Recommended.