From Ghouta, Ms. Al-Khalil stored a diary, fragments of her expertise beneath bombardment and siege. Like some 113,000 Syrians who’ve been forcibly disappeared since 2011, she was kidnapped, on Dec. 9, 2013. We nonetheless don’t know the place she is or if she is even alive. Her neighbor discovered the pages from her diary strewn round her residence after her kidnapping. For Syrians, reminiscence is commonly a messy room stuffed with scattered papers, fragments of time and expertise in want of a story.
Ms. Al-Khalil’s husband, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a author, helped publish her diaries into a number of languages and entrusted me to translate them into English. The act of translating her writing helped give phrases to the story I, in exile, might by no means inform about my nation. Her chronicles from Ghouta are an account of the crimes dedicated by the Assad regime, they usually additionally function a testomony to the ability of bearing witness. It’s as if her diaries say: This actually occurred, and Syria gained’t neglect. “These photos won’t be erased by different life recollections,” she wrote. “They will solely be erased from my thoughts by loss of life.”
Ms. Al-Khalil reached Ghouta in Might 2013. These are excerpts from her diaries — some handwritten, others posted on her social media — after her arrival there. Inside weeks of reaching the besieged, rebel-held suburb, she had witnessed starvation, malnutrition and bombings.
July 18, 2013
Immediately marks the tip of my second month in Ghouta. Right here, one hour equals many hours within the outdoors world the place there is no such thing as a siege. Life bears no resemblance to life. I used to suppose that my recollections of jail have been probably the most horrifying and cruelest violations of the soul and physique that my eyes would ever see. However to witness a whole space with its properties, streets and folks violated, to really feel totally helpless and unable to guard your loved ones, to have your little one starve when you’re unable to offer him with meals, sick with no medication, to witness a shell break via the partitions of your home, unable to cease it from stealing certainly one of your kids, every part that I’ve seen and heard won’t be erased from reminiscence and stay etched within the soul.
Just a few weeks later, Ms. Al-Khalil writes of witnessing weapons-grade nerve gasoline assaults on Ghouta.
Aug. 5, 2013
