Book review: The Morning They Came for Us – an unflinching account of Syria’s catastrophe

On August 29, 2012, the celebrated British journalist Robert Fisk published a story about a massacre in the Damascus suburb of Daraya. Fisk claimed that contrary to "the popular version that has gone round the world", the massacre four days earlier was the outcome of a "failed prisoner swap". The men who committed the crime, he suggested, "were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops". He based this on interviews with "the men and women to whom we could talk". The Independent splashed the story as an "exclusive".

In Daraya, however, no one was aware of this “prisoner swap”; neither – we learn from Fisk – was the regime. Fisk admits to arriving at the site of the massacre “in the company of armed Syrian forces” riding an “armoured vehicle”, casting doubt on his own survivor testimonies. But far from endorsing his claim, most of the interviewees give evasive answers, leaving the culpability for the attack vague. And the one source that does support his theory brings its premise into deeper question: “Although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard,” writes Fisk, “he believed that most were related to the government army”.

In a less obscene manner, Fisk was reenacting earlier scenes from Daraya when Micheline Azar, a journalist for the pro-regime Al Dunya TV, had thrust a mic into the face of a dying woman, and of children still in the arms of their dead mother, to coax pro-regime testimony.

The record was set straight, however, when a few days later the American journalist Janine di Giovanni managed to sneak into Daraya disguised as a local and interviewed survivors without the intimidating presence of regime forces. (The Free Syrian Army had left two weeks earlier.)

In article for The Guardian, di Giovanni recorded residents' testimony and revealed in precise detail how the offensive began, what weapons were used, and how the slaughter was carried out. Her report was corroborated by the Local Coordination Committees and Human Rights Watch.

The story of di Giovanni's entry into Daraya and her meetings with survivors is told in considerable detail in The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, a harrowing collection of reports from Syria. In stark contrast to the obtrusive voice of her more celebrated counterparts, in di Giovanni's journalism, pride of place is given to her interlocutors. With minimal intrusion, interviewees are allowed to tell their own stories without attempts to force these into a preconceived narrative.

The book shows that unlike missionaries like Robert Fisk or Patrick Cockburn, di Giovanni understands the function of journalism. Where the former have privileged coherence over accuracy, di Giovanni recognizes the fragmentary nature of truth and appreciates that it doesn’t always hew to grand narratives. Where the former use deductive logic, di Giovanni allows facts to drive the story.

For her, personal sympathies have not made the commitment to verification superfluous. Di Giovanni’s sympathies are transparent – they are with the victims of state terror. But this doesn’t prevent her from reporting fairly on regime supporters, even regime soldiers.

Indeed, she goes to considerable length to report the mood on the regime side, revealing the various shades of opinion, from the cynical to the surreal – but also the sincere. She speaks to Christians in Maaloula who genuinely fear the opposition’s Islamist component; regime supporters in Damascus who believe the chaos is being orchestrated by a “third element”; Sunnis who have chosen denial for fear of reality’s terrible implications; and an Alawite soldier who, despite having lost an arm and a leg, is eager to return to the front to battle “foreign fighters”.

Meanwhile, in the regime's surreal bubble, a pool party carries on complete with Russian prostitutes and Adele's Someone Like You playing, and at the lavish opera house an orchestra practices the Evening Prayer from Hänsel and Gretel.

Surrounding all this however is the desolation of a landscape scorched by the regime’s indiscriminate fire. There is the archipelago of torture centres where the regime breaks bones in the hopes of breaking wills. There is the systematic use of rape as a means of subjugation through humiliation. There is relentless and casual murder. There is vandalism.

Above all, there is the absence of normality. “The celerity with which life as you know it breaks down is overwhelming”, writes di Giovanni. One of the most affecting scenes in the book has nothing to do with violence. It is an infant in Aleppo that dies of respiratory infection despite the best efforts of one of the city’s few remaining doctors. Intense shelling prevented the parents from leaving and there were no ambulances nearby. “It’s not really asking for a lot, is it? One ambulance?” asks the doctor.

Navigating this grim landscape is at times like a trip through the various circles of Dante's Inferno, each representing a different level of torment; and haunting the periphery are the spectral figures of the damned.

At one point in a camp, di Giovanni is followed by boy in fake G-Star jeans with his face hidden behind a hoodie. “But then I saw his face”, she writes, “it was completely burnt. His mouth appeared to be nothing more than a hole and his nose was practically non-existent. His ears were flaps of skin, which had been stretched tight into pink crevasses, across his skull.”

Abdullah, 11, had been on his computer in Hama when he heard the scream of an incoming bomb. He ran out in fear, but the bomb fell nearby and he took the full impact of the blast.

“I heard the worst thing in the world that day of the bombing”, his father tells the reporter: “The sound of my own son’s screams of pain”.

And then there is rape. Less than a year into the conflict, the International Rescue Committee and UNHCR had established rape as one of the primary causes of the refugee flight. But given the stigma attached to rape, few survivors admit to this. Some become suicidal.

One 14-year-old survivor di Giovanni learns of has tried to kill herself three times. The rest have evolved what the journalist calls a language of shame. To admit to having been raped is to risk social exclusion.

Di Giovanni illustrates the tangible consequences of such a confession. Shaheeneez, 37, a schoolteacher, had her fiancé walk out on her when, on her doctor’s advice, she told him about her rape while in regime custody.

Nada, a petite media activist, can only reveal what happened to her through stories of what she saw others endure. She describes the beatings, the torture, the humiliation; but she can only make oblique references to her own ordeal.

But where di Giovanni’s reporting is rigorous, the same cannot always be said for her analysis. By confusing balance for impartiality, she sometimes drifts into error – in one instance egregiously so. She condemns both sides for the use of barrel bombs when they are known to be used only by the regime (the opposition has no air force).

This minor lapse aside, the book is an essential read and a necessary corrective to the distorted lenses of media missionaries. Along with Jonathan Littell's Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising and Samar Yazbek's The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, this book is an important chronicle of a time when hope had not entirely yielded to despair and there were still red lines that the world was promising to enforce.

August 2013 changed all that. By allowing the regime to get away with a chemical massacre, the world gave it a licence to kill with impunity – and the regime made full use of this. But along the way it was assisted by the conscious blurring of the deeply uneven nature of the conflict by friendly ideologues.

This is why Janine di Giovanni has become persona non grata in Damascus. When you are in the middle of a genocide, the last person you want as witness is a truth teller.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is the author of The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War. He is currently writing a book on the war of narratives over Syria.