by Rania Abouzeid (One World, ISBN 9781786074171)
This is an astonishing work, in its ambition, its scope and its humanity. Rania Abouzeid’s aim is to show how Syria collapsed in a few short years from a country quiescent under the heel of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship into the patchwork of bloody conflicts that we see today. Beginning in 2011 with the first small, tentative protests in Damascus, she traces the rise of the Free Syrian Army, the establishment of the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda and the ISIS declaration of a caliphate across vast swathes of Syria and Iraq. Syria, as she says has ‘ceased to exist as a unified state except in memories and on maps’.
