Syria and the end of normality

Few war reporters have described the sights, sounds and smells of war as vividly as Janine di Giovanni, whose new book, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria portrays a country engulfed by civil war.

Di Giovanni is a master storyteller who weaves just enough geopolitics into the human drama to give a true sense of what’s happening. There are torture, rape, death and destruction, but there are also the lavish parties that continue in Damascus and the self-delusion of Syrians who would rather not know what Bashar al-Assad’s regime is doing.

Di Giovanni tells the harrowing story of Nada, a 25-year-old student and peaceful opponent to the regime. After a friend betrayed Nada under torture, Nada’s panicked mother woke her early one morning, saying: “There are six police cars outside. They are shouting out your name.”

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Janine di Giovanni: “I always think, It could be me, and why isn’t it me, living in Aleppo or Sarajevo or Freetown?”

For everyone caught in Syria’s nightmare “there is a before and an after,” di Giovanni says. “It’s a strongly defined line: before these things happened to you, and the aftermath and how you can never really go back to that world once you’re down the rabbit hole.”

Normality disappears with stunning rapidity. “All the things we take for granted every day – the shower, turning on the tap of water, going to a shop and buying cigarettes or a pint of milk – it stops completely. I always ask people, ‘What do you miss most?’ It’s the mundane things.”

Nada spent eight months in a regime prison. She ran the tap in her cell constantly, to prevent rats coming up the drainpipe and biting her. She was forced to watch a male prisoner being sodomised.

The memories were so painful that Nada had to run to the bathroom to retch as she told the story. “Yes, Nada was raped,” whispered her friend, who was present. “But she can never admit it, even to herself.”

Di Giovanni says that the Catholic in her gives her a tremendous sense of guilt. “I always think, It could be me, and why isn’t it me, living in Aleppo or Sarajevo or Freetown? Why was I fortunate enough to grow up in New Jersey?”

Di Giovanni, the daughter and granddaughter of Italians who fled Mussolini's Italy, expected to earn a doctorate, "teach at a lovely New England college, marry, have children and live in a Victorian house, and write sitting on the front porch".

Then one day she picked up a newspaper. "It was the first intifada," she says. "I saw this photograph of an Israeli soldier burying a Palestinian teenager alive with a bulldozer. I couldn't sleep. I ended up going to Israel.

"I interviewed Felicia Langer, the Israeli Holocaust survivor and human-rights lawyer who was the first to defend Palestinians in military courts. She sent me to Gaza and said, 'If you have the ability to write about these people, then you have an obligation.' And that was it. I became a struggling freelance foreign correspondent for the rest of my life."

Di Giovanni has covered more than a dozen wars, but after witnessing two intifadas she distanced herself from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I got very depleted working there. It was so frustrating. No matter what you did it was always twisted . . . I was in a state of perpetual anger.”

In 2003, when she was pregnant with her son Luca, di Giovanni agreed to give an interview about Bosnia to what she thought was a Canadian film crew.

“They asked two questions about the Balkans, then launched into Jenin and the second intifada. The ‘journalist’ leaped up like a reality-TV star and said: ‘We are not journalists. This is a soldier from the IDF’ ” – Israel Defense Forces – “ ‘and he was in Jenin, and what do you have to say?’ ” di Giovanni says.

“The Israeli embassy had sent them to make a propaganda film about journalists being anti-Semitic. I kicked them out. Then they cut the film so it showed me saying, ‘Are you Israeli? Get out of my house,’ so it looked like I was anti-Semitic.”

When the film-maker tried to show the documentary at the Frontline Club in London, where journalists and photographers who cover international affairs gather, the US war correspondent Marie Colvin defended di Giovanni, saying: "You ensnared Janine when she was pregnant and sick and vulnerable and lied to get access to her home."

“She really went after them,” di Giovanni says.

Colvin was killed in a bombardment in Homs in February 2012. “Marie was just this glamorous, extraordinary creature. She was 10 years older than me. She was a big name, feisty and damaged by all those years of doing what she did . . . It’s hard to believe she’s gone.”

Steven Sotloff, the US journalist who was beheaded by Islamic State, in September 2014, used to call di Giovanni “Mama G”. “I’m now of an age where I see these kids as my little brothers and sisters,” she says. “Steve was just adorable: funny, sweet, smart. He wasn’t a cowboy. He spoke Arabic and had lived in Yemen.”

Di Giovanni also met Kayla Mueller, the young American who wanted to do humanitarian work in Syria but was kidnapped and killed in a bombardment. "I don't know what she was doing there. She was bouncy and idealistic and full of life and incredibly naive and inexperienced," di Giovanni says.

Yazidi women whom Islamic State held as sex slaves said the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, “married” Mueller. She wept each time she returned to their cell. “We sat and had tea, and a few days later she was kidnapped, a young girl from Arizona who had ambitions to save the world and ended up the unwilling bride of al-Baghdadi. It’s just horrific.”

War reporting has changed a great deal since Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell covered the Spanish Civil War, and since di Giovanni worked in Bosnia and Gaza. “Now you get captured and you die,” she says.

The yearning for justice is one of di Giovanni’s main motivations. She returned to Bosnia a couple of years ago and met a woman who survived a rape camp. “She still sees the men who raped her in her village. She’s the one who is forced to be ashamed, not them. We should send these guys a message: ‘We will find you.’ You cannot rape and kill and mutilate with impunity.”

Di Giovanni condemns "the policy of nonchalance towards Syria" adopted by Barack Obama, David Cameron and other leaders, what she calls "the policy of 'Let them sort it out; there's too much regional conflict' ".

That carelessness "turned around to bite them" in the form of Islamic State and attacks in Europe and the US, di Giovanni says. Despite the group's recent territorial losses, she does not believe it will be defeated any time soon. "You might be able to crush them in Falluja, but they will return in another form," she says. "They have opened up the fury of European Muslims who have long felt alienated. They have really ignited something. You cannot kill an ideology."

Janine di Giovanni will speak at Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas, in Co Carlow, next weekend and at the Zurich Dalkey Book Festival, in Co Dublin, on June 18th