I feel like I owe this book a review. With this book I went back 11 years in the past, I was a kid, 11 years old, seeing my father sitting in front of our old TV, watching the news, and then my mom comes to the living room asking :"what happened?" , and my dad telling her: "Bashar attacked El-Ghota with chemical weapons". Me as a kid not realizing what a chemical weapon is, only it sounds awful and whole families are dying. And after 11 years (in the meantime) while I was reading, I felt how big of a disaster it was, how innocent people died, and how the medical staff felt dealing with the victims of the attack, their desperation to revive every soul. And now I wonder how could he do this to his people? How could the world forget all these crimes and build a new diplomatic relations with him?

I remember reading about Hama massacre in the past years after I read a tweet about it, done by Hafez Al-Assad (his father) in 1982.

I remember the early protests in Dar’aa.

And there’s more than what I remember or what was mentioned in the book.

I remember being a spectator, I got to feel being there while I was reading, feeling the pain; the loss; the panic; the fear; the desperation, I saw how PTSD Could affect a person and haunt them, I felt their hope; their faith. I saw the might life they could have lived if things were different. I felt their pain in leaving the homeland they knew their whole lives, I felt their hope in surviving and building a new life away. I hope and pray they return to a free Syria one day, no dictatorship, no oppression. a free Syria, alive with its history and treasures. One day Insh’Allah.