A Disappearance in Damascus

Author/Guide: Deborah Campbell

Why a Booktrail?

2007: Who are the people who go to war torn countries to tell us the news

ISBN: 978-0345809292
Genre: Non-Fiction

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

Deborah Campbell travels undercover to Damascus to report on the exodus of Iraqis into Syria following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. There she meets and hires Ahlam, a refugee working as a “fixer”—providing Western media with trustworthy information and contacts to help get the news out.

Ahlam, who fled her home in Iraq after being kidnapped while running a humanitarian centre, not only supports her husband and two children through her work with foreign journalists but is setting up a makeshift school for displaced girls. Ahlam soon becomes her friend as well as her guide. But one morning Ahlam is seized from her home in front of Campbell’s eyes. Haunted by the prospect that their work together has led to her friend’s arrest, Campbell spends the months that follow desperately trying to find her—all the while fearing she could be next.

Locations

Reset

Iraq
C: Baghdad centre

Travel Guide

Syria and the Iraq war

Seen through the eyes of a journalist who goes there to see and speak to the citizens who suffer the day to day reality of an horrific war:

The book takes place four years after the US invasion of Iraq and in the midst of one of the worst humanitarian cases in recent times.

This journalist has a unique purpose and interest in the issues:

While most reporting focuses on those who” make history”, what interests me more are the ordinary people who have to live it. I wanted to put a human face to the war

Interviewing the Iraqi refugees

“That was not possible for me to do inside Iraq. So I had come to Syria to meet the eye witnesses”

The Iraqi road sign

I was greeted by a weathered road sign that broke the tension. It read in English, Happy Journey. It was the peak of Iraq’s civil war, and absolutely no one was travelling into Iraq on a happy journey; a million and a half refugees had already fled the other way, to Syria and they were happy for nothing but to be alive”