The Morning They Came for Us review – unsparing account of Syrians’ suffering

Janine di Giovanni’s reports of life under the Assad regime during the civil war are nightmarish, but unflinching

When I first visited Syria, about 20 years ago, it was outwardly calm but with an atmosphere of underlying unease. After I gave a lecture at a university in Homs, I met a group of postgraduate students for coffee and was bombarded with questions about everyday life in a western secular society. I thought I’d been careful to avoid politics but when I got back to Damascus I discovered I’d been banned from speaking at the university there. A mukhabarat informer had been in the coffee shop.

A few years later, when I chaired an English PEN committee that campaigned on behalf of imprisoned writers, I heard first-hand about the torture that went on in the country’s prisons. One of the most notorious jails was close to Palmyra, where opponents of the government had their joints ripped apart on a horrific instrument of torture called the “German chair”. I used to wonder what would happen when decades of this brutal repression became intolerable and ordinary Syrians rose against Assad.

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