Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Syria: just another news item while I am sitting comfortably at a café in a rich city sipping coffee... The assault on Idlib and its consequences See also Inside Syria's Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent

Ghani's statistics on armed groups show that most of them also involve cases of violence against women – and the Syrian government heads that list. Women are deliberately targeted, he says, because they always played an important role in the opposition against Assad. The regime sees torture and sexual abuse of women as a war strategy, Ghani argues. "Break the women and you break the family – and with it opposition in society. That's the goal." Syrian women in Assad's prisons

The Syrian novelist Roza Yassine Hassan A Syrian novelist and writer, Roza studied architecture but has been working as a journalist for years , writing for various Syrian and Arabic periodicals. Her first novel Ebony won the Hanna Mina Prize and her third novel Guardians of the Air was long-listed for the Arabic Booker Prize in 2010. In 2009, Hassan was chosen as one of the Beirut39, a group of 39 Arab writers under the age of 40 chosen through a contest organized by Banipal magazine and the Hay Festival. 

Reem exclaims to the audience, “We come from the Troy of this age . . . hundreds of thousands of victims . . . millions of refugees . . . everyone wants to bomb us but no one wants to accept us into their homes . . . only the sea opens his arms to us without any preconditions . . . When did it become normal to kill people?” Syria's 'Trojan Women'