My Country: A Syrian Memoir

Kassem Eid survived arrest in al-Assads regime a chemical weapons attack that shocked the world and the siege of a city where he fought with the Syrian rebel army. This is his storya unique and powerfully moving testimony for our times with a foreword by Janine di Giovanni. On August 21 2013 Kassem Eid nearly died in a sarin gas attack in the town of Moadamiya. At least 1 500 people were killed. Later that day he was hit by a mortar while helping the Free Syrian Army fight government forces. He survived that too. But his entire worldfriends neighbors family everything he knewhad been devastated beyond repair. Eid recalls moving to Moadamiya in 1989 at the age of three. The streets where he and his eleven siblings played were fragrant with jasmine. But he soon realized that he was treated differently at school because of his familys Palestinian immigrant origins and their resistance to the brutal regime. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000 hopes that he would ease the states severity were swiftly crushed. The unprecedented scope of this brave deeply felt memoir makes it unique in the body of literature to emerge from the Syrian civil war. Eid illuminates the realities of growing up in a corrupt dictatorship; the strictures of living under siege; the impact of unspeakable violence; and how at extraordinary personal risk he drew worldwide attention to the assault on cities across Syria. This is a searing account of oppression war grit and escape and a heartbreaking love letter to a world lost forever.