Syrian notebooks - Jonathan Littell

"We fight for our religion, for our women, for our land, and lastly
to save our skin. As for them, they're only fighting to save their
skin."

In 2012, Jonathan Littell traveled to the heart of
the Syrian uprising, smuggled in by the Free Syrian Army to the historic
city of Homs. For three weeks, he watched as neighborhoods were bombed
and innocent civilians murdered. His notes on what he saw on the ground
speak directly of horrors that continue today in the ongoing civil war.

Amid
the chaos, Littell bears witness to the lives and the hopes of freedom
fighters, of families caught within the conflict, as well as of the
doctors who attempt to save both innocents and combatants who come under
fire. As government forces encircle the city, Littell charts the first
stirrings of the fundamentalist movement that would soon hijack the
revolution.

Littell's notebooks were originally the raw material for the articles he wrote upon his return for the French daily Le Monde. Published nearly immediately afterward in France, Syrian Notebooks has come to form an incomparable close-up account of a war that still grips the Middle East-a classic of war reportage.