In search of the facts, and a fixer, in Syria
In her award-winning book, Deborah Campbell recounts the months she spent looking for her missing fixer inDamascus. She speaks with OpenCanada about her search, the Syrian conflict and the problems plaguing today’s foreign news coverage.
Back in 2007, before Syria had become the world’s largest source country of refugees, Canadian journalist Deborah Campbell went undercover in a neighborhood of Damascus known as “Little Baghdad,” home to 300,000 Iraqis who had fled the chaos that followed the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. Her desire to tell the human story of the Iraq War led her to meet Ahlam, an Iraqi woman in exile who became her guide, fixer, translator and friend.
In A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War – the winner of this year’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction – Campbell tells the story of her journey to get to the bottom of Ahlam’s arrest by the Syrian secret police. Unsure of who to trust, and without the backing of any major news organization, Campbell is drawn deeper into the world of shadowy Syrian politics – the likes of which would eventually plunge the country into civil war.
While in Toronto ahead of the Writers’ Trust Awards ceremony on Nov. 2, Campbell spoke with OpenCanada about her desperate search for Ahlam, the often overlooked origins of the Syrian conflict, the challenges for refugees who end up in the West, and why, when reporting abroad, she prefers to fly under the radar.
Continue reading at OpenCanada.org