11/19/2023 0 Comments Undercover tourist car rental![]() ![]() "The paranoia of the state had been reproduced in my psyche," she writes, and in the claustrophobia of Damascus, Campbell is engulfed by that paranoia: "I now interpret every event as a message." A power cut to her apartment, a foiled attempted break-in all possible proof that she's somehow to blame for Ahlam's plight.Īs it turns out, Campbell's masquerade as an academic on vacation fooled the security police, but she wouldn't learn the full story until much later.Ī Disappearance in Damascus can be read on a number of levels. As Campbell writes in the opening paragraphs, Ahlam had taken her to a hidden world, "into the increasingly unstable country of Syria where she had sought refuge from Iraq." She had "showed me what survival looks like with all the scaffolding of normal life ripped away."Ĭampbell reveals the intimate relationship between journalist and fixer - and, more tellingly, unravels a darker truth about how a paranoid security service can terrorize those on both sides of a prison wall, including a Canadian writer who believes she has the protection of a Western passport. Compelled by guilt and obsession, she begins a fraught undercover quest to free her friend.Ī Disappearance in Damascus is a true story, but the truths go deeper than just the disappearance of a fixer and a friend. Why was she taken? Campbell is convinced their friendship has put Ahlam in grave danger. She befriends Ahlam, a brave and resourceful Iraqi refugee who can smooth the way.īut her real detective work begins when Ahlam suddenly disappears into Syria's vast prison system, seized by the dreaded intelligence police. It will be four years before Syria begins to come apart - but the signs are there, as past and future conflicts converge.Ĭampbell's goal is to quietly immerse herself in the Iraqi exile community, but she needs a translator and guide. At first, she is a journalistic sleuth: On a tourist visa in Damascus, her aim is to collect the stories of Iraqis fleeing to Syria as the brutal war in Iraq drives more than a million civilians across the Syrian border, stories that depict the legacy of the U.S. In this riveting detective story, Vancouver writer Deborah Campbell goes undercover in Syria in 2007.
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