Three Must-Read Books on Syria

The truth about Syria in the age of fake -news and propaganda

Fadi Hallisso
7 min readSep 23, 2019
The interior courtyard of Dar Zamaria, a traditional house in Aleppo, Syria (taken in 2008).

In my travels, I keep encountering people who either don’t know much about the Syrian conflict or are influenced by fake-news coverage of war crimes deniers.

I confess this makes me deeply sad and even angry! My first reaction is wondering how on earth, that after eight years of the worst humanitarian crisis in the 21st century, so much explanation is still needed?!

I had one of these encounters Last week while on vacation. It was with an academic who was impressed by an anti-imperial website. The kind of sites whose only concern was to blame the west for what happened in my country without the slightest effort to discuss the root causes, the responsibility of the ruling regime, etc.

This time instead of getting angry and falling into despair, I decided to do something. I took a few hours of my vacation to write a shortlist of three must-read brooks, which, in my opinion, present an honest and balanced narrative of the events in Syria. And the most important thing is that these books give enough space for voices from Syria to tell the story.

So if you ever heard, in the last eight years, an awful piece of news about Syria. If you thought, this is just another third world country, where…

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Fadi Hallisso

A Syrian blogger & podcaster. Development consultant. Co-founder and CEO of the relief and development NGO ‘Basmeh & Zeitooneh’ working in MENA regiom.