Fadwa Suleiman, Syrian actress who led resistance to Assad regime, dies
‘Freedom has its price’
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Emily Langer.
Fadwa Suleiman, a Syrian actress who rose to the world stage with a campaign of protest against President Bashar al-Assad, died Aug. 17 in Paris.
The National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces announced her death, describing her as “one of the symbols of the Syrian revolution,” having led “the protests and sit-ins against the Assad regime” and chanted “the first slogans for freedom.”
Suleiman was widely reported to be in her mid-40s, but her exact age could not immediately be confirmed. She died of cancer, according to the Agence France-Presse.
In the Syrian civil war that has taken 400,000 lives since it began in 2011, Suleiman was an eloquent and unrelenting voice of peaceful resistance — a rare female front-line dissident who attracted international attention for her activism.
Suleiman risked her life to decry the Assad regime’s atrocities and to promote unity among the divided Syrian people. In 2011, she traveled to the insurgent stronghold of Homs, where she appeared in an anti-Assad demonstration aired on television by Al Jazeera. Her family disowned her.
She had come to the city knowing, she said, that from that point forward, she was destined either for prison or for execution.
“I don’t care what happens to me,” an Australian newspaper quoted her as saying. “Freedom has its price and we all have to chip in.”
To evade arrest, Suleiman went into hiding. On YouTube, she remained a powerful moral voice for her cause and continued to distribute calls for peace. By 2012, she concluded that she could no longer safely remain in Syria. She reportedly escaped by foot to Jordan before traveling to Paris, where she lived in exile and wrote a book of poetry, “When We Reach the Moon.” She was immediately recognizable for her shorn hair, an outward sign of her protest and, perhaps, everything she and her country had lost.
Born in Aleppo, Suleiman studied theater because she saw it as a guarantor of the “freedom to think and to express oneself.”
After attending the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus, she acted on stage and television, displaying a social conscience early on. Her credits included a stage production in Damascus of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and the Syrian television show “Small Hearts,” in which she played an orphanage teacher.
She traced her anger at Assad to his government’s repression of artistic freedoms, once remarking that “everywhere you go, even a theater or a film company, you feel you have entered a security branch.”
