Loubna Mrie's Defiance: An Alawite daughter's reckoning with Assad's Syria

Loubna Mrie grew up calling two men father. When the family needed money, her mother would press the phone into her daughter's hand and guide her words: "Tell him the fridge is empty. Tell him his hands are blessed."

The man, known within Syrian intelligence as the 'doctor', kept them dependent. The other, Hafez al-Assad, waited in Arnous Square in Damascus, cast in marble, his sculpted quiff too high to cover his forehead.

Her memoir, Defiance — set to be published on 24 February 2026 — returns to the moment she saw Syria for the first time. She was 20 and had lived there as long as she could remember. But as an Alawite daughter in Assad's orbit, invisible walls had dictated which neighbourhoods, which Syrians, and what version of her country she was allowed to see. 

In 2011, when the Arab Spring reached Syria, she asked a friend to take her to a protest on the outskirts of Damascus. What she saw there, ordinary Syrians and their suffering, was the Syria both fathers had kept from her, and she chose it over them.

She would later return to Arnous Square and the statue of Hafez al-Assad, the same man she would hold a picture of every morning and recite, "With blood and soul, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Hafez."

Defiance shows how authoritarianism in Assad's Syria operated not just through state violence but through family, sect, and self, and how breaking free means undoing all three

By then, she lived in a smoke-filled, decrepit art studio where revolutionaries were teaching her to use a camera for the first time. One day, standing in the square, she squinted and raised her hand: for a brief moment, he was eclipsed.

That heretical gesture, deciding what stays in frame and what vanishes when you adjust the focus, would make Mrie's name. For three years, she documented the Syrian War as a journalist for Reuters, her Alawite identity first a shield, then a target.

What if the uprising fails? It's the question Mrie and her companions return to in different, increasingly desperate forms throughout the book. They would get their answer. It came in pieces, of flesh, over the years.

Bashar al-Assad, by way of scorched earth and barrel bombs, would cling to power for another 13 years before finally falling in December 2024, a fact she notes, almost in passing, in the book's epilogue.

By that point, Loubna lived in exile in New York, in recovery from her addictions to Syria and alcohol — two of the psychological costs the book traces alongside the more visible ones.

She learned of Assad's fall when her phone, forbidden during rehab, flooded with messages. By then, the war's toll had already reached her own life: most of the people she loved in Defiance had Wikipedia entries beginning with "was."

Writing on the Syrian War has fallen into one of two registers. One is the kind of 'expert' analysis produced in foreign policy journals, where Syria is a "complex theatre of competing interests", and half a million deaths are footnotes to arguments about Russia or Iran. The other is nostalgic elegies for a Syria that only exists in retrospect. 

Few memoirs have emerged from what the UN called the worst man-made humanitarian disaster since the Second World War; Kassem Eid's My Country and Samar Yazbek's The Crossing are among the exceptions.

Where Eid wrote of growing up as a victim of Assad, and Yazbek's war reportage drew comparisons with Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Mrie's Defiance moves differently. It's a memoir of unlearning where unlearning threatens survival itself.

She writes as an Alawite woman whose safety was inseparable from the regime's power, born and bribed into every privilege Assad's Syria offered — her family's 100,000 olive trees, her new clothes. In contrast, others wore garments so infested with lice that they needed gasoline to disinfect them. All depended on a bargain to stay blind.

Defiance shows how authoritarianism in Assad's Syria operated not just through state violence but through family, sect, and self, and how breaking free means undoing all three.

Reading the book, I couldn't help but think of Ghassan Kanafani's Letter from Gaza, a classic of modern Palestinian and Arab literature.

In that story, a narrator visiting his family from California encounters a child whose leg has been blown off by an Israeli mortar. While others look away, conditioned to treat extreme violence as inevitable, he forces himself to look.

Mrie does the same, repeatedly, throughout the war. Like a surgeon returning to an operating theatre, she crosses the border from Turkey to Syria's rebel-held areas, documenting the worst sites: sandflies gnawing at children's bodies in Manbij, sharing tactics for avoiding snipers in East Aleppo (go first; their eyeline catches the second person crossing).

After a barrel bomb strike, she writes: "It felt disrespectful to use my hands to take photos rather than help dig through debris. It was horrifying to hear muffled screams coming from underneath the collapsed building and the voices of dying people begging to be rescued before they suffocated."

What drove Mrie to continue this work? Perhaps the answer lies in shaheed, the Arabic word oversimplified in English as "martyr."

In the West, martyr conjures suicide bombers. But shaheed's root, sh-h-d, means something simpler, more profound: to witness.

Loubna Mrie became a witness. She trained herself, like the narrator in Letter from Gaza, never to look away — not from videos of government soldiers pouring gasoline over two women's heads before lighting them on fire, not the black flags of the Islamic State (IS) group replacing the green revolutionary ones, nor when Syria became a place she no longer recognised.

It's tragic, then, that the two losses that marked her most deeply happened when she wasn't looking.

As Mrie grew deeper into the revolution, she left behind the one person who had protected her in her past life. In a world where, as she writes, "nothing disgraces a man," it would be her mother who paid for her defiance.

Halfway through the book, we learn her mother had disappeared. In a gut-wrenching revelation, it was her father who killed her.

Her mother was one of two major sources of guidance in Defiance. Peter Kassig, an American aid worker and Mrie's boyfriend, was the other. His voice threads through the book in gracious, almost soothing interjections, a counterweight to the spiralling guilt and grief Loubna carries about her mother.

He was captured by IS and beheaded in Raqqa while she was elsewhere. For a woman who had made 'witness' her life's work, the Assad regime delivered its cruellest lesson: even witnesses cannot see everything.

These absences haunt Defiance. Mrie writes around them, circles them, returns to them with the same compulsion that drove her to bomb sites.

But she cannot reconstruct what she didn't see. The book's power lies not in resolution but in this irreconcilable gap: the documentarian whose most important footage doesn't exist.

Reviewers will inevitably describe this memoir as an "unveiling"; the word is inescapable in Anglophone writing on Arab women.

But like "martyr," "unveiling" is another English word that flattens what Arabic holds. Kashf, as it is unveiled in esoteric Levantine traditions, doesn't simply mean removing a 'veil of oppression'. It means a revelation, a moment when the hidden structure of reality becomes visible — an act of seeing, not of being seen.

Mrie has been engaged in kashf all along, though not in the way reviewers might understand.

In the memoir's first chapter, she returns to childhood: standing with her grandmother in a maqam, a small domed shrine. She is told to kiss a prayer mat, its fabric stiffened by years of devotion and smelling of old socks. She recoils and lifts the corner to see what lies beneath: a slab of stone, small photographs of children who had died. "Don't look," her grandmother cries. "It will turn you blind."

According to Sufi folklore, only two kinds of people can look beyond the prayer mat without consequence: the walī, the saint who truly knows, and the majdhūb, the holy fool whose fearlessness exposes authority. Reading Defiance, I kept wondering whether Mrie knew this, whether she recognised herself as the majdhūb, or whether, like the narrator in Letter from Gaza, she was brought here by something beyond choice.

But the memoir performs a different kind of unveiling than Western readers expect. It shows what happens when you're neither saint nor fool, but something in between — someone compelled to look yet powerless to change what she sees.

Her grandmother's warning came true, though not as she meant it. Mrie didn't go blind from looking behind the prayer mat. She just saw what Syria would see much later, when Bashar fell, and Hafez al-Assad's statue fell with him: the cold, ordinary stone beneath.

Benjamin Ashraf is an editor at The New Arab, with bylines in Al Jazeera and Mondoweiss. He was formerly a Research Fellow at the University of Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies.

Follow him on X: @ashrafzeneca