Inside Loubna Mrie’s raw account of surviving Syria’s civil war

Images of Iran’s streets aflame, with protesters facing off against the security forces of a repressive regime, must reawaken traumatic memories for Loubna Mrie. Her participation in similar protests in Syria inspired her career as a photographer and journalist. But the price she paid was exorbitant — in her words, a life “decimated by grief and loss and exile.”

“Defiance” offers a prism on Syria’s authoritarian society before the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war, and vivid snapshots of the devastation that the war unleashed. Its subtitle, about awakening and survival, underlines Mrie’s trajectory from submissive daughter to political actor and skilled observer. But this candid and absorbing memoir is also a stark reminder of the corruptions of power, the uncertainties of revolution and the frequent viciousness of human nature.

Embedded in a patriarchal family within an oppressive society, Mrie faces the challenge of disentangling herself from both. Indisputably courageous, she is also young, naive and at times overmatched by circumstances. Her self-portrait isn’t always flattering. She admits to pushing away those she loves and using alcohol as a crutch.

The narrative begins with a religious ritual that situates her as a member of Syria’s minority Alawite sect, a variant of Shi’a Islam. Influenced by Christianity, Judaism and other belief systems, Alawites celebrate Christmas, have no dietary restrictions and don’t require women to wear hijab, or head coverings. In Syria, after a history of persecution, they were for a time on the right side of the political divide: The country’s longtime rulers, Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar al-Assad, were Alawites.

Mrie’s family was wealthy and well-connected. Her maternal grandfather was a diplomat. Her father, Jawdat Mrie, also worked for the government. His marriage to Mrie’s mother, an engineer 15 years his junior, was rocky almost from the start, marked by abuse and infidelity and punctuated by long separations. As children, Mrie and her sister, Alia, were obliged to plead with their father for money, which he supplied only intermittently.

Mrie depicts her mother as a mostly heroic figure who encouraged her daughters to obtain an education and pursue careers. Mrie’s father had other ideas: Their filial obligation was to marry another well-connected Alawite — or risk losing their inheritance. In Mrie’s telling, he was worse than a tyrant; his sexual proclivities skewed toward pedophilia and he was allegedly an assassin for the Assad regime.

The society that Mrie sketches is riddled with brutality. Even her beloved mother beat her on occasion with a coat hanger. Corporal punishment was routine in Syrian schools. And, as we now know, Bashar al-Assad’s prisons were notorious sites of torture and extrajudicial murder. The memoir’s descriptions of prisoner abuse are horrifying, if no longer novel.

As a college student in Damascus, Mrie stumbled into her first democratic protest more out of curiosity than conviction. It left her bloodied, but introduced her to a new purpose and community of activists. Her Alawi identity rendered her especially useful as a revolutionary courier; police never imagined her capable of betraying the regime. Through both instruction and practice, her once amateurish videos evolved into photojournalism.

As Mrie recounts, Syrian democratic idealism curdled over time into infighting and worse. The anti-Assad forces were splintered, mutually mistrustful and prone to looting; the areas they controlled descended into anarchy. Meanwhile, the Assad regime was bombing and gassing civilians. (Mrie aptly wonders why the use of chemical gas stirred so much more Western outrage and empathy than other war crimes.)

Amid the chaos, Islamic militants, known as ISIS, infiltrated the country. Where they achieved military victory, they murdered opponents and imposed their radical religious regime. Suddenly, every man sported a beard, and women remained covered and afraid to leave home. Mrie’s memoir is a useful primer, if hardly the last word, on the complexities of the civil war and the shortcomings of the rebel forces.

Fearing for her life, Mrie fled to Turkey, a country more welcoming than most to Syrian exiles, and starting working for a nongovernmental organization training civilian journalists. She returned to Syria periodically, often with the help of fixers, to chronicle the mayhem, surviving her own brushes with death. Eventually, she quit the NGO and began freelancing for Reuters.

In the midst of her exile, her mother disappeared — a kidnapping that her father may have engineered. Mrie’s angry and terrified family shunned her. Under extreme stress, she became a blackout drunk, engaged in casual sexual encounters and got an abortion. Then her luck seemed to turn: She found unexpected love with a compassionate former U.S. Army Ranger and medic, Peter Kassig. Impelled by a sense of mission, he too toggled between Turkey and Syria, courting danger — and finding it. His tragic fate seemed almost too much to bear.

Mrie’s descriptions of her lost country are imbued with nostalgia. From coastal Jableh, her paternal family’s home, she recalls the aromas of “flavored hookah smoke, nuts toasting on carts, and boiled sweet corn.” And as darkness falls, she contrasts “the roaring cars, honking horns, and the music from loudspeakers” on shore with “the sound of water lapping against the sides of the boats, the thud of feet, the splashes of the nets being tossed out and pulled in, and the flapping of the fish against the dock.”

With her increasingly fluent English and photography skills, Mrie finally seeks refuge in the United States — and addresses the behavioral fallout of her harrowing history. After depression and despair, she chooses hope, but that hope has its limits. “Even when we succeed in finding our new homes,” she writes, “we will always bear the scars of our displacement.”

Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.