In “Asphyxia”, which brings together testimonies from residents of Rakka, the Syrian journalist Hussam Hammoud tells the fall of his city in the hands of the Islamic State.
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I had forgotten so many details of my kidnapping, my imprisonment, my assassination attempt. Or rather … I didn’t want to remember it. I had buried them deep inside and I had no reason to invoke them until this book. “The traumatic experience that Syrian journalist Hussam Hammoud lived in the hands of the Islamic State organization (IS) is one of the testimonies that make up asphyxiation. Raqqa, chronicle of an apocalypse. This choral story, that ‘He co -wrote with French journalist Céline Martelet, traces the fall of his city, Rakka, in the hands of the jihadist group in 2014, his accession to the sad rank of Syrian “capital” of the self -proclaimed caliphate of IS, and his brutal reconquest by Kurdish forces and the international coalition, at the end of 2017.
When they launched this project two years ago, Hussam Hammoud and Céline Martelet was already collaborating on surveys devoted to IS crimes and French jihadists. “We realized that we did not tell anything about the victims. We wanted to allow them to tell what they experienced before Daesh [Arabic Acronym of IS] became a global threat,” explains Hussam Hammoud , contacted by phone. The testimonies he collected in Turkey, and those obtained by Céline Martelet in Rakka and in France, surprised him. “I thought that all the stories would be the same, that there was nothing more monochrome than life under a terrorist organization, but each of these lives was differently affected by the Islamic State,” he said.
Five years after the reconquest of Rakka, Hussam Hammoud continues to live under the threat of the jihadist group. Refugee in Turkey since the end of 2019, with his wife and their two daughters of 3 and 5 years old, he is again the target of IS for an investigation which he conducts on his funding networks. He regularly changes a place of residence to escape monitoring of his cells in Turkey. At the end of March, he filed a humanitarian visa request for France. The procedure seemed to be well initiated until it was noted a refusal on September 5. The profession mobilized in support of its request on appeal. “Working against IS is not a temporary threat. If they want my skin, they will have it, even in one or two years,” he explains.
not much- thing to lose
This conviction, he carries it in his flesh, for having experienced the arbitrariness of the jihadist group. Born thirty years ago in Rakka, on the banks of the Euphrates, he would never have imagined that his city would become the “new Kabul”. “Before, the Syrian regime presented us as a city of herds of herds, not very educated, not very modern. We preferred this image of a simple city, even false, to that which it acquired in the eyes of the world, of the capital of the caliphate of The Islamic State “, regrets Hussam Hammoud. Son of national education officials, he grew up with his three brothers and sisters in the Mansour district. At 18, he started studying petroleum engineering between Homs (west) and Hassaké (northeast). He was in the second year when the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011.
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