No Turning Back

Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria

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Pub Date 13 Mar 2018 | Archive Date 28 Feb 2018

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Description

Extending back to the first demonstrations of 2011, No Turning Back dissects the tangle of ideologies and allegiances that make up the Syrian conflict. As protests ignited in Daraa, some citizens were brimming with a sense of possibility. A privileged young man named Suleiman posted videos of the protests online, full of hope for justice and democracy. A father of two named Mohammad, secretly radicalized and newly released from prison, saw a darker opportunity in the unrest. When violence broke out in Homs, a poet named Abu Azzam became an unlikely commander in a Free Syrian Army militia. The regime’s brutal response disrupted a family in Idlib province, where a nine-year-old girl opened the door to a military raid that caused her father to flee. As the bombings increased and roads grew more dangerous, these people’s lives intertwined in unexpected ways. Rania Abouzeid brings readers deep inside Assad’s prisons, to covert meetings where foreign states and organizations manipulated the rebels, and to the highest levels of Islamic militancy and the formation of ISIS. Based on more than five years of clandestine reporting on the front lines, No Turning Back is an utterly engrossing human drama full of vivid, indelible characters that shows how hope can flourish even amid one of the twenty-first century’s greatest humanitarian disasters.

Extending back to the first demonstrations of 2011, No Turning Back dissects the tangle of ideologies and allegiances that make up the Syrian conflict. As protests ignited in Daraa, some citizens...


Advance Praise

“The civil war in Syria is the most catastrophic event of our time, and the most dimly understood. Most journalists won’t go near it. Rania Abouzeid has produced a work of stunning reportage from the very heart of the conflict, daring to go to the most dangerous places in order to get the story. The result is a sensational book that allows us a deeper, and more humane, understanding of this terrible war; it’s a credit to Abouzeid’s bravery and fortitude.” - Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Forever War

No Turning Back stands far above anything I have read about the Syrian war. Rania Abouzeid has produced a masterpiece, weaving together the lives of protesters, victims, and remorseless killers at the center of this century’s most appalling human tragedy. No one else, to my knowledge, has reported this story so bravely or narrated it with such intimacy and power.” - Robert F. Worth, author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS

“Rania Abouzeid has written an intimate portrait of a chaotic war. Her profiles of Syrians caught up in the savage unraveling of the country heightens the tragedy, a lens missing from the news stories. This book is a must read for anyone who has watched the seemingly incomprehensible horror and for policy makers who must try to stop the violence.” - Deb Amos, author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East

“Widely recognized as the bravest of reporters…Abouzeid writes with great fluidity and authority about the most important foreign policy and moral crisis of our era, embedding with the men, women and children whose lives were torn apart by the Syrian civil war…No Turning Back works both on the level of deeply reported personal narratives of a tragedy that continues to unspool and also as a major work of history.” - Peter Bergen, author of United States of Jihad and Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden

“In No Turning Back, Rania Abouzeid brings you up close and personal to the men and women who led the uprising in Syria. Abouzeid understands these people so well and her writing is so vivid that they practically jump off the page with all their dreams, ideals, and misplaced optimism. After No Turning Back, you won’t be able to hear anything more about Syria without feeling that you too know the people who are living (and dying) through it.” - Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood

“The civil war in Syria is the most catastrophic event of our time, and the most dimly understood. Most journalists won’t go near it. Rania Abouzeid has produced a work of stunning reportage from the...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780393609493
PRICE $26.95 (USD)
PAGES 384

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