Opinion | In Syria, an Account of Life Under al-Assad

From Ghouta, Ms. Al-Khalil kept a diary, fragments of her experience under bombardment and siege. Like some 113,000 Syrians who have been forcibly disappeared since 2011, she was abducted, on Dec. 9, 2013. We still don’t know where she is or if she is even alive. Her neighbor found the pages from her diary strewn around her home after her kidnapping. For Syrians, memory is often a messy room filled with scattered papers, fragments of time and experience in need of a narrative.

Ms. Al-Khalil’s husband, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a writer, helped publish her diaries into several languages and entrusted me to translate them into English. The act of translating her writing helped give words to the story I, in exile, could never tell about my country. Her chronicles from Ghouta are an account of the crimes committed by the Assad regime, and they also serve as a testament to the power of bearing witness. It’s as if her diaries say: This really happened, and Syria won’t forget. “These images will not be erased by other life memories,” she wrote. “They can only be erased from my mind by death.”

Ms. Al-Khalil reached Ghouta in May 2013. These are excerpts from her diaries — some handwritten, others posted on her social media — after her arrival there. Within weeks of reaching the besieged, rebel-held suburb, she had witnessed hunger, malnutrition and bombings.

July 18, 2013

Today marks the end of my second month in Ghouta. Here, one hour equals many hours in the outside world where there is no siege. Life bears no resemblance to life. I used to think that my memories of prison were the most horrifying and cruelest violations of the soul and body that my eyes would ever see. But to witness an entire area with its homes, streets and people violated, to feel utterly helpless and unable to protect your family, to have your child starve while you’re unable to provide him with food, sick with no medicine, to witness a shell break through the walls of your house, unable to stop it from stealing one of your children, everything that I have seen and heard will not be erased from memory and remain etched in the soul.

A few weeks later, Ms. Al-Khalil writes of witnessing weapons-grade nerve gas attacks on Ghouta.

Aug. 5, 2013