By then she knew the nature of the regime and had seen the inside of Assad's torture chambers. She was arrested, blindfolded, pushed into an office; then her blindfold was removed, and a senior police officer hit her hard in the face, and jeered at her for falling down and being unable to get to her feet again. "Well, well, what a hero, you went down with just one slap," he said. "Isn't it awful when such an angelic face gets hit?" Then they showed her what she was risking: the filthy cells where tortured young men lay in their own blood and excrement, waiting for the next beating, because they had been on a demonstration.
She knew, too, why they set fire to the pharmacies: "So that people won't be able to treat the wounded." She had learned the bitter lesson that sectarian spite in the opposition makes Assad's overthrow less likely and less hopeful – among the mountain of hate mail she received was one that began: "Dear unveiled infidel, the Syrian revolution doesn't want an Alawite apostate like you in its ranks." She knew the cynical use the regime makes of Israel and the Palestinians; one of her interviewees told her how the Palestinian prisoners got the worst beatings, and how he was told the beating would stop if he would say that he was holding up a picture of Ariel Sharon during the demonstration.
Yazbek had been to all the most dangerous places in Syria and recorded how the people were resisting, and what their rulers were doing to them. She saw things no one should ever see. Eventually she had to get her daughter out before the teenager was captured. They are both now exiles in Paris. But she took with her this detailed daily account of what she saw and heard between 25 March and 9 July last year.
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