Deborah Campbell - A Disappearance in Damascus: Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War

Campbell’s award-winning book starts in 2007, when she went to Damascus to cover the influx of refugees fleeing Iraq in the wake of Hussein’s downfall. A foreign correspondent who has written for publications including The Economist and Foreign Policy, Campbell hired a “fixer” to help find reliable contacts and in Ahlam met a remarkable woman. Forced to leave Iraq after reprisals for her humanitarian work, Ahlam set up a school for displaced girls in the refugee camp. When she was kidnapped, Campbell set out to find her, and her book is a revealing portrait of both a refugee crisis and the mutual dependence of journalists and those whose lives they report on.