‘My father was my first dictator’: activist Loubna Mrie on oppression, murder and escape from Assad’s Syria

When Loubna Mrie was 21 years old, she left Syria. Like so many other young Syrians, she had been caught up in the protests against the Assad regime, and as the crackdown became increasingly brutal she fled to Turkey in 2012. Reading her new memoir, Defiance, I feel a wave of relief as she crosses the border. Is this the start of greater freedom for this brave young woman?

But days after arriving in Turkey, Mrie becomes concerned that her mother, who is still in Syria, is not responding to messages. The silence continues. Then she receives a phone call. Her mother is on the line. “Her voice comes through, trembling. Something isn’t right ... It seems she isn’t able to hear what I’m saying. ‘Loubna, please come back’ ... I hear the pain in her sobs.”

Mrie never hears from her again, and eventually she realises that her mother has been killed in reprisal for Mrie’s resistance and flight. The guilt drags her down and follows her for years, even as she builds a new life as a respected journalist and moves from Istanbul to New York. When I meet her on Zoom the day before her memoir’s publication, I am almost scared to talk about this part of her story.

But Mrie, who is sitting on her bed with the east coast blizzard raging outside her windows, has made peace with her mother’s terrible fate. “The first page of my book says: everything I am began with you. And it feels like, truly, this book is my gift for her. I know the worst thing I could have done to her legacy is to keep taking shelter in my silence, and pushing her memory away.”

The most shocking part of this shocking story is that Mrie’s mother was killed not by anonymous government forces but by Mrie’s own father, or his acolytes. Because Mrie’s journey into the resistance is unusual in that she was brought up right in the heart of those faithful to Assad – the Alawite community in the city of Jableh – and her father was a powerful figure in the regime.

“My father was the first dictator I grew up with,” Mrie tells me. “I was made to believe that in order to be safe, in order to be a good daughter, you have to follow the rules, no questions asked.”

Her memoir begins with a compelling picture of her childhood, as she grows up both afraid of her father and longing for his attention. “When my sister read the book,” Mrie tells me, “she hated the first chapters. She said ‘you sound like you admire him’, and I'm like ‘but that's the truth’. We admired him growing up. We were fighting for his love and validation. I admired his power, I admired the scars on his legs.”

Growing up in Jableh, the young Loubna is expected to follow the example of other women in the extended family, who keep their heads down in return for security. But then she attends, almost by chance, one of the early protests against the regime in Damascus, and sees a protester shot in the street in front of her. The scales fall from her eyes. From that moment, there is no going back.

I ask Mrie if now, knowing what suffering was in store for her, she wishes she could have prevented her young self from attending that protest. She demurs, speaking about herself in the third person. “She stumbled upon that world just out of curiosity, and the curiosity is not something I want to take away from her. That was her way out of a life that was written for her before she was even born. I admire her for taking this path, even though the end was not clear.”

The road is certainly not clear. It is studded with danger. At one point in Syria, Mrie is almost murdered as a suspected spy. Another time, when she crosses from Turkey back into Aleppo to continue to document the resistance as a journalist, she sees her fixer shot dead in front of her. Another time, she goes back into Syria to interview a foreign Islamic State fighter just after her American boyfriend, Peter Kassig, has himself been captured by IS. “It’s part of a larger pattern,” she writes. “Whenever I’m in pain, I find myself running toward the next burning building ... Danger distracts me from my grief.”

Mrie has finally arrived in New York on a scholarship to study photography when the news comes through that Kassig had been beheaded by IS. She keeps going forward, but always dragging the guilt and grief with her, often taking refuge in alcohol. When the news of Assad’s fall finally arrives, years later, she is on a rehab retreat. She wants to rejoice, but it is hard for her to compute all that has been taken from her. “I cried for hours,” she writes. “Not out of joy, because joy was impossible. I felt physical pain ... for all the years stolen from us.”

As I summarise these moments of loss and pain, I realise many readers will wonder if they have the stomach for this memoir. But to paint this book only as a story of anguish is to do it an injustice. Because on every page is Loubna Mrie herself: clever, funny, brave, sceptical, learning, growing – not just a witness to these terrible conflicts and violence, but also a participant in the blossoming of resistance, both personal and political.

One of Mrie’s key moments of courage does not involve facing down men with guns, but when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and decides to have an abortion. “We don't write about abortion in our culture: we don’t even talk about sex,” she says to me. “At 22, I really did not have an example of someone who had an abortion and did not have their life destroyed. So I wanted to give that example to someone else – to be like, yes, you got pregnant, it's not the end of the world, you don't have to marry your rapist, you don't have to kill yourself, you have full agency over your body, and one mistake should not ruin the rest of your life.”

With this refusal to bow either to shame or oppression, Mrie is part of an uprising that refuses to die. She is not naive about the dangers posed by the new leaders of Syria, or the rise of authoritarianism and patriarchy elsewhere. But, despite everything, she has not lost faith with resistance, and she reminds us that this is no time for any of us to lose that faith.

“If the Arab spring taught us to dream, this moment is teaching us how to think,” she tells me. “That level of political awareness that came with the Arab spring throughout the whole region is not something that can be taken away from us. And there are so many people who now see what I saw, the parallels between misogyny and authoritarianism, and that it’s OK to rebel against the system in order to be your full, authentic self. It’s OK to dream, and it's OK to raise your voice.”

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion and Survival in Syria is published by Virago (£25)