Journalist Rania Abouzeid has had a front-row view of the conflict in Syria from the very beginning. "I witnessed what was one of the first demonstrations in Damascus in late February 2011, and I was trying to figure out what it all meant and what was happening," she says. Abouzeid's new book No Turning Back: Life, Loss, And Hope In Wartime Syria traces the stories of four Syrians from those small protests through a bloody war that still has no end in sight. We began our conversation by talking about those early days during the Arab Spring. At that time, Syrian President Bashar Assad was trying to seem like a benevolent and modern leader. But many Syrians were still haunted by what his father had done as president in 1982, when he crushed a rebellion in a town called Hama . "The regime went house to house in Hama , and nobody knows how many people were killed," Abouzeid says. "Estimates are in the tens of thousands. People were put in mass graves that were then paved over, and Hama
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