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Civil war every day. Bombings of cities and civilians. Outside nations using the country as their battleground. Peace talks. Failures. And refugees searching for peace and safety.
That, the experts say is what has come from the Civil War terror of Syria since 2011 when a rebellion grew out of the Arab Spring. For many, the words "Syria" and "Aleppo," so personal to the people there, have become daily news headlines in the U.S. or comments on American campaign trails.
For Alia Malek, Baltimore-born journalist and civil rights lawyer, it is personal. She is the author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria.
The writing of this book was inspired when her journalist's soul could not resist reporting what she found in the nation her parents had fled decades earlier. She had gone to Damascus "to reclaim her grandmother's apartment," lost to a change in government power in 1970. It was the loss that had inspired her parents to "make their lives in America."
Publishers Weekly praised her work with this passage: "Malek's multigenerational memoir is a brilliant combination of geopolitics and family history...Malek courageously tells the stories of unforgettable family members and friends, including underground humanitarian aid workers who continue despite the risk of torture and execution."
Malek, a former journalist for Al Jazeera America, is also the author of A Country Called Amreeka: US History Re-Told Through Arab American Lives and editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices.
After law school, she was a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. Malek, who has degrees from Johns Hopkins and Georgetown universities, earned her master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
In November, Malek received the 12th annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Dallas Institute Executive Director J. Larry Allums said, "Through her work and writing, Alia tells the stories of the people who occupy our headlines but are too often denied voices of their own. Most importantly, she succeeds at ... bridging cultural and societal differences while challenging how we think about identity and belonging in an age in which cultural and even geographical boundaries are growing ever more fluid."