Rescue workers search for survivors after an Israeli attack hit a residential building in Beirut on Wednesday.Daniel Carde/Getty Images
Lina Chawaf is a Syrian-French journalist, a researcher fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and a visitor fellow at Tufts University.
The other night, for a moment, I felt something close to peace. My daughter, who was visiting me, was sleeping beside me in the quiet of my bedroom. I began to fall asleep, too.
Then I heard it: the low, distant sound of an approaching aircraft.
At first, I tried to convince myself it was something else – a train, maybe, or a truck. But the sound grew heavier, closer, unmistakable. I knew that sound.
I leaned forward in bed, my body alert before my thoughts could catch up. I looked toward the window, searching the dark for anything that might prove me wrong. There was nothing – just silence stretched tight with fear.
Then the explosion came.
The bed shook violently beneath us. My daughter jolted awake. I fell to the floor. For a second, neither of us understood what was happening. Then instinct took over.
“Get up,” I shouted. “We have to hide. We have to leave.”
I moved toward a window facing the direction of the blast, and what I saw froze me in place: Bodies were scattered outside.
“Don’t look,” I told my daughter. “Close your eyes.”
We ran out of the house, not knowing where to go – only that we had to move. Fear has its own logic. It doesn’t need direction, only escape.
But then, I jolted awake. I was back in bed. It was another nightmare.
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These things often happen around 4 in the morning. That is the hour my body remembers, even when my mind tries to forget. The hour when the worst things tended to begin in Syria: the shelling, the air strikes, the earthquakes, the moments when night would split open and survival became the only instinct left.
But now, the room was quiet. My daughter was still asleep beside me, breathing deeply, untouched by whatever had just taken hold of me. I looked at the clock. It read 4 a.m.
I was forced to flee Syria in 2011, after receiving threats against me and my children from Bashar al-Assad’s now-deposed regime. The government wanted me to broadcast propaganda when I was the editor-in-chief of a private radio station in Syria. I refused to obey.
I’ve kept returning to war-torn countries in the last 15 years, including trips back to Syria as a reporter, and since then, I have experienced many more real nightmares at around 4 in the morning. The most terrible one was the 7.8-magnitude earthquake in 2023, on the border between Turkey and Syria, which killed more than 60,000 civilians. I was there – and somehow survived.
Even after leaving Syria all those years ago, my sleep has been light, fragile, always ready to break. My mind replays what it has learned: that danger comes in the dark, without warning, without mercy. I’m still suffering from what can only be described as post-traumatic stress disorder.
And now, the U.S.’s war in Iran and Israel’s war in Lebanon seem to be triggering my nightmares again.
Syrian Democratic Forces personnel walk down a street past destroyed vehicles and heavily damaged buildings in Raqa, Syria, in October 2017.BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images
This is something that is often lost in the way we talk about conflict. We measure wars in numbers: of casualties, refugees, destroyed cities. We discuss strategies, borders, interventions. We track the rise and fall of economies and deploy the detached language of geopolitics.
But we forget how it feels to live through conflict. How people have to learn that a sound can become a threat. How sleep becomes impossible. How safety never fully feels real and certain, no matter how far you travel from the danger.
The tragedies of war are countless, but some of their most devastating details are carried, invisibly, inside those who survive.
Imagine living every day fearing that a bomb could fall on your home at any moment. Imagine the constant calculation: Where would I run? Who would I save first? Would there be time?
This is the real, everyday nightmare of life for many in the Middle East. I know it, because I’ve lived it.
During one of my trips back to Syria to cover the war, I interviewed a fighter from the antiregime resistance who had lost both of his legs. He sat in a wheelchair, determined to continue the fight. When I asked him about the countless number of civilians killed by both sides, he told me something I will never forget: that the deaths were necessary, because they were the “fuel of the revolution.”
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“Fuel” for him is a nightmare for others. Thinking of things that way reduces human beings to something expendable, required only to keep a larger machine running. That mentality is not unique to one side, one country, or one conflict: war, everywhere, depends on this logic that reduces civilians, women, mothers into mere numbers, into strategy, into collateral damage.
But we need to remind ourselves: Who, among the people in Lebanon or Iran, would ever choose to become a refugee? Who would elect to have a life defined by fear and survival, one that measures time in numbers of escapes? What parent would willingly offer her children up as fuel? Yet millions are forced into that reality, again and again.
I have changed. What I have lived through – as a war journalist, a refugee, a mother and a woman subjected to abuse by multiple forms of authority – has forged something unbreakable in me. This is my fuel, driving my fight for what should never be negotiable: freedom of expression and women’s rights.
This fuel does not fade. It hardens and sharpens me. And it forces me to confront my nightmares when they return again and again, so that I can continue to report the truth and fight against them – for myself, and for others.