AS THE SHADOW ADVANCES – High-Risk Mission in Syria

In March 2011, amid the wave of the Arab Spring, children from a village in southern Syria wrote graffiti on the wall of their school. Their arrest by the Syrian government's security services and the abuse they suffered would become the trigger of the Syrian revolution, initially peaceful.

From the summer of 2011, this revolution took on the character of an armed insurgency. In April 2012, Kofi Annan succeeded in negotiating a ceasefire agreement, which resulted in the emergency deployment of a mission of 300 United Nations observers. This ceasefire collapsed shortly afterwards, as the country plunged into civil war.

Enora Chame recounts this high-risk mission in which she takes part as a volunteer (she is the only French officer selected) — one of the most violent missions ever undertaken by unarmed observers. At the heart of the katibas (combat units) of the rebels, the Syrian army, sometimes hostile crowds, prisons and hospitals, she works to uncover the truth, despite the close surveillance of the political police and the manipulation of the regime and the rebels.

The dangers are multiple: gunfire, explosions, and above all the growing involvement of Al-Qaeda. Her convoy ambushed, she manages to escape the death threatened by a jihadist group with the help of her comrades. A lucid, harrowing account — at once clinical and apocalyptic in style — that offers a clearer understanding of the origins of the Syrian conflict. But above all, a vibrant tribute to Syria and its people.

" The French army can take pride in counting among its ranks officers of her calibre, capable, as she is, of acting with perfect selflessness and a true sense of mission. It seems to me that if one had to describe Enora Chame in a single word, the most fitting would be: the fighter. " General Christophe Gomart 

" The most striking thing about this book lies in the moral strength, the sense of humanity towards the Syrian population and the MISNUS observers, and the unwavering courage displayed by Enora Chame amid the chaos, the fighting, the fire directed at her personally, the death threats against her — most notably during her hostage-taking by Islamists who at any moment risked slitting her throat, before finally releasing her. " General Jean-Marc Marill