What piqued my curiosity the most was that not even cockroaches and mice came into this room. Perhaps they didn’t dare to. Is it possible that humans have a greater tolerance for dirt than vermin? This is what crossed my mind on the evening of October 1st, 2013, just two days after I was arrested. The thoughts still haunt me here in New York, thousands of miles away from that awful prison cell. I anticipated the very moment of my arrest, years before it happened. I was certain that I would eventually be incarcerated, but couldn’t yet imagine how or where.
By, Issam Khoury
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By, Veronika Bondarenko, Business Insider, Even before he started covering the civil war in Syria, Issam Khoury was under constant threat for what he wrote. After growing up in the western Syrian city of Latakia, the future journalist started writing about human rights violations as he witnessed them unfold. Between 2001 and 2002, Khoury published…
The Daily Reports, Shania Thura, June 10, 2022 We as a whole know Syrian President Assad, however who am I, who was referenced in Assad and Me? With this bewildering question, we started to peruse the book of author and insightful Issam Khoury, depicted by previous U.S. Representative to both the Democratic and Republican organizations Cameron…
Issam Khoury has been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, and forced to flee his country because of his journalism and political activism over the last 15 years in Syria, a country torn apart by revolution and the reprisals of a brutal regime led by Bashar al-Assad.
The goddess Fashion, who throughout all ages has waged war on the productions of the goldsmith, has laid a heavier hand on these than on any other forms of personal ornament.
I am a Syrian journalist, writer, and researcher for +15 years, and have written hundreds of journal articles on terrorism, politics, sustainable development, human rights, minorities in the Middle East, and religious schools in Syria and the Arab world.
I was a target of harassment from the Syrian regime in my country, especially since my writing and civil activism focused on supporting democracy and freedom in the Arab region. Two novels were censored from publishing, and one was withdrawn from libraries in 2002. In “2009”, I was prevented from traveling for “two and a half” years as part of the movement to restrict freedoms pursued by the Syrian government against well-known civil society activists in Syria, and in 2011 I was the first journalist covering the events of the Syrian revolution. I was beaten and then arrested for 27 days in September 2012. After my release, I moved to Lebanon, where I continued my work as a journalist in the Al-Joumhouria newspaper and started training Syrian civil society activists. I trained a large number of journalists and citizen journalists to cover the news, but the Lebanese government, dominated by the Hezbollah Party, prevented me from continuing my work, which prompted me to travel to the United States in May 2014.