Excerpt from A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Before the bombing in Samarra, there had been lists of specific targets, but now any man or woman found to be Sunni or Shia, or a minority—Christian, Mandaean, Yazidi, Palestinian—could be stopped on the way to work, their identities inferred from the names on their ID cards, and tortured to death, or simply gunned down in their homes. At the UNHCR registration centre in Damascus, where crowds of refugees lined up each morning at dawn, clerks took down their reasons for fleeing. "I get sick from the stories," a fresh-faced young Syrian clerk had told me. She meant it literally: she sometimes had to excuse herself to throw up. But with neighbouring countries refusing them refuge (Jordan had already taken half a million or more), Syria was the last exit from the killing fields.

* * *

Driving back the way I had come, I watched the setting sun burnish the desert pinkish-gold. Power poles loomed over desert scrub and green patches of irrigated farmland. The highway was calm, my driver silent and brooding; he found the refugees worrisome. "Speaking as a Syrian," he had earlier told me, "we don't want their war to come here."

The refugees would be following in the same direction, many of them bound for a crowded suburb of Damascus where rents were particularly cheap: Sayeda Zainab. Little Baghdad it was being called now. I had been to that neighbourhood a couple of times already. Home to the largest community of Iraqi refugees in the world, it would make an ideal base to research my Harper's article on the crisis.

I wanted to immerse myself there, in the lives of the people, but how would I do it? To enter a traumatized community, I needed to find someone the community trusted who could make introductions; I needed a good fixer.

As the lights of Damascus beckoned, it occurred to me that I might already have found that person.

Excerpted from A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell. Copyright © 2017 by Deborah Campbell. Excerpted by permission of Picador. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.