“No one has the right to kill, to torture, just because they want to destroy the free word.”Īt noon on Feb. “Seriously, it was the call of freedom,” she said. Now, looking back, she sees her decision to join the group as a turning point. But she held to the belief that her Yemeni diplomatic passport would protect not only her, but her colleagues as well. Assabalani was warned from the start the office had already been raided twice. The group, founded in 2004 by Mazen Darwish, a journalist and lawyer, defended journalists and monitored media coverage, with a credo of strict neutrality. “It was weird because she was so different from others,” she said. When she met a young woman in her French class who was ready to express her views openly, Ms.
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“Nobody had opinions,” she said, using her fingers to zip her mouth closed, “not even in joking.” Assabalani then about Damascus, besides the sweet smell of jasmine, was the silence. The year was 2010, the eve of the Arab uprisings. To keep busy, she enrolled in French classes. She had been working as a consultant with the World Bank, when she decided to join her family in Damascus where her father was - and still is - posted. In 2008, she spent a year in the United States on a Fulbright grant to the University of William and Mary, in Virginia. That meant she grew up in different countries, before going to college in Jordan. Her grandfather fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution and went to Yemen, where her father became a diplomat.