A Syrian Masterclass in the Art of Being Human
A Syrian Masterclass in the Art of Being Human
A Review of Hadi Abdullah’s Critical Conditions
By Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
Ten months and six days after the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his regime, DoppelHouse Press released Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution, the eyewitness chronicles of nurse-turned-frontline-war-reporter Hadi Abdullah, ably translated by Alessandro Columbu.
The English translation expands on the original Arabic (published by Jusoor, 2020), adding a third chapter that covers what transpired since 2019, a year the author describes as “our darkest hour.” According to Columbu, this third chapter came together in a manner similar to the Arabic original (ed. Jood), in that it was dictated through voice messages exchanged between author and translator. “If you read [Abdullah’s] book, you’ll see that everything that happened to him seems fictional,” he says. “When his book came out [in Arabic] in 2020, I ordered several copies… I devoured it in three days.” The two were introduced through a mutual friend, and the translation work commenced in 2022.
Although it offers “a frontline eyewitness account of the Syrian Revolution,” Abdullah’s book is, above all, a testament to friendship and community, loss and grief, survival and creativity, faith and courage, the stubborn grace of rebuilding. It is, in the end, a masterclass in the art of being human.
‘What’s In a Name?’
In Critical Conditions, Hadi Abdullah looks at the situation in his hometown and across Syria through the eyes of a professional nurse who is specialized in treating those cases that are “critical conditions.” And yet this is not limited to the most serious physical wounds. Early in the book, he writes that he “entered the operating room straightaway, to report the undistorted facts, except that from that time on, all conditions became critical.”
Beyond this, we don’t know exactly who Hadi Abdullah is. This, readers learn, is the author’s third attempt at coming up with a pseudonym. He had to “kill” his former public persona, Samir Fathi, to save two of his friends from rotting in al-Assad’s dungeons. He also had to discard an earlier alter ego, Abd al-Rahman, after receiving threats from the regime demanding his silence. He only lets readers in on his real first name: Muhammad.
For the years between March 2011 and December 8, 2024, he shed various selves, struggling to protect the man behind them all.
Friday of Dignity: First Protest, First Tears, First Hope
Beginnings are often laden with hope, and sometimes with fear of the unknown. Hadi Abdullah recalls his first protest in full detail. This was the Friday of Dignity, March 18, 2011, starting from Droubi Mosque and ending around the Clock Square (aka Martyrs’ Square) in Homs.
With clarity and vulnerability, Abdullah lays bare the full range of emotions that ran through his mind as he watched as a small protest unfold in solidarity with the people of Daraa. He goes from believing “the hangman still has the upper hand” and weeping as he watches the plainclothes shabbiha intimidate and beat protestors with sticks and electric prods, to “tears and sadness gave way to joy and exultation,” with the arrival of more protestors undeterred by the regime’s use of tear gas and live ammunition.
Abdullah’s telling of that day’s events also challenges the regime’s divisive, sectarian rhetoric. “Non-violent, non-violent, Islam and Christianity!” people chanted on that day. “With these slogans, we were trying to distance ourselves from the accusations of racism and sectarianism which had been directed at protestors, as had happened in Egypt, but all that was for nothing.”
Perhaps the chants failed to deter the regime from using a “divide and conquer” strategy. Yet they continued to have to dispel bad-faith accusations against a revolution that began at a mosque—the only place where Syrians had some access to their right of peaceful assembly.
Laying Out the Action Plan
It was in that first protest where Hadi Abdullah had to provide first aid to the wounded. It was also where he learned how he could be of service to people who had just begun tearing down the “wall of fear that had separated everyone since the day they were born.”
Going back to his hometown of al-Qusayr, Abdullah used his training as a nurse to create a field hospital to treat the wounded protestors. Moved by the protestors’ courage, he decided to make their voices reach as far as possible—an idea that led to the first communication with local, then international, TV networks as a frontline reporter, starting with Orient TV. With no previous reporting experience, he had to learn on the job. With full humility, he walks the readers through his journey as his methods and techniques became increasingly sophisticated, despite the siege and scarcity of aid and equipment everywhere he went.
“How are we supposed to live our lives as we go from one critical situation to another?” Abdullah asks.
Through Abdullah’s eyes, readers get a detailed account of how a man survived everything that ensued: the miraculous escape from al-Qusayr, the sieges of Homs and Aleppo, the ground troops, the barrel bombs, the attempt at murder in Aleppo, the multiple surgeries, the recovery, the incredible evasion of detention by the regime and al-Nusra Front, the displacement to Turkey, the earthquake, and more.
All the while, he was there, providing first aid, documenting and recording—sometimes hundreds of meters away from the location, sometimes from a wheelchair.
Why ‘Critical Conditions’?
In the past decade, many books have been written about Syria—as well as many conferences, public discussions, and media appearances. These materials, for the most part, sought to explain the Syrian epic from a political analyst’s viewpoint, centering official narratives and speculating about state puppeteering by global superpowers. Too many analysts and pundits have offered, from the comfort of their desks in Washington D.C., their cold and detached “expert” opinions on the shifting geopolitical map of the so-called Middle East, lionizing, as usual, the old-new colonizers and imperialists. For many of these pundits, their newfound interest in Syria came only after the arrival of jihadist groups, to satisfy a well-known Western fetish, years after al-Assad had been brutalizing civilians across Syria.
But where are the voices of Syrians in all of this?
Having read Hadi Abdullah’s Critical Conditions, you probably will not emerge well-equipped to enter a debate on the scope of the US involvement in the toppling of al-Assad; you will not formulate a stronger argument about Moscow’s and Tehran’s real motives behind supporting the fallen tyrant in Damascus. What you will gain is the eternal memory of the sixteen children of the Arba’in School in Daraa, who dared to breathe life into a suffocating city by simply writing anti-Assad slogans on the walls of their school. You will learn the names and the stories of Emad Nasab, Tarad al-Zuhouri, Khaled Essa, Ra’ed Fares, Abd al-Baset al-Sarout, and Hammoud—Hadi Abdullah’s friends who he met along the way, who taught him the meaning of friendship, brotherhood even, and the depth of the pain of loss which no first aid can relieve. You will realize that it is indeed possible for one man to be an enemy of both the Assad’s regime and of ISIS and al-Nusra Front. You will see the creativity and full human capacity for survival of those under impossible circumstances, driven by their love for life. And you will understand that a human voice and a camera, used correctly, can be the most dangerous of weapons.
“And rise we will.
………Every time.”
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a Jordanian American writer and translator based in New England, USA.
October 30, 2025 @ 3:47 pm
“A masterclass in the art of being human” is a review that feels too comfortable, and too certain of the moral clarity of the so-called nurse-turned-frontline-war-reporter. It glorifies the reporter’s role under the Assad regime without confronting the disquieting transformation that followed: how Abdullah himself has since aligned himself with the Sharaa regime responsible for waves of massacres and mass killings against non-Muslims that have been roaming Syria in a familiar pattern from the coastal regions to southern Syria.
To glorify victims is to freeze them in time, to deny their capacity for corruption, ambition, or compromise. It turns biography into myth. Every platform today seems to need a hero to believe in, that much is understandable. What is missing is a bit of respect for the readers ability to handle nuance without a savior.
October 30, 2025 @ 9:55 pm
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. You’re right that the past seven months, and the massacres in Latakia and Sweida, have complicated that moral terrain a great deal. In my review, however, I engaged Critical Conditions as a literary document of the years 2011–2024: a record of survival and witness under the Assad regime, not an endorsement of what followed. I appreciate the call for nuance, and for keeping our empathy as alert as our skepticism.
November 2, 2025 @ 7:04 pm
Thank you very much for your kind and thoughtful response. You are absolutely right, and the original comment was not meant as an attack on your engagement with the literary text. I also want to apologize for the anonymity, given the troubling reality of our times where there is a new “Syrian army” online targeting anyone who dares to criticize the new regime and its supporters.