10 years ago Enora Chame was sent to Syria. On Saturday, June 9, 2012, the only French soldier in a group of international experts tasked with monitoring the ceasefire set off again in a UN 4×4 to the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, 450 km Damascus. Her vehicle is then stopped by armed men: “We are surrounded by aggressive young bearded men with evil eyes,” she says. They are members of Al Qaeda.
“There’s a part of the brain that tells you it’s not true, ‘I’m in a movie. It doesn’t happen, not to me’. That part of the brain, says Enora Chame, is utterly useless, while the other part of the brain is utterly useless calculating, hyper-alert and like, ‘where can I go, what can I do? what did he just say?’ You’re actually too busy to be scared. And for me, the discomfort I felt was that we were being released without a fight. We hadn’t fought to get out of there. We had waited like sheep for our fate in front of the butcher. And that shaped me. And the smile of the guy who wants to cut my throat, a warm smile. It’s really a very strange feeling,” she says.
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Enora Chame spent four months of 2012 in this universe of violence, lies and atrocities shared between the forces of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, the Free Syrian Army rebels and jihadist factions. Then a cycle was set in motion that the UN could not stop: it was the beginning of the war in Syria. Every day civilians disappear like swallowed. “After a while you wonder how many people have been arrested and where are they? In Damascus, I rented a small apartment right next to some security services and the Ministry of Defense. And I said that to myself under my feet, if so, there were cells full of people, tortured people, prisoners, and I felt like walking on people.
Collecting lists, inspecting hospitals, morgues, attack and attack sites… To document the beginning of a war, because nobody wants a truce, Enora Chame then writes “We failed”. However, she keeps a sense of mission every day. Overcoming the fear of some of her 300 colleagues dispatched to the crime scene, she insists, retrieves forensic medical sheets, lifts the sheets to photograph the bodies. She records the tracks of the dead, a persistent writer of the massacres committed. “I’ve done everything I could. I’ve still gone far enough in my search for testimonies, for the elements I’ve collected. But I don’t accept that excuse.”
“On this type of mission, you have to forgive yourself for being helpless.”
Enora Chame,
at franceinfo
To this day, the 50-year-old colonel is just as strong-willed, persistent and stubborn. This very special mission in Syria with the Syrians shaped her so much that she made a book out of it, When the Shadow Advances (Mareuil Editions). However, Enora Chame had a thousand military lives, a thousand secret stories, a thousand nicknames and nicknames. Also, Enora Chame isn’t her real name…