"When I was in secondary school in Aleppo, one of the required English texts was an abridged version of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Back then, I sat at an old wooden bench with two girls — who were once my best friends, but now we barely speak — and together we read dusty words about a revolution steeped in blood and sacrifice in a place that seemed so far away in time and space from our isolated lives.

The story of two places, rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, was also the story of our Syria. When we read Dickens, we could not imagine similar scenes unfolding in Syria during our lifetime. In 2011, scenes of protests and funerals, torture and murder, international press conferences and presidential interviews, were recorded not on the pages of a novel but in videos and photographs, in tweets and Facebook statuses, transferred via Skype and YouTube. Over two centuries later we would write the same story: the story of a revolution."

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