An unprecedented and unforgettable first-person account of resistance and transformation from a young Syrian woman—raised with deep family ties to the authoritarian government—who risked everything to rebel against the regime

Loubna Mrie was raised a staunch Syrian Alawite—a member of the same insular, historically oppressed Muslim sect as then-President Hafez al-Assad. Her mother’s father helped plan the coup that saw Hafez seize power in 1970 and bring the Alawites out of hiding and into a position of total control; her father was intimately involved in Hafez’s government as an enforcer and assassin. In her household and community at large, the president was seen less as a political figure and more as an object of near-religious devotion.

When the Arab Spring reached Syria in 2011, and popular discontent with the rule of Hafez’s son, Bashar al-Assad, triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across the country, Loubna sought out an anti-government demonstration out of curiosity and found herself forever changed by what she witnessed: genuine passion for a better future for all Syrians being brutally repressed by government forces. When she returned to her grandparents’ home in Damascus, her jeans spattered with fellow protesters’ blood, her grandmother called her a traitor. Unable to ignore her political awakening, Loubna plunged ahead into a life of activism—in opposition to both the regime and her abusive father—with unimaginable consequences.

An account that includes her mother’s murder as a direct consequence of her resistance activities and the kidnapping and execution of her American boyfriend, Peter Kassig, at the hands of the Islamic State, Defiance is a searing, ground-level view of surviving the unendurable at the flashpoint of one of the most visible and least understood wars in recent history, from a perspective that is rarely considered, let alone heard—that of a Syrian Alawite woman.