Je viens d’Alep, itinéraire d’un réfugié ordinaire

Joude Jassouma’s Je viens d’Alep, itinéraire d’un réfugié ordinaire (I Come from Aleppo, Itinerary of an Ordinary Refugee), coauthored by Laurence de Cambronne, is the first narrative recounting the migration of an undocumented Syrian emigrating to France as a result of severe political crises in Syria during the regime of Bachar al-Assad, president and commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces. In 2016, owing to the civil war in Syria that had erupted five years earlier, Jassouma, his wife, and his daughter were among some twenty-five thousand undocumented Syrians who made irregular border crossings into the European Union following the eastern Mediterranean route, the most traveled sea route to mainland Greece. Jassouma’s flight from Syria began in June 2015, when he left Aleppo alone, entered Turkey illegally, and traveled by bus to Istanbul, where his wife and daughter joined him three months later. Because of a lack of professional opportunities in...