Rookie reports from the aftermath of Arab Spring

Aris Roussinos's gripping stories of the frontline in Libya, Lebanon, South Sudan, Sudan, Mali and Syria, are rich in detail
On guard: author Aris Roussinos does a piece to camera in the middle of an ambush outside Bor, South Sudan (Picture: Image from Rebels by Aris Roussinos)
Image from Rebels by Aris Roussinos
Sam Kiley17 July 2014

Rebels — My Life Behind Enemy Lines with warlords, fanatics, and not so friendly fire by Aris Roussinos (Century, £16.99)

Rockets explode overhead. Machine gun bullets rip the air. Refugees clutching pathetic bundles trudge away from the flames. From Libya to Idlib, rebel fighters have seen the hopes of the Arab Spring melt into a violent hopeless hell — a landscape of warlords leading men for whom war has become a way of life, a habit.

Showing uncommon bravery, and occasional foolishness, Aris Roussinos travelled with hope as the war began its descent. He does so with a lad-mag exuberance.

In Libya during the revolution against Muammar Gaddafi he wanders in from Egypt, crossing into a war zone with the merest sketch of a plan for where he would go next, and how. He wasn’t smart. He was lucky. He finds himself sharing a taxi with a Salafi extremist from around the port city of Derna.

Roussinos says: “He saw I was wearing a turquoise ring of the type worn by religious shi’as”… and Roussinos is on assignment for an Iranian news organisation.

If there’s anyone Salafists hate, and would kill as readily as Jews, it’s Shi’a “apostates” from Iran. The Salafist speaks fluent English. He cross-questions the young British reporter.

Derna is on the way to Roussinos’s final destination, Benghazi. For his own safety he’s chucked out of the cab in Tobruk.

He doesn’t have the humour to turn this incident into a self-deprecating anecdote about a green reporter. Instead he says: “I turned to the driver and shrugged my shoulders, palms out, in the internationally recognised gesture for ‘Is it me or is this guy a complete dick?’”

Rebels is often gripping. It’s got a youthful honesty and a lack of pomposity. It’s entirely, and mercifully, free of the self-regarding moralising tosh that some hacks trot out. But it is abundantly clear that Roussinos reads about a place he’s been — only once he’s got back.

Some of this can be forgiven because he’s got a fine news sense which takes him to frontlines, notably in Misrata, where he smokes dope and hangs out with men of his own age who have been catapulted into a conflict that was not of their choosing.

His stories of the frontline in Libya, Lebanon, South Sudan, Sudan, Mali and Syria, are rich in detail. His ability to capture the chaos of combat is almost photographic.

He meets a Kurd battling Islamic militants in Syria who patrols the frontline with a young goat that licks his wrists. It’s the odd moments that put one on the ground alongside him. He learns his trade as a foreign correspondent as he goes along. But again, his lack of reading lets him down.

If he’d picked up Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By I Miss it So, a modern classic of war-correspondent autobiography, he’d know that missing war and taking drugs aren’t new. Michael Herr’s Dispatches would have taught him that gonzo journalism isn’t new, and Jon Swain’s elegiac River of Time would have taught him about compassion.

Rebels begins: “Living in Britain kills me. Everything is so safe, so sanitized and regulated, life here feels like being shut into a tiny box.”

It’s not his fault. There’s a talent here. There’s a brave young man whose honesty is so total that a good editor is needed to step in to save him from himself.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £14.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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