12:00-13:00 // BOOK PRESENTATION
Dawla
Moderator: Claudia Vago
Speaker: Gabriele Del Grande, Rossella Miccio,
“Dawla” in Arabic means State, and is one of the ways in which the affiliates of the Islamic State call their organization. Gabriele Del Grande went to meet them on an adventurous trip that started in Iraqi Kurdistan and ended with his arrest in Turkey. This book is the story of their experiences interwoven with the background of the rise and fall of the Islamic State. The story starts in 2005 in the basement of the maximum-security prison of Saydnaya, in Syria, and takes us through the failed revolution of 2011, the war by proxy against al-Asad, the return of the Caliphate and the terrorist attacks that have rocked Europe. Del Grande presents a gallery of characters whose stories unfold in an interweaving of storytelling and geopolitics. A Syrian demonstrator driven by a genuine thirst for justice to take up arms and who, faced with the corruption of the Free Army, chooses to enlist in Dawla, where he will make his career as an agent of the internal secret services and emir of the moral police, the hisba. A Jordanian hacker fascinated by esotericism who arrived in Syria following the prophecies about the end of the world and ended up on death wing in a secret Dawla prison. And an Iraqi adventurer hired by a former Anbar colonel who, thanks to his own resourcefulness, delves into the most obscure level of the Dawla secret services, the one responsible for planning the attacks in Europe. This book tells us intense stories, full of twists, adventures, feelings, anger, love, life, death, and opposing points of view on war and the world. The volume stems from a crowdfunding project that has been passionately and generously backed by Del Grande’s supporters, who are committed to facing the uncomfortable point of view of the attackers. “Not to justify, not to humanize. But just to tell and, through a story, look for an answer, if there is one, to that old question about the banality of evil that has always reverberated in our heads after every war”.