The war came to Damascus when I was 14 years old. At first, it didn’t really affect our lives too much, but after a couple of years, it became very dangerous and scary. A lot of students lost their hands or feet in bomb attacks on our school, and some of them died. Sometimes my mum wouldn’t let me go to school. She would say, ‘I don’t care if you miss an exam and you can’t study at university. I just want you to keep all the parts of your body.’
Whenever there was bombing in . . .