Ruth Sherlock has just been named ‘Young Journalist of the Year’ in the 2012 British Press Awards. She has been nominated for the prestigious Gaby Rado Memorial Award, given by Amnesty International for outstanding coverage of human rights.Paul Wood has covered a dozen wars in fifteen years as a BBC foreign correspondent. During the Syrian uprising, he was three times smuggled across the border and into the city of Homs and produced Homs – Journey into Hell for BBC’s Panorama.Zoe Lafferty has worked as a director, assistant director and playwright for theatre in Afghanistan, the UK, New York, Palestine and Europe, and is an Associate Director of the Freedom Theatre Palestine.

Genuinely revealing - the first-hand testimony is riveting - it leaves one with a heightened awareness of how a basic desire for human freedoms escalated into a sectarian civil war.