Nessrin Gaddah slept through the war in Tripoli. She stopped sleeping after she moved to Tunis (EP 21).
During active conflict in Tripoli, Gaddah reported sleeping normally. Her days were spent working — with the EU delegation, then later with Expertise France — and her nights were spent in the same house in Hay Al-Andalus. The war was the environment; sleep was its baseline.
When she moved to Tunis, the sleep stopped. The threat had been removed, but the alertness her nervous system had built around it had not. She described lying awake, unable to explain to herself why.
The account is a textbook case of delayed trauma response: the body functions in conflict by suppressing the physiological acknowledgement of danger, and only permits the acknowledgement once the immediate danger is gone. The insomnia is not a reaction to Tunis. It is a reaction to Tripoli, routed through Tunis.
This matches the pattern described by other Damiri guests, most clearly Osama Alfitory in The Corpse on the Hard Drive — functional numbness during conflict, psychological cost emerging years later and somewhere else.
Gaddah's testimony is one of the cleanest first-person statements of the phenomenon. It reframes "safety" as a precondition for the arrival of symptoms rather than their disappearance. For Libyans rebuilding their lives in Tunis, Malta, Cairo, London and Berlin, the implication is practical: the absence of war is not the absence of war's aftermath.
See: PTSD and Collective Trauma