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Samar Yazbek, a Syrian writer and TV presenter, was detained - kidnapped, she would say - not long after the outbreak of the Syrian uprising. She was brought to one of the prisons run by the mukhabarat intelligence service, blindfolded and taken down to the bowels of the building.

As each cell door was opened, the blindfold was lifted for a moment. Inside were young men, chained to the walls, their bodies stained in blood, their faces smashed beyond recognition. Cell after cell revealed the same scene. This decent into Hell, as she calls it, was the first of three visits during which the mukhabarat showed her the fate that awaited her if she continued writing about the Syrian uprising in ways that contradicted the official line.

She was beaten, told she was on a death list, and warned that her 16-year-old daughter would be taken from her.

Yazbek is a member of the minority Alawite sect to which president Bashar al-Assad and his security chiefs belong. It would have been embarrassing for the ruling family to jail a well-known figure from their own community. But the regime could not tolerate her siding with an uprising comprised overwhelmingly of Sunnis. As she continued to post articles on social media sites, members of her family denounced her as a traitor.

But she refused to endorse the state media's lie that Syria was under attack from ‘armed gangs'. ‘Every time I went out to demonstrations to monitor what was happening, I didn't see anyone but peaceful protesters,' she writes in her book, A Woman in the Crossfire.

When I meet her in the calm of a London hotel lobby, she is full of restless energy. I ask her if she ever considered doing what the mukhabarat wanted.

‘No I could not. I am convinced that the regime played the sectarian card from the start. The plan was to use the Alawites as a "human shield" to protect the regime. I could never support that.'

If the pressure from the authorities was intense, she also found herself rejected by the Islamist opposition. One of them wrote to her: ‘Dear unveiled infidel. The Syrian revolution does not want an Alawite apostate like you in its ranks.'

As she tried to organize support for the protesters, she found that every vegetable seller and taxi driver seemed to be working for the secret police. The people she met were rounded up. She fled to France, taking her daughter and four months of diaries, which she has now published.

In the year since she left Syria, the uprising has been militarized, and the world has learnt a new word, shabbiha. As a student in Latakia, she lived in fear of the shabbiha, the black marketeers protected by the Assad family, who would cruise the streets looking for girls to kidnap. These days the word shabbiha refers to the thuggish pro-regime militia accused of a series of massacres against Sunni Muslims connected to the Free Syrian Army.

The shabbiha may be Alawites but they are paid by the Sunni Muslim businessmen, who are an integral part of the coalition which has kept the Assad family in power for 40 years, she says. It is becoming accepted that Syria is now locked in battle between the Sunni majority and the Alawites, with the latter supposedly preparing a last stand in the mountains of northwest Syria.

But it does not have to be like that, she says. ‘I am not afraid of the fall of Assad. I am not afraid of the Islamists. They are on the street because of the failure of secular parties of the Left. They are part of society. After the revolution we will have a democratic battle against Islamic extremism.'

A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, Haus Publishing, £12.99