Oaklandsocialist interviewed Anand Gopal, who is the author of “Days of Love and Rage”, which is about the Syrian revolution in one relatively small town – Manbij. I’ve probably read 5oo-750 books in my life, and without qualification this is the most gripping book I’ve ever read bar none. That includes other histories, science, and all sorts of fiction. Gopal gives a vivid view of what “revolution” means.

In the course of this interview, we discussed some of the individuals in the book, the rise and fall of revolution and counter revolution, ISIS, the Kurdish YPG, some points about how tyrants fall, the class conflict within the Syrian revolution, perspectives for the present regime… and much more. If you haven’t read this book, you won’t be disappointed if you get it. Here is the video of the interview and below it is a transcript. Here is the interview, and below it is a transcript:

John Reimann
I’m talking here with Anand Gopal, who is the author of this book, Days of Love and Rage, and as it says here, “it’s the story of ordinary people forging a revolution”, and in this particular case it’s the Syrian revolution and it focuses on the town of of Manbij. I’m so happy to talk with you, Anand, and welcome

Anand Gopal
Happy to be here.

John Reimann
So, before we get started, I hope you don’t mind if I take a minute to do this screen share. Just so people can know where Manbij is. You can see it here on this map here, and this is Turkey here, and just to get a wider view, not everybody is familiar with the geography. Here’s Syria, there’s Turkey, which plays quite prominently in the revolution. Manbij, according to what I read, its population fluctuated between 100,000 to 400,000 during the course of the war, which says a lot about what was going on at that time. Today, they say it’s a little under 300,000.
So with that, let’s go ahead and get started. My first question is, this book covers the period of the of the Syrian revolution up until Assad left power, which was about a year and a half ago. With everything that’s happened in the world since then, with all the crises – Iran, Israel and Gaza, all the crises with Trump, and so on – please explain why what you write about in this book is important for today.

Anand Gopal
We can look around and see a lot of things in the news to feel upset about. Obviously, this is terrible, with Iran. There is the forward march of AI. There’s increasing power of corporations and billionaires. For me personally, I’ve been covering conflict for several years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, etc. So l’ve showed up in situations in which people have lost their loved ones, in which we’ve seen villages or cities destroyed. So I was covering depressing stories, stories of devastation and destruction, and a few years ago I was in Syria, covering the revolution there, and also had much of the same needs (people) getting their houses blown to pieces, and the Syrian government killing unarmed protesters. So there was a way in which you can look at that and say, “okay, it’s also pretty depressing,” but in the midst of that, I heard the story about a place called Membij, which I, at that point, hadn’t even heard of. It’s not a place that’s well known in Syria before 2011. It’s kind of an out of the way place, and I had heard that people in this community had managed to overthrow the 40 year dictatorship just in that city and were trying to forge a democracy from scratch. So that was very interesting to me, because here it’s a story of people trying to construct something when we usually hear stories of destruction, especially in the Middle East, and so that’s why I think it’s important, because the experiences that the individuals in the city went through, unjust experiences that teach us about Syria or the Arab Spring. But actually they speak to the broader concerns we have across the world about democracy, inequality, and the role of elites in our society. So that’s why I think it’s. It’s important subject,

John Reimann
To me, the most important event history is revolution and counter revolution, just in general, and that’s what you give a bird’s eye plus a ground level view of that. In reading your book, I kept thinking of the saying by that old tyrant, Stalin, who said “1000 deaths is a statistic and a single death is a tragedy.” To me, what your book does is it gives gives the view of both of those; it combines the both of those, and you did it through what you called “collective reporting.” So explain that method oh how this book came together through that method.

Anand Gopal
Well, when I was tracing or tracking down people who are involved in this revolutionary experiment experience, pretty quickly, I found that people were not always forthcoming or willing to talk. They were afraid of outsiders, they were distrustful. People were traumatized by the things they had experienced. People also, their memories are faulty, of course, or you’re in a situation with different political factions, and everyone has their own story to tell. So, I faced a challenge, which was, “How do I sort fact from fiction? How do I verify people’s stories? How do I get them to open up to me and trust me?” And what I realized pretty quickly is that I actually couldn’t do that alone, but I was able to meet other Syrians from Mambij who were protagonists or participants in the revolution, and I recruited them as research assistants, and they fanned out across Syria, across the region, even into Europe to track down their old comrades, people that they were on the barricades with, people that they risked their lives with, and they interviewed them too, and so in the end we collected some 2000 interviews. I collected many of them, but these research assistants also conducted many, so we had this massive corpus of data of sort of testimonies from people from the city. I call that process collective journalism, because you know, revolution is around the collective process. There’s so many different experiences that one needs to contend with, and individual can’t do that alone. And so, you know, I was really able to do the sort of wisdom and experience of all these revolutionary activists who became researchers.

John Reimann
I Think it took you something like two or three years, actually, to research and write the book, isn’t that right?

Anand Gopal
Eight years,

John Reimann
So you write a good deal in depth about the personal lives of different individuals, and how their lives, their family relations, and everything intersected with the broader historical process. And you wrote, “Anything worth doing – falling in love, having children, joining a political movement, standing against oppression – leaves us at the mercy of forces outside our control, at the mercy of risk.” And I’d like to bring up a couple of individuals for you to discuss and explain what you meant by that. Let’s start with, I hope I’m pronouncing his name correctly, Oday,

Anand Gopal
Oday, when we meet him in the book, he’s a kid, maybe 19 years old, completely apolitical, bit of a wayward youth, spends his time smoking hash on rooftops, and loading porn on his computer, and you know, just goofing off, and kind of doesn’t really work very hard at his job, which is cell phone salesman. He has a vague and imprecise appreciation for Bashar Al Assad, the dictator of the country, not knowing much, but you know, he just thinks, “well, he’s the president of our country.” Then in 2010 early 2011 he ends up meeting a young woman in his city, and he falls in love with her. The problem is, though, that this, this woman’s brother knows Oday knows the kind of layabout that he is, and does not want his younger sister to be seeing him, and so they end up having to conduct the romance in secret. And keep in mind, as a backdrop, Manbij is a fairly conservative city by Syrian standards as well, so you don’t have a lot of open coupling and dating, a lot of it is furtive. So at some point the brother finds out about romance, and and she can, or Oday can no longer see his girlfriend, and this kind of awakened something in him. He begins to realize the life isn’t always fair. As this is happening, the city, the country breaks out into protests in the south of the country against the dictator. In the beginning, he’s kind of dismissive of this, he’s like,
why are people causing raising a hue cry about this. Our country’s fine.” But slowly he begins to realize that the government is oppressing its population, is shooting at its protesters, and coupled with the loss of his lover, he awakens essentially, and realizes that he’s living in a pretty unjust society, and he becomes an unlikely revolutionary activist. And the book follows his story as he becomes a leader of the revolution, both against the Assad regime, and later when ISIS takes over the city, becomes the leader of the resistance against ISIS.

John Reimann
It’s just so fascinating, how something, how a love affair leads somebody into playing a historical role in a way that you would never expect. That’s real life, though, isn’t it?

Anand Gopal
Indeed, indeed. And you know, if there had not been this historical event, that revolution that had taken place, you know, somebody like Oday would have had his love affair and would have had his life, and he would have lived in anonymity, like this would have happened. For this is what happens all throughout history, that revolutions take ordinary people and thrust them into extraordinary circumstances and turn them into extraordinary people.

John Reimann
In fact, had it not been through your book he would have been, except outside of his town, he would be anonymous, which is true for 10s of millions of people throughout history.

The next one I’d like to ask about is, again, I hope I’m getting this name pronounced right, Abel Os.

Anand Gopal
Abel Os, yeah. Abel Os is a Kurd, so the city of Manbij is predominantly Arab, but it does have a Kurdish minority. He grows up very poor. As a child, he works his father’s roadside stall, essentially, and his dream, his entire vision for his life is to turn this little roadside stall into a real shop, and so he works very hard. He ends up as a migrant laborer in different parts of the country, trying to save up money. He eventually comes back and is able to build up the shop, but at the same time as this is happening, Bashar al-Assad comes to power in 2000 and he begins to undertake a wave of privatizations, economic reforms, and this involves cutting subsidies for basic foodstuffs, cutting subsidies for fuel, etc. so the cost of living begins to creep up. Abel Os finds it harder and harder to make ends meet, so he ends up getting in debt and ultimately loses everything and is thrust into Lebanon as an undocumented migrant worker, and his story is one that is typical of hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of Syrians who were on the wrong end of neoliberalization and globalization, and ended up thrust into precarious existence. All of them ended up becoming sort of the backbone of the revolution after 2011 Abel Os also becomes a leader of the revolution in the city, and it’s a kind of extraordinary trajectory, because again, I don’t remember exactly, I think he didn’t go past the ninth grade. He’s barely literate, yet he is.. he becomes one of the most respected revolutionary leaders and thinkers in the city, because he becomes a leader of people through this process,

John Reimann
You went in search of what happened to him, including in that giant concentration camp in northeastern Syria, in northeast Syrial

Anand Gopal
That’s Oday. Oday.

John Reimann Oh, I’m sorry, Oday.

Anand Gopal
Yeah, exactly. So, Oday, he… I don’t want to give too much away for people who haven’t read the book, but I’ll just say that at some point I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing everybody in the book, including Abel Os and others. Oday was one person I hadn’t met personally. His story is reconstructed through the interviews of people who knew him, and as well as his, his, his diary, and his Facebook posts, etc. So I wanted to meet Oday. He was was missing, and so part of the book is my search to try to find him.

John Reimann
In reading about your search to try to find him, which you put yourself at a great deal of personal risk, and I got the feeling that you weren’t just doing it to write a good book, but that you felt like a personal responsibility to him and his family. To me, it was kind of a metaphor for the book as a whole – a sense of responsibility, the people that made that, that revolution,

Anand Gopal
That’s a good way of putting it. I think that on the on the on one level we had hundreds and hundreds of people who were willing to delve into their often difficult traumatic pasts to share their stories, because they wanted the world to know what the revolution really was and what they experienced, and so for that reason alone, I feel that I definitely owed it to the people that I met, that I personally learned a lot about revolutions and politics by studying the Syrian experience. I think we all can learn something about democracy and revolution, and I think the book is trying to – part of its aim is for some of the lessons of the Syrian revolution to the rest of us to understand and we can talk about what those are later. But I think for that reason as well I felt I and all of us owe something to the people who stood up against tyranny in this case and of course, with Oday’s case, in particular, I did get to know his parents pretty well, and believe me, it’s pretty, it’s very difficult when you’re sitting and interviewing a mother and she believes in her heart that her son is out there somewhere, and she’s relatively powerless about it, but she sees you as the foreigner, as the American who can move around, that you have the ability to help, and so I did feel that I should try to take whatever small part I can in that.

John Reimann
Talk next about Abdul Hadi.

Anand Gopal
So Abdul Hadi, when we meet him in the book, he’s a friend of Oday’s. He’s also kind of this layabout young kid hanging out in rooftops, but he is a gifted soccer player. And growing up, he was dreaming to make it to the big leagues of soccer. The Syrian soccer system, in like a tiered system, where you have different leagues and you try to get to the top league, the big leagues, basically. So, the Mambij soccer team was in the lowest league, like the minor leagues, almost. So, his dream is to get to the major leagues, and for a while, everyone thought that he had a really good shot, because he was very gifted. The problem, though, is he comes from a very poor working class background, and so after school, whereas some of his more middle class friends could go and spend time practicing, or in the gym, or with private coaches, he had to work. He had a little vegetable stand of his parents that he was manning, and so he wasn’t able to keep up with the middle class kids, and so he fell behind. Eventually, he wasn’t able to make it to the to the minor leagues, and ended up eventually as a gym teacher, kind of frustrated dreams and frustrated ambitions, always feeling pretty acutely the class difference in the city between some of his friends who are much wealthier than him and him. But then the revolution kicked off, and all of a sudden everybody, whether they’re rich or poor, seemingly were on the same side against the tyrant Bashar al-Assad. So there was this kind of unity, cross-class unity, and for the first time in his life he was an equal on the barricades.

So, as the protest go on, he becomes a revolutionary leader, gets arrested and tortured by the regime, gets released, and then when the city liberates itself from the Assad regime, he becomes an important revolutionary activist. But at that time tensions between different classes begins to grow, and Abdul Hadi turned against his revolutionary brethren and sees them as a vehicle for a new form of class domination, and turns to the dark side. We can say eventually joins ISIS and becomes the leader of ISIS. Now, in the beginning, when we meet him in the book, he’s actually a secular activist. He has never a religious bone in his body. It’s a part of what the story here in the book is telling is that his transformation from secular activist to a religious fanatic, and that story was not unique to him. It was fairly common in the context of this civil war and the situation in which people were trying to fashion a new type of society. People were moving all across the political spectrum in one direction or the other, and you know, we tend to have this idea that you have these people who are either secular or they’re religious, and these are fixed categories, but actually, in reality, they tend to be very fluent.

John Reimann
In reading about all that, I couldn’t help… As you know, I’m a hardcore socialist. I’m sure that won’t come as a shock to you. You know, there was like this, this absolute flowering of thirst for knowledge and ideas, and so on. I kept thinking, as I’m reading, “if there was a few real working-class socialists who had an understanding of history and economics, and so on, what impact they would have had, in that sort of situation.”

Anand Gopal
Absolutely. I mean, there was a huge class divide in the city. Just to give a little context, in the protests in Manbij started and by mid 2012 protesters were able to take over the city. Essentially, the regime withdrew from the city, and now, for the next 18 months, people engaged in a bottom-up radical democratic experiment to try to govern themselves, and in the course of that, a divide emerged between the wealthier elements of revolution and the working class. Due to that divide, the Islamic fundamentalists rejected themselves, and they began to articulate these class grievances in Islamic terms, and as a result were able to become hegemonis in the city by accruing a mass working class following. If there had been a left alternative, I think maybe things have gone very differently, you know. But part of the reason why there wasn’t a left alternative is because of the way in which left wing had either been eradicatedby the regime or co-opted by the regime.

Anand Gopal
So back to the 50s and 60s, the dominant language of political resistance in the Arab world was some version of leftism, right? It’s either Arab nationalism or some version of communism or Stalinism, so both of those became discredited for different reasons, right? The communists discredited by 1991 actually discredited because you had these dictators ruling in the name of Arab nationalism, but actually oppressing their people. And so this is partly what creates a space for a right-wing alternative, which was the Islamists, but yes, I think if there had been a different tradition present in the city, things could have gone differently.

John Reimann
I wasn’t just thinking of that, but you just described how there’s just this flowering of discussion groups and art and music, and so on. If somebody had had reading group of this kind of history and stuff, I just fantasized about the kind of discussions and kind of interest there would have been in something like that.

Anand Gopal
Absolutely.

John Reimann
There’s a lot of other people that you really feature in the book, one of them to me I see as a kind of classic Bonapartist figure. That was The Prince. Then there was Hassan Nefi, who was kind of like the grandfather, or like the repository of the history of the Syrian revolution, and we could take an hour to talk about all of those. There’s one other that I would like you to talk about, and that is Mina, and how through her, or how she exemplifies how the revolution awakened all the issues of women’s rights and and amongst the women themselves, so could you talk about her and that question in general?

Anand Gopal
Yeah, sure. So you know Syria is a fairly conservative country and Mambij is by Syrian standards a fairly conservative city, a tribal city notorious for honor killings and underage marriage and various other forms of women’s oppression that have been there. So Mina when we meet her in the book, we describe herself as a housewife and a mother. She’s also a school teacher, and she is not really political, and her brother is involved in the protests, and so her brother gets arrested and tortured pretty badly, and this awakened her. She’s pretty horrified of what’s happened to her brother, and there’s a moment where there’s been a few months of protest, but all the protesters are pretty savagely repressed, tortured, sent to prison until the protests are dead, and it seems as if the regime has won and and Mina is so angry with what has happened to her brother, and looks around in the city. No one is willing to stand up and do anything about it, and she takes it upon herself and some of her female friends who hold a protest in the city, and this was a kind of a doubly transgressive act. On the one hand, of course, it’s transgressive because it’s standing up against the dictatorship, but it’s also transgressive because it’s in a deeply patriarchal society that these women are doing this. So she ends up eventually becoming one of the revolutionary leaders in the city after the liberation of the city and its self-governing. She articulates a vision of feminism, and she describes how there’s actually two revolutions that are happening simultaneously. This is the revolution against the dictator, and there’s also the revolution against the patriarchal mores of their husbands and others and sons, et cetera, and women, by the way, who embody some of this,. And so you end up having a number of women’s groups appear in the city. There’s one kind of conservative women’s group that appears, then there’s Mina’s, and there’s even more radical women’s group that splits out of Mina’s, and their position is they want to fight on the front lines alongside the men, so as you said before, there’s a real flowering of the different types of ideas, and Mina represents one of those.

John Reimann
I’d like to read a passage from your book, partly just to encourage other people to get your book, also because it’s such a vivid description, and here’s how you describe, I’m guessing you got this just from actually watching videos, you describe the reaction once Assad’s forces left.

Anand Gopal
As background, that comes from watching videos and from interviewing dozens of people who are present.

John Reimann
You write, “The central square was packed, cars could not move, trays of sweets were passed to the rest. Reena and her sisters worked their way through the throng, shouldering coolers with two liter Coke bottles filled with ice cold water. The revolutionaries grasped bottles with their gritty hands. One rebel exclaimed, ‘You are the true sister of men.’ The crowd grew. Abel Os attempted to speak, but his voice was submerged under the chanting, the shouting, the singing, and what songs! On one corner people had broken into an impromptu rendition of Our Homeland Is A Paradise. Dancing on car tops, a second group was was crooning We Trample on the House of Assad. Singing men, ululating women, car horns, clapping, laughter, cries of joy, inarticulate shouting, screaming.” Talk about that little bit.

Anand Gopal
This is the moment in which the Syrian regime withdraws from Manbij. It’s in July, and all of a sudden activists who had begun as just a half a dozen people a year and a half earlier, and now are in the ranks of 1000s, are facing the fact that there’s no government to their city, and you could just imagine the shock people first face because there were so many parts of the city growing up that were off limits because they were security areas. There were buildings that had files on every citizen because there was a network of spies that would spy on the populace, there were buildings where people would go and be tortured. Now, all of a sudden, all of these were open. People would just go in and look for their files on themselves. They would go in and see the instruments of torture and start smashing them. And Hassan Nefi, who was one of the revolutionaries at this moment, he realized that. He said, “Wait a second, I know there’s a kind of cathartic need to want to destroy everything, because this is the stuff, the system that’s been repressing us. But now all of these buildings, all of these are all ours now. This is the state, the government is now ours. We people in the city run the run the city now for the first time.” So it was kind of an exhilarating moment where people realized that they could be in control collectively of their own destiny,

John Reimann
In reading all of this, during that period I was engaged in debate with people who claim to be socialists. They said, “oh, Assad is an anti-imperialist fighter.” All this sort of thing. I’d like them to have gone there to people of that city to have told those people that.

Anand Gopal
Yeah. Unfortunately, there was a segment of the left in the West that myopically prioritized opposing their own state with supporting and giving solidarity to people resisting dictatorship, but not recognizing the kind of complex and deep links between their own state and these other systems out there. You know, first of all, Assad allied with major world powers like Russia and Iran. Secondly, he was always willing to make deals with the US, when it suited him. Thirdly, the regime posed itself as the ally and friend of the Palestinians against the Zionists, but in fact the Assad regime, especially the father, had done quite a lot to damage Palestinian struggle, you know, for example, in Lebanon in Palestinian refugee camps, for instance, allowing militias to try to root out the PLO in camps in Lebanon, so on and so forth, never really standing up to Israel, essentially allowing Israel allowing a de facto settlement with Israel. So the regime was definitely not an anti-imperialist force. The regime stood for only itself, and it’s the family in the clique of businessmen that supported the family.

John Reimann
Yeah, for sure. So in the event in that city, it seemed to me that the Assad military wasn’t actually militarily defeated; it just kind of collapsed from within, and I think that that’s what happened nationally. Also, you know, that’s an important question for revolutions and revolutionaries in general, trying to overthrow, trying to militarily defeat a tyrant rather than undermining it from within.

Anand Gopal
I mean, in the case of members described in the book, the regime withdrew from Manbij, because it was facing rebellions all around the country, and it decided to retrench and focus on the areas it deemed the most strategically important, so Aleppo, Damascus, and the areas near there, so places that are a little bit out of the way, like Minbij, they basically ceded those areas with the idea that, “well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna pacify the core areas, then we’re going to come back,” and as it turned out. That was the idea, and then if we go back, fast forward to a couple years ago with the collapse of the regime, the country overall, I would say that it wasn’t even really wasn’t the case that the rebels militarily defeated Assad. It was that Assad collapsed, and the rebels were able to take the vacuum, and the reason Assad collapsed is a confluence of factors, one of which is the hammering that Hezbollah had taken at the hands of Israel, another is Russia was embroiled in Ukraine, so Russia, Hezbollah, Iran – these are the main patrons of the regime. So they all had their own issues and were unwilling to come to the defense of the regime. And then the sanctions and the corruption, on the one hand, the sanctions, the other hand, the kind of kleptocratic corruption by the regime itself meant that most of the rank and file soldiers weren’t even getting paid, so people were no longer willing to… so it was a kind of internal collapse of the regime. And then HTS, the group that took power, took power not because they were the strongest, but because they were the most organized out of a smorgasbord of rebel groups that weren’t very organized.

John Reimann
That’s the lesson in general. If you’re a minority and you’re well organized, you can overcome a much bigger majority that’s not organized.

Anand Gopal
That’s right.

John Reimann
So, relation to that, also, part that the main reason Russia did not continue its defense of the regime was the struggle of the Ukrainian people. Of course, the tenacity and the courage of the Syrian people themselves played the central role, but it seems to me they also owe a debt of gratitude to the Ukrainian people.

Anand Gopal
That’s right. Russia is embroiled in Ukraine, and that’s in large part due to the Ukrainian resistance, so yeah, there’s absolutely these kinds of connections. Absolutely.

John Reimann
Talk a little bit about how it was that ISIS came to gain popularity, and what happened under their control.

Anand Gopal
As I mentioned earlier, the city, once it was liberated, was riven into basically two factions, or put differently into two different conceptions of freedom, Before when Assad was in power, everyone was unified in demanding freedom as a dictator, right? So once the dictator was overthrown, now a new question arose. “Well, what do we actually mean by freedom?” One group, which was in the revolutionary leadership, said the freedom means freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, free markets. That group tended to be wealthier, tended to be merchants. The second group said, “well, freedom of speech and assembly is great, it’s important, but freedom of markets, we’re not so sure, because there is an economic crisis unfolding due to the war, the subsidies, what few subsidies were left, so subsidies were out the window.” So, the price of fuel was skyrocketing, the price of bread, which is a staple in Syrian diet, was rising very, very quickly. At the same moment you mentioned earlier, the fluctuating population levels of the city. Part of that is because as other parts of the country were being bombed by Assad, people would flee and come to Manbij for a refuge. So what this did is rent started to go through the roof in Manbij. So all of this led to a crisis of affordability in the city, and so working-class members of the city began to demand all sorts of policies, everything from rent control, price controls, taxing the wealthy, even seizing… there was a French-owned factory nearby, it was demanded to seize it, nationalize it. Those were emerging from the poorer sections of society. So this was the divide. Because the leadership of the revolution, who I would call liberal for the most part, did not agree. They saw property rights as inviolable, and should not be encroached upon.

So into this divide, six individuals, six people who are not from Syria but from other Arab countries stepped. They saw that the city was riven to these two sides, and they very adroitly manipulated these factions. They began to say that, “well, the reason why there’s a crisis of affordability, there’s crime, all these other problems is because we are adopting all these Western ideas of liberalism, freedom, and we actually have the resources in our own tradition to combat this, get to go back for back to the time of the Prophet and the descendants of the Prophet.” In that time they claimed there was no rich or poor, everything was secure, you can leave your house open at night, it was a kind of Islamic welfare state, is how they portrayed it, and this was a message that appealed to the working class elements of society, because they wanted deliverance from very real material issues.

Meanwhile, the liberal elites pushed (aside) a question of redistribution of wealth. And so, as a result, these six individuals were able to cultivate a following in the city, and they revealed themselves to be ISIS, and ISIS went from six to 12 to 30 to 100 to 1000. Eventually, they grew so large that they were able to more or less take power in the city without much of a fight. So, the lesson there is that ISIS basically took power politically primarily, not militarily.

John Reimann
It seems the choice was either revolution or counter revolution. I mean, not just political, but economic revolution, or counter revolution.

Anand Gopal
Yeah, because you know, the first wave of the revolution from 2011 and it is not just in Syria, this was across the Arab world, was framed in very liberal terms around questions of dignity and human rights, and it was a kind of alliance between the middle class and… but class contradictions there could not be kept under wraps forever. Eventually, they would have to be exposed, and they were in the fullness of time, which is that the middle class activist had a very different vision than what the working class activists did. And really, the difference primarily came down to questions of class, questions of economic redistribution, and in every case, Syria and elsewhere, began to see a fissure grow between these two sides, and often, not always the case, but often in most of these countries, it was the Islamists who are the most adept at exploiting that fissure in order to act essentially as agents of counter revolution from within,

John Reimann
Assad claimed the banner of socialism. Towhat extent did that kind of ssully the idea, or the word socialism’s image in Syria, in general, do you think?

Anand Gopal
It did absolutely sully the word socialism. Wha’’s interesting is that if you talk to the middle-class activists and they mention the word socialism, they’ll be horrified and say “that’s just the Baath Party. We already, we had socialists. Look, what happened,” but several of the working-class activists, if you talk to them, they have more nuanced view of these things. Where the Baath Party slogan was “freedom, unity, and socialism”. I had a friend who’s a working-class activist from In Manbi who said, “well, under the Ba’ath Party we didn’t have freedom, certainly there was no unity, and there was no socialism.” So there’s a more nuanced view among some of the people, and they say, “well, actually what the regime calls socialism is handouts for its for its supporters and his cronies, and we have a very different way of looking at things.” But, but there is a sense overall that the terms were term was tarnished, and so when the Islamists come and they give a vision of their society, the caliphate, as a kind of ideal society was not a term, for better or worse, that was tarnished. It was a kind of, for many of these people, now knowing these terms here in the West, we think, “Oh, that’s kind of repressive society,” but many people in the moment, in the revolution, hadn’t heard of this idea, the new political idea for them, and so it didn’t have the same baggage as something like socialism. Now today, if you go to the Middle East, though, it does, because of the terrible experience of it.

[I must interject here: I should have raised the question of Traditionalism at this point in the interview, because that was really what ISIS was advocating. It was similar to what Aleksandr Dugin advocates in Russia – a return to traditional (meaning feudal) society. And similarly to Manbij at that time, it received a hearing in Russia because of the crisis in society and the absence of a working class socialist alternative. Traditionalism is really the 21^st century ideology of fascism. For more on Traditionalism, see Aleksandr Dugin: Alchemist of “Traditionalism”, mysticism and fascism]

John Reimann
When ISIS was driven out, the SDF, behind whom stood the United States. I want to get to that, but just as a detour: I’ve been told that the YPG actually sent a delegation to Minbij, I think was around 2013 or something like that. Then they left within a day or two, because they did not receive a friendly reception. Did you hear about that? And, like, what did you hear about that?

Anand Gopal
So, just to give context to that, after Assad was overthrown, we had the appearance of these things called assemblies, and there were some 40 assemblies. They were not political parties, really. There were new types of political formations. Sometimes they were like political clubs, sometimes they’re charities, sometimes they’re proto parties. In the book, the kind of parallel that draws is with the Jacobins, for instance, in the French Revolution. So you had about 40, and they ran the gamut from right-wing secular to Islamist, Everything was there. Now, the YPG, or really the PKK, which is the YPG, is a front group for the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party.

The PKK did set up an assembly in Menbij from day one. It was called the People’s House, that was the name of that assembly, and they were pretty active in local politics, so it wasn’t the case they just came for one day or two days and left. They were there the whole time.

Secondly, we haven’t talked about the rebel groups, but you know, we’ve been most talking about the political side of things, but there’s also the armed struggle side of things, and there were in Manbij some 80 different rebel groups, and several – they’re all connected to different factions – and the book kind of explains a little bit of it, but the PKK also backs certain rebel groups in the city. So the PKK slash YPG always had a presense, but they were always kind of like a third rail in the city, in the sense that they weren’t really with the revolution, they were kind of a third force. And of course they ended up becoming pretty important in the city, because after when ISIS is in power, it’s the SDF, which is another conglomeration front group for the PKK, the SDF comes with US support and defeats ISIS, but the PKK slash YPG was an essential part of that. So they were there all the way through, and in fact, the book does recall, I believe it made it to the final cut of the book, which is that there is a moment where one of the assemblies, which is very important to the history of the city, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which is kind of like the locus of some of the working class energy in the city, led by Abel Os and Oday and Abdul Hadi, and these people, they were approached by the PKK to try to get them on the payroll, right, because the PKK recognized that these guys had an ear to the street and had a popular following, and Abel Os was a Kurd, so they actually approached him and threw a lot of money at him and said, “Hey, you know, we’ll support you,” but they’d sell their independence and didn’t take one dollar.

John Reimann

What do you mean by they were the third rail?

Anand Gopal
I mean, that you had kind of two forces in the city, you had like the liberal leadership, and then you had kind of the working class side, and they both had very different visions for what the revolution should look like. That was everybody was either on one side or the other, more or less, between like the revolutionary leadership and the revolutionary opposition. Then we had the PKK, which didn’t take a side with either one. But my reading of it is they kind of, had their presence in the city, they’re kind of seeking a way to see which way the wind blew, seeing if they can sort of support and manipulate one side or the other, so in that sense they were the third rail.

John Reimann
My impression of them was that, as well as all the Kurdish parties in different countries where Kurdistan exists, is that yeah, they might see other issues, but only in as much as those issues related to Kurdish independence or Kurdish rights, and everything was kind of subordinated to that question. How did that play out among their members?

Anand Gopal
I think that’s so good way of putting it, because they mostly, the People’s House, the assembly, that’s run by the PKK, were mostly intervening on questions related to Kurds or Arabs and Kurds. So issues where there were problems, where there were disputes, they would try to reconcile the two. So they were very much a Kurdish organization. And by the way, they weren’t the only Kurdish organization, there was the KNC [Kurdish National Council], which is a kind of other side of things, more liberal Kurdish organization. There were other Kurdish organizations that were there. So you know, in Manbij at the time there was a flowering of political expression, so you had so many different political parties and political sort of currents that were present. The PKK slash YPG was primarily politically focused on the Kurdish issues. Militarily, they were supporting rebel groups that were not necessarily only Kurds, they also had some Arabs in it, but they were the ones who were kind of behind them.

John Reimann
Talk a little bit about what the city was like under their rule,

Anand Gopal
So under the rule of Syrian Democratic Forces, this was a group that’s a name that was given to them by the United States, so it’s almost a creation of the US, which consisted of in Menbij consisted of the YPG. As I said before, was the front group of the PKK. Sorry, it’s confusing, but so the YPG, as well as some rebel groups, used to be on the side of the revolution and switched over. Okay, so that that was the city after ISIS, despite their name, Syrian Democratic Forces, several members of the YPG were not Syrian, they were Turkish or Iranian, others were Kurds from other places, they were definitely not democratic. They ruled the city with very authoritarian bent. There was no freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. People were disappeared for speaking out. Important leftists who had played a role in the revolution, were disappeared. Some of them are still missing to this day. They economically were both extremely corrupt and neoliberal, so you know, we hear in the West sometimes you hear on the left about Rojava, so Manbij was part of Rojava geographically, but the reality of Rojava was that it was a profoundly anti-democratic experience and neoliberal experience, actually, as well, and the experience…. What Mambij showed was that there’s a lot of frustration, animosity in the city towards the SDF rulers, because of issues like forced conscription, disappearance, lack of basic rights.

At the same time, I should say there were some positives. I shouldn’t just say the negatives. Number one, Syria historically has been a place where minorities have been oppressed, especially Kurds, hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of Kurds, that had been rendered stateless by the Assad regime, and one of the important positive things that the PKK slash SDF rule did was to improve the status of these minorities and give them more more safety, and kind of include them in the political process a little bit, so that’s very positive. And the second really important thing they did was on gender. They have a very progressive gender policy, every city was run by a systems health council, economics council, etc. One for each sort of ministerial position. There’s a council, and each council is run by one man and one woman. So, there’s a lot of women who are now in positions of authority for the first time. Now, the problem was that these councils, their powers were only on paper, because behind the council was a member of the PKK, who was really running the show. PKK members could be men or women, so there was still a gender egalitarian, but other problems [existed). So, the thing to point out is that Turkey has been a historically hostile force against aspirations of Kurdish self-determination, and in Syria, as well, Turkey has been a male line actor, and so the SDF was acting as a bulwark against Turkey and some Turkish-backed factions, which were really criminal factions. So it’s a complicated situation. There’s some positive things, but we shouldn’t be naive to the fact that they themselves were also very authoritarian,

John Reimann

I’ve seen it personally, if you have a small. minority, that’s well organized, they’re going to control the situation if nobody else is organized,

Anand Gopal
This is a perfect example of that, because in the height of the revolution in advance, when there’s 40 different assemblies and dozen councils and newspapers, probably the most well organized group of all of them, the two most well-organized were the six people in ISIS, and like the nine people in the PKK.

John Reimann
Incidentally, that’s exactly what happened in Occupy Oakland, although in a totally different situation.

Your book ends when Assad left in the end of 2024 Are you still in contact with any of the people that you worked with or interviewed in Syria?

Anand Gopal

Yeah, I talk to them all the time, actually.

John Reimann
Can you talk about how they’re doing?

Anand Gopal
Well, unfortunately, one of the kind of heroes of the book, Hassan Nefi, who suffered many years in prison and became kind of the heart and soul of the revolution, passed away after the book, but he never had a chance to touch liberated Syrian soil, even though he has contributed so much to what happen now. So it’s kind of tragic and unfortunate, but others – it depends on who they are, but like, Abdul Hadi joined the wrong side, he joined ISIS, and is still suffering for those decisions. I do talk to him sometimes. And there’s Mina. She’s worried about the economic situation, so she has not moved back to Syria yet. She in Turkey, and she wants to see which way things are going. Then there’s others. One of the characters we didn’t discuss named, Ibrahim, has lives in Manbij and is a major supporter of the events that have happened, in the sense that he feels that the country is far better off now, even though he has lots of disagreements with the current authorities, he feels they’re succes to express dissent where there wasn’t before,

John Reimann
So with all of what you’ve seen, and people you’re still in contact with – do you have any thoughts on the current regime and its perspectives?

Anand Gopal
The current regime, the first thing to note about it, which I mentioned earlier, is that it didn’t defeat the Assad regime. The Assad regime collapsed due to its own internal contradictions of weaknesses and power. It was a group that was controlling the northwest corner of Syria, called Idlib, so it hardly has the forces to be able to control the entire country. It definitely doesn’t have the constituency, the political constituency to control the entire country. It’s an extremely diverse country, different ethnic groups, different regions, tribal groups, etc. And so they lack that constituency, and what that means is that sometimes they’ve had to turn to repressions like what happened among the Druze, among the Alawites, really terrible stuff on the one hand. On the other hand, economically, I think their vision of this regime is to try to turn Syria into another Gulf state, but not with the oil. So I’m not sure how they’re going to do that, but they do have also a very neoliberal vision of governance, so these are these are causes of concern. I think there’s an authoritarian tendency among these. They put off presidential elections for a few years now.

On the other hand, the energies that were unleashed by the revolution have not been put back in the bottle at this point. Syria of today is freer than the Syria of Assad. You have protests and demonstrations every single day on economic and political issues. You have people critiquing the government, writing op-eds against the government. You have freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. Freedoms can be taken away at any moment, so there’s always a constant struggle to protect the ability of ordinary people to have a voice, but it’s a legacy of the revolution that they’ve been able to do to have these freedoms so far, but it’s also the case that if you look at, I do end the book on this, would say if you look at revolutions historically, they’re not just discrete events, they’re processes that have steps forward and steps backwards, and there will need to be new struggles in Syria against these rulings, that those struggles were inconceivable without having had the history and the tradition of the struggles from 2011 to 24 the late. On work for this,

John Reimann
I think a central part of al Sharaa’s strategy is to attract foreign capital.

Anand Gopal
Yeah.

John Reimann
But in order to do that, if you have constant turmoil, struggles, protests, workers fighting for higher pay, and stuff, it’s not going to be…if I’m a billionaire anywhere in the world, I’m not going to want to invest there.

Anand Gopal
It’s not a good investment climate, that’s for sure, that’s for sure. So, you know, it’s going to be a challenge.

John Reimann
Yeah, and what you describe about basically the class struggle breaking out after Assad forces left Minbij, it seem to me that something like that would develop here in the current situation.

Anand Gopal
Yeah, I think so. I think that it’s more complicated on a countrywide level, but definitely there’s going to be real class divisions that are emerging already, and will continue to emerge, and yeah, we will have to see where that heads, but I think class divisions always emerge, right? There’s no way to way to cover that up, because I’m a socialist, so I think that.

John Reimann
I’ve had discussions, disagreements, with various people who have written a lot of great stuff about Syria, about the revolution there, and some who have not written such great stuff about it, who say about my view of the necessity for revolution including, but beyond just Syria, “Oh, that’s just dreaming, and you’re living in a dream world,” and so on. Well, when I think about them, I think about what you wrote, “revolution is precisely one of those extraordinary events that can render impractical ideas workable and unthinkable ideas thinkable.”

Anand Gopal
Yeah. Now we can give all sorts of sober analyses of why the Arab Spring broke out, but nobody before it happened could have ever guessed it could have happened. I think that there’s a lot of turmoil and upheaval around the world, Nepal, Sri Lanka, you know, there’s been uprisings, popular rebellions all over the place. So the question to me isn’t, but when you’re going to see another kind of upheaval, and the other question is alluding to what we were saying before, are there going to be forces that are organized well, or be able to lead these uprisings in a fruitful direction or not,

John Reimann
I had had hopes for the revolution in Iran because they would be immune from the lure of Islamic fundamentalism, because they lived through it. But from what I understand, there’s a lot of division between the people in Iran and Suria, but they really have such a natural strong alliance.

Anand Gopal
I don’t know how deep those divisions are, or if they’re just the kind of top-down ideological views, because at the end of the day, Syrian people generally loathe the Islamic Republic of Iran, because what Iran has done. I mean, it’s like Syria doesn’t have a big Shia population, it was ruled by Alawites, but it was a political choice by Iran to ally with the Assad regime. And so what people see when they see Iran is you see the regime intervening in their country. I talked to friends who support protesters in Iran, because they see that they have the common enemy. I mean, the Iranian neo-colonialism of Iraq and Syria isn’t in the interest of Iranian workers and working people either. So it’s not like they’re benefiting from this. They’re definitely not. The economy in Iran is in tatters, and it’s definitely not on the benefit of people in Iraq or Syria. So, there is a shared interest of class Iraqis and Syrians and Iranians against a common enemy. Unfortunately, with the war, I think, maybe some of the revolutionary energy in Iran [has dissipated], because now you have an outside power trying to sow chaos in the country.

John Reimann
I wasn’t going to raise this, but I can’t help but doing so: The view that revolution for democracy has to be led by the working class, and also that it has to spread, can’t be just in one country alone, and everything that you write about in Syria, and also what you see, like in the Arab Spring, is like a living example of that, because really the Arab Spring talked about the banner was for freedom, but it was the neoliberal so-called reforms that were really what generated it,

Anand Gopal
Yeah. I believe there’s a book of results and prospects to cover something like that.

John Reimann
Somebody wrote something like that.

Anand Gopal
Some of these dynamics were tested.

John Reimann
So the final question for you is, what’s your next book? Would you ever think about writing something, a book about the United States?

Anand Gopal
This last book took eight years, 2000 interviews, just inordinate amounts of fact checking and rechecking and triangulation and cross checking, and it was exhausting. The conclusion I drew after all that is, I just want to make things up. So I’m writing a novel. I’m writing fiction just to take a break a little bit from the research-intensive approach, but the novel does take place in United States.

John Reimann
Okay! I look forward to reading that novel and interviewing you about it when it comes out.