What made Syrians fight for revolution?

0:00The Observer Hello, it's Basha Cummings here and you're listening to the Sloan Newscast. Today I'm joined by Annan Gopal, the author of an incredible book, Days of Love and Rage, which was published earlier this year. It's a truly epic tribute to the population of the city of Manbij in Syria, and what they went through during Syria's 14-year civil war. It's about the struggle for freedom, the struggle to do politics yourself in your community, after years of dictatorship, and it's about love and longing and horror. It is an incredible feat of journalism that is well worth your time, and so I'm thrilled that Annan is here with us to talk about Syria, and I'm joined too by my colleague Chloe Hedge Muthay, who recently published an investigation into Asma Al-Assad, the former president's wife, which investigated the role that she played in the war crimes committed during that time,

1:04and Chloe previously worked on the hugely acclaimed podcast called Mayday about the White Helmets in Syria. So we're going to have a conversation about Syria and Annan's reporting, but let's start with some figures that have really stuck with me when I was reading about the work that you put into this book and the time that it took you to write. So am I right in thinking this was eight years of reporting, 2,000 interviews, hundreds of videos, and thousands of text messages? Yes, that's right. So tell me when did you embark on this project, and when did you know that this was a project that was going to come together in this way? Well, I've been reporting on Syria since the start of the uprising in 2011, and in most instances, I was coming into villages and towns after pretty horrific massacres that had been committed by the Assad regime. So I was meeting people often in the worst moments of their lives, and in the midst of this, I heard this story about the city of Manbij,

2:09which by the way is a place that not many Syrians themselves really knew much about before 2011. It's a city of about 150,000 people in the north of the country. I heard that they had managed to overthrow the dictatorship just in their city, and they were trying to build a democracy from scratch. And so that was really captivating for me, because when we think about the Middle East, it's a place that's extraordinarily chaotic and complex, and there's different factions, and it's often seems pretty depressing to read about it. But here is a kind of hopeful story, and so I was interested in that, and so when I got to Manbij eventually, I realized that actually, to do justice to what had happened, I needed to interview a lot of people. I was fortunate that I was able to hire researchers who were themselves protagonists in the events, and they were able to interview their friends and comrades, and in this way, we were able to mass a pretty large set of data that I could use to write the story. What is the story that you end up telling in this book? The book follows the lives of six individuals from different walks of life, all of whom never gave a thought to politics before 2011.

3:17You have bricklayers and people who describe themselves as housewives, university students, etc. But all of whom were thrust into the Arab Spring, which was peaceful protest against the dictator in 2011, and they found themselves arrested, tortured, shot at, for protesting for freedom and democracy. They succeed eventually in overthrowing the government in their city, so now they all of a sudden are faced with a situation in which there's no authority in this city of 150,000. They have to figure out how to keep the streets clean, the lights on, how to keep schools running. So now all of a sudden these people who never thought much about politics before were confronted with the exigencies of running a city, basically, and so they set up councils, the set of bodies to do so. And in the process, they experimented with democracy, and in many ways I think they were forced by a dint of circumstance to think outside the box for what democracy actually looks like.

4:18There's a really beautiful little description that you write. This is a bit later once the people of Membij overthrow the Assad regime around them, and they start doing politics themselves. And I think somebody described it maybe in a review of your book, that there's a sort of prometian element, is that they sort of, they went all guns blazing towards democracy, and then when they got some semblance of it, they realized how difficult it is to do, and how much negotiation, but you write, yet when the people of Membij overthrew the government, independent councils and assemblies and newspapers and charities and unions appeared overnight, in other words, the people of Membij started doing politics. And it's such a, it's again that sort of sense that the chess club or the local newspaper or the local charity is as important to sort of how we live our lives and how we do our politics as it is, the kind of city councils, and you know, Chloe, when you were doing your reporting throughout, you know, over the last few years in Syria,

5:22had you been aware of these kind of flourishings or sort of local attempts to do things themselves, people fighting back against the government, tell me sort of on the other side of this. I was on the outside, so I'd read about these committees in articles, but never in the sort of intimate detail that I got in a NAND book. So actually seeing this kind of play out in one place was fascinating, and that for me actually one of the really stark moments that I'd never thought about in this kind of intimate detail that told me how repressed the society was and where it was going was the moment where these descriptions of the first protests and how they decided between a group of friends, and then they're standing outside the mosque as the crowds are coming out of the mosque onto the street. And there's the moment of like, am I going to be the first person to open my mouth and make the first cry of democracy? That moment of can I have the courage to open my mouth and be the first person? And it's just amazing because it just shows you how repressed it was and how difficult it was for the first person to make the first chant, but it was fascinating reading about how these people who had never experienced democracy in their lives, they had no idea what it was.

6:37So I'm making a first attempt and each of them has a very different idea of what democracy is and often those clash. Well no doubt we would have slightly different ideas about it ourselves because it is this, it's a word that we all pile different assumptions into as a result of this eight year project. What have you emerged thinking about democracy and politics and the Western understanding of it versus a kind of localized understanding of it? Well I did have a lot of my assumptions challenged in doing this research and I would say the biggest way is that like I think most Americans I tended to think of democracy as being able to choose your leaders every two or four years. So basically it was an exercise in the ballot box for about a few minutes and then the rest of the time you just kind of recede and worry about your own business. Looking at the ways in which the people I describe in the book conceived of democracy they thought of it very differently and actually it goes back to more of the way some of the ancient Greeks thought about democracy.

7:41So one way of translating the word democracy is it's the rule of the people but often in ancient Greek context what they meant was demos meant the non-aletes. So another way of measuring democracy is to the extent to which non-aletes ordinary people have power in a society. And the question of how much they should have power how much power they should have and how it should be wielded those are tricky questions and those are the kinds of questions that were being debated on the ground. Part of the book is actually exploring that experience but it's also a book that's about the sort of intimate experiences of people because when we think of a conflict like Syria or any conflict we tend to think in ideological terms. You know there's secularists and Islamists or terrorists or liberals or whatever. It does matter but at the same time a lot of people's decisions had to do with really personal things. So there's a lot of love stories in the book there's a lot of jealousy and rivalries and I was very interested in trying to explore how people's intimate circumstances get refracted into a political stance and that's part of the story of the book.

8:46Tell me when you started to sit down and write it how did you think about balancing those two forces the sort of the everyday mundane and these big philosophical ideas? Something I learned over the years in interviewing people in these types of conflicts settings is that when you ask people these big philosophical questions or these big political questions like why did you pick up a gun and fight against the government for example. You tend to get I think fairly uninteresting answers you'll get boilerplate answers and so I started to veer away from that and ask people what tell me about the village you grew up in. And what you capture I mean you've sort of alluded to it but the nuances of people's feelings towards Assad or towards ISIS or Islamic extremism. Initially some of the people that you follow are actually really quite excited about Assad and they feel that he might be a reforming influence. Just talked to me about sort of I suppose we know about this moment of rupture in 2011 and 2012 when it really escalated.

9:49But that period just before what did you find out about that moment of hope before you know it became a kind of flagrant war? Well when Assad came to power the younger Assad in 2000 there was a lot of hope and there's people that I profiled in the book who actually led rallies through the city with flags and you know hailing the new leader and there was a hope that the country would modernize its economy. There was a hope even more so that they would open politically so there would be room for political parties freedom of speech because under Assad there was no freedom of speech no freedom of assembly. That's specials fall that's right right who had been bound for about 30 years at that point. You know if you wanted to form a football club or a chess club you technically needed to get permission from the authorities. It was a society in which there were secret police everywhere. It was teaming with spies. You couldn't trust your neighbors. People would disappear for having said something in private to a friend and would not be seen for years.

10:57This was the environment of fear that people were living under Assad. So there was a hope that Bashar Assad he's younger he was educated in the UK. He might have a different outlook and he also made some gestures towards that early on so there was a hope that there would be an opening. He turned out that was not the case. He proved to be as controlling as his father. And while there was economic changes it was done in a way in which it widened the gap between Richard and poor and it really forced millions of working class serians out of their homes and villages and into Gulf states into a foreign countries where they lived a very precarious existence. If we zoom out a little the idea of sort of the labels that we attribute sort of fundamentalist or liberal or progressive onto people because one of the things one of the stories that I read of yours last year that has really stayed with me is a piece of reporting you did about Al-Hull which is in Syria, it's a prison camp home to thousands of people who had been connected to ISIS or had been through association sort of rounded up and put there.

12:08Imagine Guantanamo is a city and 50% of its residents are children. I mean that's what we're talking about a city. And you follow particular woman, Jahan who's the sort of backbone of that piece. This piece I should say was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And there's one paragraph that has really stuck with me. But you're writing about so her husband had joined ISIS they had moved to Racka they had to keep moving to escape the bombs and she ended up in this prison Al-Hull he had died. And you write she realized for the first time that she hated Ahmed for his stubbornness his zealotry his blood lust his willingness to destroy her life. She hated her parents who she told me had tossed us out like garbage she hated her government for plunging her country into horror. She hated the Americans the UN and the entire world and she swore that she'd never cry for anyone for anything again. And what's striking to me about particularly that description of her rage but also all of the people that you interview in that piece some of whom had joined ISIS willingly some of whom had joined out of desperation some of whom had been murdered.

13:15And some of whom had been married to ISIS fighters who didn't feel they had a choice to get out of those relationships. The level of empathy that you that you find for these people is what sets this piece apart for me in all the things I've read about Syria and ISIS. And I was curious about your experience of reporting that story you obviously spent a lot of time in the camp you talked to a lot of people particularly here in the West. And you had such a kind of terrified idea of ISIS and who was in it and you in this piece kind of explode all of those assumptions. So tell me how did you firstly get into the camp and what was your experience of talking to people? Yeah, I mean so because ISIS at one point had controlled almost a third of Syria and so millions of people were living in ISIS territory. And of course that meant there were ISIS fighters but lots of civilians, just families who had ended up there or had been from there. And then when ISIS was defeated by the US everyone was heard into what it's a prison because the people who are in there cannot leave and their guard towers.

14:20There are guns trained on them. As well inside this prison, ISIS was able to reconstitute itself as a kind of de facto authority inside. So this is essentially like a tense city is how you describe it. It's sort of temporary city. Mentebe temporary but ended up being there for years, yes exactly. And so ISIS was able to reconstitute itself and so it was this odd situation where technically the camp was under the control of the US backed Kurdish forces. But in fact actually ISIS was controlling it from inside. So I was eager to try to understand this and expose this and because this was happening under our watch, US watch. And so the challenge was it's not easy. It wasn't easy to get in. So it took a lot of doing eventually I was able to enter with an aid organization and start meeting people.

15:20I went in and I would start sitting with people and sitting in tents and talking to people. And I realized that there are so many stories here that could illuminate not just the course of the Syrian conflict but as you said it couldn't tell us something about ISIS. And so what I did is I hired some of the people in the camp to interview their friends and to interview their relatives. And so they came up with hundreds of testimonies. There was many people who had a story in which they had nothing to do with ISIS and just kind of by sheer bad luck ended up here. And then there are other people who actually joined ISIS. What I found among the people who joined ISIS was that for the most part they were ordinary people who really weren't religious in any sense before 2011. And in fact in my book I do profile a character named Abd al-Hadi who kind of exemplifies as he was somebody who was secular, he was a footballer, he was smoking hash and playing video games.

16:24And when the protests began he throws himself into the protests and is doing it for freedom and democracy. Eventually as events transpire he begins to feel deeply embittered at what he sees as the inequities that emerge in the revolution itself. A lack of security, lots of different armed factions, got off between the rich and the poor and he gets swayed by ISIS's populist message and joins ISIS. It's only after he joins ISIS that he begins to be what we may call radicalized or begins to sort of see the world through ISIS's lens. And I saw that story, that trajectory again and again, where people coming from all walks of life who were not religious or political and for one reason rather they end up in ISIS and once they join they become committed salads. So that's on the one side and then the other side there are those who kind of just had bad luck and so jihad is a woman that I profile in this piece.

17:26She marries this man and before 2011 and he wasn't a very religious person. He suffers a series of personal tragedies and is disgusted by the corruption that he sees among the secular rebels and so he drifts towards ISIS. But this choice kind of ends up resulting in her being dragged along to all these places around Syria and it's what ultimately leads her to end up in the camp. I wanted to say that this trajectory into ISIS for me was one of the most interesting things both in the piece, the Al-Hol, the piece in the New Yorker and also in the book, which is that we have this idea of ISIS as a group of kind of fundamentalist religious people. But actually I reading about it in the book I see that it has so many more parallels to the populist right in Europe that this idea that it's an alternative to corrupt elites that are basically taking advantage of you and that the people that really found ISIS attractive found it as a sort of antidote to corruption, as a voice for the poor and the unrepresented.

18:38The religious aspect of it was not so important, I mean other than to say that we're giving an alternative to democracy that's in some way pure and less open to corruption but that it was attractive to people who weren't religious. And you say that explicitly in your reporting that the sort of western idea is somebody sort of sitting at a laptop being radicalized by beheading videos or you know, and in fact there's a line I think you write about how refreshing an idea it was for them. That they had found in ISIS this idea that you could be accountable to something bigger than yourself. And putting it that way you think well of course that sounds that's a powerful idea that has existed for millennia. No wonder it's drawn so many ordinary people towards it who were living in a country that was violent and dysfunctional. It makes it feel so much more understandable which is what felt so powerful about that piece. Absolutely and ISIS was really adept at playing on people's feelings of a lack of dignity for instance in Membige which I described in the book.

19:43There was crime, there was insecurity, there was an affordability crisis as rents were going very high as fuel costs and food costs were very high. And what ISIS told to the people was the reason we're in this mess is because you have these out of touch elites who don't care about your needs. They have all these words about like international human rights and international and all that but that's not putting food on the table that's not keeping you safe. We here have actually the resources in our own tradition to address this problem which is to go back to the time of the prophet and where they claimed there was no rich and poor you could leave your doors open at night etc. So we are proud people but we've been trampled on by these globalist you know elite values and we need to recover our tradition. That was the message that was said to people and when people were actually dealing with real physical material insecurity it became an appealing message.

20:48Obviously your book moves towards this point of the Assad regime falling and we've spent the last few months thinking a lot about that moment and what became possible in terms of reporting and investigation now that all the documents are more or less available. And you government tell me for somebody who spent so much time in Syria over the last decade how the fall hit you and how it impacted your reporting and what I suppose it now makes possible. Well I had handed in the manuscript for this book about like a week before Assad's part. Terrible time. Yeah and it was a really depressing ending initially I have to say. And then you didn't see it coming either. No in fact I think I went on television at some point and said like two weeks earlier like this regime would never fall so go see what I know. I'm glad I wasn't alone in that. But even the rebels themselves had no idea to be honest when I've talked to them and they thought that when the initial push was happening in November 2024 they thought this was like a skirmish.

21:55They didn't realize that there's this sort of kind of perfect storm of geopolitical events in Russia's embroiled in Ukraine. Hezbollah which was supporting the regime had been weakened, Iran was weakened. All of that just kind of happened at once and so everybody was surprised I think. For me I was initially following it from my home in New York and frantically texting my friends and colleagues and others that I've gone to know over the years. When he finally fell I felt that all of the people that I had interviewed who had endured so much suffering and so much loss. Perhaps in some way it wasn't for nothing that they had experienced those things that there was some outcome in there that could be hopeful. At the same time for the characters in the book I think many of them felt it was bittersweet because at the same time those people who had gone no longer with them couldn't experience that moment. After the fall I went to Syria and I went to Membish a couple days after and reported and that's the new ending of the book.

23:02Cliff Hanger by the book. Clowy, given that you had talked about doing an investigation into Asma for a long time before we actually started doing it and the fall made a lot of what you've reported in the last year possible. So just tell me sort of from an investigative perspective what was available to you in the last year that wasn't previously beyond just being able to go there. So Anand was operating in what Syrians called the Free Syria which was the areas that were outside of regime control. Well he didn't have access to and nobody really had access to was the regime held areas and the regime itself the people on the inside. And that now is starting to open up so not only do we have now all the documents and this was a regime that was absolutely obsessive in its sort of Soviet documentation of everything that it did so we have this incredible trove of evidence that not even the Nazis left behind.

24:07That still needs to be picked through and there are efforts now to digitalize this and access it. But we also starting to speak to people on the inside and even in the inner circle because the way in which Bashar al-Assad and his closest cronies fled the country was to abandon everybody else that was on the inside. And so there is an enormous sense of betrayal even among the inner circles of the regime and that has led to people slowly opening up and beginning to speak. That is allowing us to see how this thing really operated what was the mindset on the inside and we're still picking away at that. And thank you so much for coming in and talking to us and best of luck with the book and all the awards you are no doubt going to be nominated for. Tell us what is next on your horizon a break or another story or what are you off to doing? I'm working on a novel at the moment because eight years of chasing down facts and fact checking is warning me out and I just want to make things up.

25:08Well, best of luck with it. Thank you Chloe for joining us. The Observer. I'm Sam Cotes and I'm Ann Nicole Roy. Britain has a new Prime Minister and every day from 7.45 am will help you make sense of the day ahead in just 20 minutes. That means taking you inside Westminster with our forensic insight sharp analysis and the stories behind the headlines. The battles in Parliament to the conversations shaping government will set you up each morning for the day ahead in British politics. Hit follow and listen to politics at Sam and Ann's wherever you get your podcasts.