Anand Gopal is cautiously optimistic. Much has happened in Syria since he completed the research for Days of Love and Rage , a sprawling non-fiction narrative about a city’s remarkable efforts to resist the rule of Bashar al-Assad. Covering the city of Manbij’s political and social life from Assad’s rise in 2000 to his regime’s collapse in December 2024 (but focusing most intensely on the developments between 2011 and 2016, at the height of the Syrian Civil War), the book was published this past March. Gopal, a contributing writer at the New Yorker magazine, gives readers a primer on recent Syrian history all through the lens of a mid-sized northern city. The remarkable development of Assad’s fall from power – which gives the book a satisfying sense of closure – has ushered in a myriad of questions about the fate of the country under the presidency of Ahmed al-Sharaa.
I think the most striking thing about Manbij today is that people are engaging in politics. Whether that’s debates, organizing political parties, going on protests, that – more than anything else – is what was outlawed in the fifty-year dictatorship.
“[The people are] optimistic and they say this is not the kind of government we want,” Gopal says from his New York City home. Although he has now moved on to other writing projects and left Manbij, where he spent time with the community of rebels and citizens over the course of several years, he still keeps up with how they are faring under the different political circumstances. “I think the most striking thing about Manbij today is that people are engaging in politics. Whether that’s debates, organizing political parties, going on protests, that – more than anything else – is what was outlawed in the fifty-year dictatorship.”
But there was quite a bit of politics in the northern Syrian city during the Assad years – it’s just that it was all illicit, swept under the rug. Through the efforts of a few charismatic individuals who come off as unforgettable characters in Gopal’s book, the city managed to emancipate itself from the regime in the summer of 2012. After doing so, Gopal says, “all of a sudden the people of Manbij found themselves in a circumstance in which they had to figure out how to keep the streetlights on, how to keep the schools running, how to get the garbage collected.”
These everyday problems became the impetus for an explosion of democratic thinking. The victorious Manbij rebels wanted to implement a representative system of government – encompassing everything that they had lacked under the Assad regime – but building consensus about what form this should take wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed.
Soon, there were visible fissures. The Revolutionary Council, formed by figures like the poet and ex-prisoner Hasan Nefi and business owner Abel Os, approached governance in a hands-off fashion, emphasizing liberal principles like freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. As they saw it, in Gopal’s words, “freedom [meant] being left alone by authorities to do what we want to do.” But they were soon challenged by another group, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, “which tended to be more poor and working-class citizens, [and] were saying we need to have some kind of restrictions on the market, and maybe we need to have some means of redistributing wealth from the very wealthy to everybody.”
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It was a conflict that was never resolved. An incipient ISIS presence in the city gradually grew until the Islamists seized power in January 2014, bringing this experiment in grassroots governance to an end after 18 months. Gopal stresses, though, that within this time frame, the tensions of figuring out how to implement a democracy were deeply productive in their own right.
“I think people in Syria actually have a lot to teach people in the West about democracy because we identify democracy in a very stilted way. Here was another form of democracy, a more disciplinary democracy that emerged organically. And the protagonists of that story were not political theorists for the most part. Many of them had not read Tocqueville…. They were just participating in daily life and dealing with the exigencies of daily life and realizing the best way often to do that is to do that collectively, where everyone has a voice. So in that sense, I think democracy is as indigenous to the region as it is to anywhere else.”
Tragically, though, this nascent democracy was brought down from inside. The initial effort to empower citizens in the early years of the civil war gradually proved vulnerable to ISIS-associated extremists, who began to infiltrate the city’s political proceedings. Terrible changes gradually accumulated: show trials, inhumane punishments, assassinations for dissenters. “It is an irony,” Gopal explains, “that it was in this democratic moment that ISIS was able to come to power, and a lot of democratic revolutionaries were facing real challenges. For example, as ISIS began to assert itself, there were debates about, ‘Should we ban them, should we outlaw their speech?’ ISIS was using the black flags. ‘Should we ban black flags?’ Others are saying, ‘We can’t do that, that’s a violation of free speech.’ And these are very thorny questions that any democracy has to contend with.”
There is freedom of speech assembly today in Syria. You can criticize the government in a way you could never do before. Whether that will persist or whether it will degrade remains to be seen.
When ISIS fully took control of the city, women were hit the hardest. Initially, women were quite active in the political culture of Manbij, with one known as Mina Saba founding a group called Women of Freedom, which staged workshops on figures like Gandhi. During the revolution against Assad, they contributed in ways that allowed the effort to sustain itself at times where the men were demoralized or incapacitated. Of Mina, Gopal says: “She sees that her revolution is actually a two-front revolution. On the one hand, it’s against the dictator, but on the other hand, it’s also against some of the chauvinistic patriarchal mores that people in the city face.”
But Mina ended up spending many of the subsequent years boarded up in her home with her family, unable to participate in an ISIS-run society. Even so, small acts of resistance continued. One of the more moving scenes of the book features her and other restless women putting on a play making fun of ISIS’s extreme social conservatism to a laughing home audience. Now that Manbij is free from the caliphate’s rule, Gopal says that, “The effects [of women’s political involvement] are still felt to this day. If you see the role of women in public life in Manbij, some of them still point to the experience of those 18 months and how it emboldened them to take part.”
Gopal’s skill at focusing the story on the circumstances of women in revolution and in democracy shows his most impressive strengths as a writer. He is able to direct attention to the domestic and the intimate in stories that are typically told through the registers of guns and violence. He tells his accounts of the rebels courting their wives with the same intensity as their efforts to form a new government, and carefully chronicles the effects that attaching oneself to a life of protest has on the family.
Manbij was relieved of ISIS by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces in 2016. Under the watch of the American military – during a complicated period that led to both the return and displacement of many of the characters in Gopal’s book – the city is now administered by a city council in a fresh attempt at democracy. On the whole, Gopal says, “Syria today is reaping the benefits of the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who gave lives for some version of freedom and democracy. There is freedom of speech assembly today in Syria. You can criticize the government in a way you could never do before. Whether that will persist or whether it will degrade remains to be seen.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.