The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off Assad

“Manbij. May God protect it,” the great traveler Ibn Jubayr of Valencia wrote in June 1184. “Its skies are bright, its aspect handsome, its breezes fragrant and perfumed, and while its day gives generous shade, its night is all enchantment.” These raptures eluded me when I visited the city 800 years later, in 1987, and wrote, “It was a dull, lifeless place. Either it had lost its glory, or Ibn Jubayr, like many travelers before and since, had exaggerated: Manbij was, simply, a dump.”

But “Days of Love and Rage,” the journalist Anand Gopal’s epic tribute to Manbij’s population during Syria’s 14-year civil war, forces me to recant. The heroic beauty of the city’s people, as Gopal portrays them, struggling for freedom with its attendant glories and travails more than compensates for the eyesore that is its motley collection of concrete hovels and Baath Party monstrosities.

There have been many books about Syria since the earliest days of unrest in 2011, but the closest kin to “Days of Love and Rage” is “Homage to Catalonia,” George Orwell’s indelible 1938 portrait of the fractious partisans struggling to save the Spanish republic from dictatorship. Like Orwell’s masterpiece, Gopal’s account is destined to stand out as the definitive text of the war.

Gopal, a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author of a similarly rich telling of America’s misadventures in Afghanistan, “No Good Men Among the Living,” labored on this book for eight years. With the help of a research team that comprised half a dozen locals — “all protagonists of the revolution in Manbij,” he writes — Gopal collected 2,000 interviews, watched hundreds of on-scene wartime videos and read thousands of texts to tell the story of six ambitious rebels in a remote provincial town that even many Syrians had not heard of until war and revolution engulfed it.

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A History of Modern Syria — the people at the heart of their own story

Daniel Neep’s excellent account corrects the traditional narrative to show a nation surviving and resisting the powers that have vied to dominate it.

Syria is as ancient, and as complex, as civilisation itself. Lying between antiquity’s great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it functioned as a bridge, sometimes a wall, between them. Rarely a conqueror, it adapted over millennia to invaders from all points on the compass: Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mongols, Turks and French.

All left indelible marks despite their ephemeral presence. On seeing Syria’s historic capital, Damascus, in 1867, Mark Twain reflected, “She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.”

It was only in 1946 that Syria, albeit in truncated form, governed itself after 26 years of French imperial rule. Its freedom of action remained provisional while outsiders — the US and Soviet Union on the global stage, Egypt and Hashemite Iraq within the Arab region — vied to dominate it. The struggle continues today between Turkey and Israel, whose armies occupy respectively the north and the south.

Daniel Neep’s excellent, comprehensive history of “modern” Syria corrects the traditional narrative of a passive Syria by placing its people at the heart of their story. As well as considering “the usual suspects of European colonialism, American imperialism and Soviet expansionism”, he also looks to “seemingly impersonal economic currents” that have played “a crucial yet often overlooked role in remaking modern Syria”.

His account begins in the mid-19th century, during what Turkish historian Selim Deringil calls “the Ottoman twilight”, when sultans in Constantinople grappled with modernising their empire to preserve it from European encroachment…

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Taliban Fighters and Truck in Kabul, August 17, 2021

Imperial graveyard: the sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it

Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and failing – twice more, in 1878 and 1919. Next came the Soviet Union. Its triumphant conquest of 1979 ended ten years later in humiliation. The “exceptionalism” of the US proved less than exceptional in 2021, when its armed forces, having lingered for a record two decades, departed in such a hurry that they left thousands of their local collaborators behind. Despite the expenditure of $1 trillion and the loss of 2,311 American and an estimated 95,000 Afghan lives, America’s long-term impact was as negligible as Britain’s and Russia’s. Soon, it will be China’s turn. If Xi Jinping goes for it, my money is on the Afghans.

Jon Lee Anderson, whose excellent New Yorker frontline dispatches are collected in To Lose a War, sympathizes with the Afghans’ predicament. They owe their woes not only to foreigners, but to homegrown warriors:

“In a forty-five-year period, they have lived through a decades-long Russian military occupation followed by a police state dictatorship followed by a bloody civil war followed by a six-year Taliban tyranny followed by twenty years of a western-leaning quasi-democracy, only to revert to Taliban control.”

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Review of One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This

To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World

Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary.

Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired – “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both. Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.

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U.S. President Donald Trump with new Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa

In the “New Syria,” violence and high hopes

Since I left Syria last January, Alawi and Christian friends have sent me almost daily messages about killings, beatings, house break-ins, threats and intimidation.

When the dictator was overthrown, Syrians hailed the new leader with such fervor that they lifted him in his car and carried him shoulder-high through the streets of Damascus. Men beating their chests chanted the old Arabic oath of fealty, “With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice for you!”

That momentous event occurred, not at the end of last year when Bashar al Assad fled to Moscow, but in November 1970 when Bashar’s father, Hafez, overthrew a previous tyrant. An old Syrian friend who witnessed that event told me he watched crowds last December, 54 years later, cheering the newest ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa. The latest transfer of power left him less with nostalgia than foreboding. Assad père, like Sharaa, began his tenure with what Syria historian Patrick Seale called “an immediate and considerable advantage: the regime he displaced was so detested that any alternative came as a relief.” If modern Syrian history taught any lesson, it was that deliverance from a wretched past did not guarantee a brighter future.

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Syrian president Hafez Assad declares war on Israel, October 6, 1973

Liberation Daze

Hope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria.

When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women not only drove cars, they worked in offices, shops, and restaurants. Some chose to wear headscarves, but many chose not to.

At the same time, billboards reminded citizens of their duty to the Baath Party’s founding motto: unity, freedom, socialism. Children wore military-style uniforms at school, and informants spied on their neighbors. The image of Hafez al-Assad, who had been president for just over two years, was ubiquitous. When I visited Damascus some months later, protesters threw eggs at a foreign dignitary. I asked my philosophy tutor at the American University back in Beirut whether he thought the Syrian government approved. “If the Baath Party doesn’t want people to throw eggs,” he said, “the chickens don’t lay eggs.”

That was the Syria I came to know over fifty years, through wars, attempted coups, the death of Hafez, and the accession of his son Bashar. It seemed unchanging, unchangeable, even throughout fourteen years of civil war. And then, on December 8 last year, it all changed. Assad was gone…

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Syria’s New Rulers Get a Makeover

The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered her to cover her hair. Another told me a Sunni friend – a friend – threatened to kill her. A Christian businessman I’ve known for years texted that he would no longer send me anything political via WhatsApp, because the new government was watching.

The atmosphere was already changing from what I had observed at the beginning of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government under its leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Shara had dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, along with the battle fatigues from his years leading Sunni Muslim fundamentalists against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. With a trimmed beard and a new suit, he was receiving and visiting fellow heads of state from the Middle East and beyond. An American delegation was so impressed that the US revoked its $10 million bounty on Shara’s head for terrorist crimes.

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Beirut Gets a Reprieve—but for How Long?

If history is any guide, the latest Lebanese ceasefire may well have broken down by the time you read this.

Whenever I hear the word “ceasefire” about Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil war there, in 1975–76, we would give numbers to each successive ceasefire. Our tally ran out of steam after 100.

Each time, something—a Christian boy dating a Muslim boy’s sister, a car theft, a drug deal gone wrong, flying a party flag in the wrong neighborhood—would kick-start a fresh wave of violence. One of Beirut’s early front lines was a street between Christian and Muslim neighborhoods. Western journalists—of whom I, as a young stringer for various publications and radio networks, was barely one—left the St. George Hotel bar long enough to observe exchanges of fire, pick up a few quotes, gather some color, and file in time for dinner. Then we would wait for the next ceasefire.

The fighting escalated with the introduction of artillery and snipers, whose favored targets seemed to be women and children. There was a period when the violence paused at the end of each month. It took us a while to realize why: It was payday for the militiamen, who held their fire long enough for the banks to reopen. Checks cashed, they started firing again. I am not making this up.

Lebanon’s war has taken many forms since then: Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organization; Maronites against other Maronites; Maronites versus Druze; a faction of the Lebanese Army against the Syrian Army; the Shiite Amal militia against the Palestinians; Israel versus Syria; and the recurring conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The one constant is the ceasefire: a false promise of peace that gives the belligerents a chance to regroup and rearm.

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Aftermath of IDF strike on Bachoura 2024

Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously

After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite visitors “to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be.” In return the visitors “must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one.” The “lost grace” of Maurilia approximates Beirut’s, which likewise “can be appreciated only…in the old postcards.” It is with nostalgic regret that from time to time I examine postcards in the decaying souvenir shops of Beirut’s once-fashionable Hamra district. They depict, in sepia and color-tint, Ottoman mansions, lush gardens, venerable covered souks, a seafront promenade, ancient mosques, churches and synagogues, Roman columns amid metropolitan chaos, and a magnificent central plaza originally named the Place des Canons. After World War I, it was renamed the Place des Martyrs to honor the nationalist partisans whom the Turkish military governor, General Ahmed Jamal Pasha, hanged there in 1916 for defying his crumbling empire.

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The expendables

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be “another Iranian student” approaching the building. “Then”, writes Ben Macintyre, “he saw the sub-machine gun.”

The “student” fired a round that shattered the half-open glass security door and lacerated PC Lock’s face. Joined by two other armed men, he rushed inside, and soon three more armed confederates arrived. Thus begins Macintyre’s perfectly paced and thrilling account of the six-day standoff between the British government and young zealots seeking justice for their fellow Arabs in the Iranian province that they called Arabistan and Persians knew as Khuzestan. Thirty-one people – diplomats, local staff, journalists and visa applicants – were in the building when the gang began rounding them up and threatening their lives. Five managed to escape in the initial confusion, leaving twenty-six as hostages to be bargained against ninety-one political prisoners in Iran. The new Islamic government in Iran refused to consider making concessions, and Margaret Thatcher’s year-old administration would not grant the terrorists safe passage out of the country with their hostages.

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