Burning Country

Leila Al-Shami, Robin Yassin-Kassab

Description

*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017*

In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrown of the government of of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a warzone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land.

Burning Country explores the horrific and complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first-hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists among many others. These stories are expertly interwoven with a trenchant analysis of the brutalisation of the conflict and the militarisation of the uprising, of the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of governments in Syria and elsewhere in exacerbating those violent processes.

With chapters focusing on ISIS and Islamism, regional geopolitics, the new grassroots revolutionary organisations, and the worst refugee crisis since World War Two, Burning Country is a vivid and groundbreaking look at a modern-day political and humanitarian nightmare.
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Revolution From Above
2. Bashaar’s First Decade
3. Revolution From Below
4. The Grassroots
5. Militarisation and Liberation
6. Scorched Earth – The Rise of the Islamisms
7. Dispossession and Exile
8. Culture Revolutionised
9. The Failure of the Elites
10. The Start of Solidarity
Epilogue
List of organisations
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• Terrorism

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783718016
• Langue: English

Extrait

Burning Country
 
Burning Country
Syrians in Revolution and War
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami
 
First published 2016 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami 2016
The right of Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3627 5 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3622 0 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1800 9 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1802 3 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1801 6 EPUB eBook
 
 
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the European Union and United States of America
 
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Maps
1
Revolution from Above
2
Bashaar’s First Decade
3
Revolution from Below
4
The Grassroots
5
Militarisation and Liberation
6
Scorched Earth: The Rise of the Islamisms
7
Dispossession and Exile
8
Culture Revolutionised
9
The Failure of the Elites
10
The Start of Solidarity
Epilogue: October 2015
Further Reading
Notes
Index
 
List of Abbreviations
ANA
Activists News Association
ASP
Arab Socialist Party
CDF
Committees for the Defense of Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria
FSA
Free Syrian Army
GCC
Gulf Cooperation Council
HRAS
Human Rights Association in Syria
ISI
Islamic State in Iraq
ISIS
Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (Daesh)
KNC
Kurdistan National Council
KRG
Kurdish Regional Government
LCCs
Local Coordination Committees
NCB
National Coordination Body for Democratic Change
PFLP-GC
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command
PKK
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê)
PLO
Palestine Liberation Organization
PYD
Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrator)
SHRIL
Syrian Human Rights Information Link
SNC
Syrian National Council
SSNP
Syrian Social Nationalist Party
SRCU
Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union
SRF
Syrian Revolutionaries Front
SRGC
Syrian Revolution General Commission
SRY
Syrian Revolutionary Youth
UAR
United Arab Republic
 
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those, named or anonymous, who shared their stories with us.
For various kinds of logistical help, we thank Razan Ghazzawi, Lina Sergie (Amal Hanano), Yassin al-Haj Saleh, AbdulRahman Jalloud, Wassim al-Adel, and Olmo.
For their reading and comments on sections of the text, we thank Hassan Hassan, Thomas Pierret, Yasser Munif, Rime Allaf, and particularly Muhammad Idrees Ahmad. Our friend and trusty IT expert Alasdair MacPhee of macpheeit.co.uk made the maps. We thank everybody at Pluto Press, most of all our editor David Shulman, who initiated this project as an act of solidarity with the Syrian revolution. His support throughout the process of researching and writing the book has been invaluable.
 
Preface
Bristol, June 2014. A compact old lady in red hair and a flowery dress is attending an evening of Syrian texts. As a description of Damascus is read out, she preserves her bright smile but begins nevertheless, quietly, to weep. Afterwards she comes up to talk. She’s a Damascene herself, she says. ‘I’ve lived in England for over thirty years, and I didn’t realise until the revolution that I had a fear barrier inside. Then I noticed I’d never talked about Syria. I’d tried not to even think about it. But those brave youths gave me courage; they gave me back my identity, and my freedom.’
This is where the revolution happens first, before the guns and the political calculations, before even the demonstrations – in individual hearts, in the form of new thoughts and newly unfettered words. Syria was once known as a ‘kingdom of silence’. In 2011 it burst into speech – not in one voice but in millions. On an immense surge of long-suppressed energy, a non-violent protest movement crossed sectarian and ethnic boundaries and spread to every part of the country. Nobody could control it – no party, leader or ideological programme, and least of all the repressive apparatus of the state, which applied gunfire, mass detention, sexual assault and torture, even of children, to death.
Revolutionary Syrians often describe their first protest as an ecstatic event, as a kind of rebirth. The regime’s savage response was a baptism of horror after which there was no going back. Not silenced but goaded into fiercer revolt, the people organised in revolutionary committees and called not just for reform but for the complete overthrow of the system. Eventually, as soldiers defected and civilians took up arms to defend their communities, the revolution militarised. And then where the state collapsed or was beaten back, people set up local councils, aid distribution networks, radio stations and newspapers, expressing communal solidarity in the most creative and practical ways.
For a few brief moments the people changed everything. Then the counter-revolutions ground them down. The regime’s scorched earth strategy drove millions from the country; those who remained in the liberated zones were forced to focus on survival. Syria became the site of proxy wars, of Sunni–Shia rivalries, of foreign interventions. Iranian and transnational Shia forces backed the regime; foreign Sunni extremists flocked to join the organisation known as ‘Islamic State’. (Or ‘the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’, or ISIS, or even ‘the Caliphate’. Syrians call it ‘Daesh’, by its Arabic acronym.)
Nobody supported the revolutionaries. Abandoned by the ill-named ‘international community’, usually ignored or misrepresented in the media, these people have been our chief informants. Their voices and insights make the core of this book. Their input was sought not only because it goes so often unheard, but because they have made history, and in the hope that we may learn from them.
If one woman in particular illuminates these pages, it is Razan Zaitouneh. In the years before the revolution Leila worked closely with Razan. She knew her as so many others did for her honesty and self-effacing modesty. Razan was softly spoken, penetratingly intelligent and uncompromisingly independent. She worked 16-hour days, chain-smoked Gitanes and had a will of steel.
In those days she was a human rights lawyer who advocated for political prisoners and befriended these damaged souls after their release. In the revolution she became a leading light. She attended some of the uprising’s first protests in Damascus, and was a founding member of the Local Coordination Committees. She was also the driving energy behind the Violations Documentation Centre, recording and transmitting information to the world. For two years she lived underground; then in April 2013 she came into the open, basing herself in Douma, a liberated suburb in the Ghouta area outside Damascus. There she worked with the Douma Council and other revolutionary administrative structures, offered human rights training to armed groups and fearlessly criticised anyone who abused the people’s freedoms. She witnessed the regime’s bombardment and starvation siege on the Ghouta suburbs, and in August 2013 its massive sarin gas attacks.
Then on 9 December 2013, Razan and three others were abducted by armed men. Her husband Wael Hamada was taken, and the lawyer and poet Nazem Hamadi, as well as the activist Samira Khalil. Most blame Zahran Alloush’s Jaysh al-Islam, Douma’s strongest militia, for the abduction. Nothing has been heard of the four since.
Samira Khalil is married to Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a former political prisoner and a key revolutionary thinker. Now exiled in Istanbul, deprived of his wife and his homeland, Yassin describes Razan Zaitouneh in these terms:

Razan is of a younger generation. She is a very courageous woman, a very good writer, a great ethical agent in our struggle for freedom. Razan is the person who revolutionized and radicalized the field of human rights activism in Syria, and brought it to the people, the persecuted, the impoverished and the invisible population. Before Razan, human rights activism in Syria was confined to well-educated middle class people and the narrow circles of political activism.
Samira and Razan’s abduction symbolizes the two-fold character of the battle imposed on Syrians: Against the Assadist necktie fascists and against the Islamist long-bearded fascists. Both women are great heroes in the Syrian struggle for freedom on the political level and on the social and cultural level. 1
In many ways, Razan’s fate mirrors Syria’s. This book is dedicated to her, and to every free Syrian.
Leila al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab March 2015
 

 
 
1
Revolution from Above

O Sultan, my master, if my clothes
are ripped and torn
it is because your dogs with claws
are allowed to tear me.
And your informers every day are those
who dog my heels …
the reason you’ve lost wars twice
was because you’ve been walled in from
mankind’s cause and voice.
Nizar Qabbani, ‘Notes on the Book of Defeat’ 1
Geography bestowed diversity on Syria. 2 Unlike Egypt, with its central river and ancient tradition of central government, the lands to the east of the Mediterranean consist of mountains, forests, plains and deserts, and have housed plural and sometimes fiercely independent peoples.
This topography of division made cooperation necessary, and encouraged the free interchange of goods and ideas. For millennia, Syria’s various communities have argued and traded in the Levant’s great cities. Both D