In his preface to this extraordinary book, journalist Anand Gopal describes how he came across the story of a small group of men and women living in the northern Syrian city of Manbij – who between 2011 and 2013 ‘briefly turned the world upside down’.
Intrigued, he tracked them down, amassing everything he could relating to their revolutionary self-rule experiment and resistance to the Assad regime. After eight years, 2,000 interviews and with the help of research assistants, here is the result – a labour of tremendous commitment. At over 600 pages long, a certain commitment is required of the reader too. But the moving and intimate stories of the protagonists keep you engaged. Told through one city, this is a complex story of Syria from the 1960s to the rise of Islamic State (Isis) and the downfall of Bashir Al-Assad in 2024.
