Review of "Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War" by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami

This is a detailed, principled, engaged and informative book about the Syrian Civil War.  I'd been aware for some time that I had a muddled and not entirely thought out position about the Syrian revolution. I'd managed to pick up that it had started out as one of the later uprisings inspired by the Arab Spring wave, and that it had degenerated into a brutal militarised civil war in which no-one seemed to be the good guys. 

Assad was clearly a bad guy, leading a nasty one-party militarised regime with torture chambers and mass disappearances. But at least some of the opposition seemed to be bad-guy Islamists, and then Assad seemed to be fighting against ISIS, which turned Islamism into a death cult. And the Russians were helping their client, Assad's regime against ISIS, and the West (well, Britain and America) seemed to want to help him too - given the track record of western interventions in Middle Eastern revolutions being against that, as were the Stop the War Campaign seemed like a good idea, and I stood on a street corner with some lefties holding "Don't Bomb Syria" signs.

Well, after reading the book I am much better informed, though I'm not sure how much wiser I am. I understand better that some of the people I thought of as Islamists were not so bad, and that some of them had a commitment to religious pluralism and civil society...lots of Syria's revolutionaries talk about "freedom", but few seem to articulate a vision about what they are fighting for.

But others in the anti-Assad camp really were pretty nasty. The Al Nusra front, which is the local Al Qaeda franchise, sometimes seems to get an unnecessarily easy ride in the book. The information about how awful it is, is reported honestly in the book, but it doesn't seem to reach a compelling narrative. The book is not nearly as warm towards the various Kurdish factions and parties, and the Rojava project, as the only other book I'd read on the subject. Actually that was a bit of a relief, because the supporters of the PYD and the YPG that I'd met on demonstrations in London had more than a whiff of a cult about them.

Elsewhere I missed some bits of narrative. The Syrian Communist Party, that ought to have been engaged in a struggle against the regime, was hopelessly co-opted by it, because Syria and the regime were Soviet clients. Even the fall of the Soviet Union doesn't seem to have disturbed this. And a small part of the book's critique of Assad (both Assads, actually) is that they weren't as anti-Zionist as they made out. There is a part of me that thinks there is another story here, about the role of anti-Zionism as an "escape valve" and as an acceptable form of anti-imperialism across the entire Arab world, that no-one really wants to think about.

So I still don't really feel like I understand the Syrian conflict properly. I am aware that here, more than anywhere else, there are powerful forces at work seeking to ensure that I don't understand it. People who I have always trusted, like Noam Chomsky, and Seymour Hersch, and John Pilger, seem to have defended or whitewashed the Assad regime out of some bizarre "campist" motive. Places that I would normally go for information aren't at all reliable. 

I'm really lucky to have met Rami, a young Syrian activist refugee living in Stroud; I feel like I can trust his narrative and his experiences, not least because he's so open about where it has turned out that he was wrong about something. Reading the book I had some idea as to what he's been through, and it was worth it for that.