Syrian Revolution

With the emergence of the 2011 Arab Spring, Syrians began assembling in support of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Protests in Syria spread rapidly in March of that year. Using horizontally-organized forms including the Local Coordinating Committees (LCCs) and local councils, Syrians have experimented with local autonomy and community control and have taken inspiration from the late anarchist economist and martyr Omar Aziz. Moreover, Syrians have collaborated, sometimes uneasily, with groups in the Syrian-occupied province of Kurdistan known as Rojava, home to the democratic confederalist experiments that explicitly oppose, in theory at least, the state, capitalism, patriarchy, and other forms of dominantion. The Syrian revolution is far from pure, as some rebels have received training from the CIA and others have become dominated by jihadists forces. Still, the revolution persists today and fights, on one front, against the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian supporters, on the other front, against ISIS.

Journalists Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami summarize in Burning Country:

In 2011 it burst into speech - not one voie but in millions. On an immense surge of long-suppressed , 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.