A few years ago, I visited Rojava in North East Syria where there has been an extraordinary political revolution: the implementation of the ideas of ‘democratic confederalism’ of the political thinker Murray Bookchin and Kurdish liberation leader Abdullah Öcalan. In a sentence - bottom-up self-government, often led by women.
This video is an extract from ‘Accidental Anarchist’, the BBC documentary broadcast in 2017, the full-length version of which you can see here.
You will hear me mention Rojava in these posts with updates on its current situation. In short, the revolution is still very much alive, and ISIS no longer holds any territory in Syria or elsewhere, though its ‘sleeper’ cells still commit attacks and bombings. But Rojava is under constant air and sometimes ground assault from Turkey and is having to manage tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners whom they cannot fully cope with (more on this in due course). I will also post a couple of written accounts that were published after my visit which give some of the background to the revolution.
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