The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off Assad
The New York Times | 6th March 2026
“Manbij. May God protect it,” the great traveler Ibn Jubayr of Valencia wrote in June 1184. “Its skies are bright, its aspect handsome, its breezes fragrant and perfumed, and while its day gives generous shade, its night is all enchantment.” These raptures eluded me when I visited the city 800 years later, in 1987, and wrote, “It was a dull, lifeless place. Either it had lost its glory, or Ibn Jubayr, like many travelers before and since, had exaggerated: Manbij was, simply, a dump.” But “Days of Love and Rage,” the journalist Anand Gopal’s epic tribute to Manbij’s population during Syria’s 14-year civil war, forces me to recant. The heroic beauty of the city’s people, as Gopal portrays them, struggling for freedom with its attendant glories and travails more than compensates for the eyesore that is its motley collection of concrete hovels and Baath Party monstrosities. There have been many…
Read more →
A History of Modern Syria — the people at the heart of their own story
Financial Times
Daniel Neep’s excellent account corrects the traditional narrative to show a nation surviving and resisting the powers that have vied to dominate it. Syria is as ancient, and as complex, as civilisation itself. Lying between antiquity’s great empires of Egypt…
Imperial graveyard: the sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it
Times Literary Supplement
Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and…
To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World
LA Progressive
Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an…
