The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a leftist dissident who spent sixteen years as a political prisoner and now lives in exile. He describes with precision and fervour the events that led to Syria's 2011 uprising, the metamorphosis of the popular revolution into a regional war, and the 'three monsters' Saleh sees 'treading on Syria's corpse': the Assad regime and its allies, ISIS and other jihadists, and Russia and the US. Where conventional wisdom has it that Assad's army is now battling religious fanatics for control of the country, Saleh argues that the emancipatory, democratic mass movement that ignited the revolution still exists, though it is beset on all sides. 'The Impossible Revolution' is a powerful, compelling critique of Syria's catastrophic war, which has profoundly reshaped the lives of millions of Syrians.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is widely regarded as Syria’s foremost thinker and the intellectual guru of the Syrian uprising. Born in Raqqa, he spent sixteen years as a political prisoner in Syria (1980-1996) and has been living in exile in Turkey since 2013, still struggling for Syria and Samira, his abducted wife. Along with a group of Syrian and Turkish intellectuals and activists, he established the Syrian Cultural House in Istanbul called Hamish ( margin’ or fringe’), which has become a major hub of activity and helped change the debate about Syria within Turkey. He has written and edited five books in Arabic, but this is his first in English.