Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria in December 2024, the future of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava, remains uncertain. While there is no shortage of geopolitical analysis about the situation, one crucial voice is often overlooked—the approximately five million civilian inhabitants of the region. Their voice could be crucial for the future of Rojava, an area that has established an administration based on a bottom-up, directly democratic system that aims to empower its citizens. However, evaluating this from afar is difficult, amongst media reports riddled with various biases. Some praise the mass civilian support for the administration near the strategic Tishreen Dam in the west of Rojava, while others accuse the administration of holding a nationalist and separatist agenda. 

Tyre, in Lebanon's south, is a city of ancient and recent ruins. Around every corner, you'll find new apartment blocks twisted inside out by bombs. Plushly decorated front rooms are exposed to the air, sometimes with pictures still on the wall, their inner columns leaning at drunken angles. Buildings bow to the road, ceilings kissing the ground some five floors below. The ruins are the result of an accumulation of airstrikes night after night, week after week, for months.

It's not very fashionable to talk about Covid-19. We'd rather blank out the whole episode. But, if we do, we forget some crucial lessons from the pandemic crisis.

How did you get involved in selling DOPE Magazine?

I got involved pretty much in the early stage, when it was the second edition. I was one of the first ones to promote DOPE Magazine. From me only doing it, now everyone’s doing it. I mean it done me wonders. What it did for me was, I was in a situation where I had no status. It was either that or crime. So I chose this – I might be getting humiliated all the time, a thousand ‘no’s – it wasn’t easy, but it really helped me in a massive way.

How did you get involved in selling DOPE Magazine?

So, basically, I seen people handing out this magazine and I wasn’t too sure what it was at first. I was in a dilemma because I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have any benefits and I was looking to turn to crime, which I had been doing. I was quite surprised when I said “what do you need?” and they said “nothing, you just go on a Friday to this place [Freedom Books, Whitechapel].” I thought it was a really good idea and I’ve not looked back since.

How did you get involved in selling
DOPE Magazine?

Well, I was going to Whitechapel Mission, which is the place where I have breakfast, because I don't have proper cooking facilities where I am. I was a bit pissed off with the inflated price of the Big Issue, so when I saw people selling a new mag,
I thought, yeah, I’ll give it a go. So I came to Freedom, got a whole bundle, and I was able to sell it –
I thought it was pretty good.

In the United States in the 1980s, there was a dramatic increase in homelessness, nearly doubling between 1984 and 1987. The hope and utopianism of the '60s was over - you didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew, and it was towards the greed and inequality of ‘80s neoliberalism. President Ronald Reagan, following a similar package of reforms to Margaret Thatcher in the UK, cut housing and social services. Many residents of social housing found themselves pushed out and made homeless whilst unemployment skyrocketed.

When I think of popular struggle, the first thing that comes to mind is Abed’s stories from his time as a political prisoner during the First Intifada. Abed is from Tulkarem, a city in the north of Palestine known for its fierce resistance to the Zionist occupation. Like most Palestinian children, he began protesting young, at 9 years old, while witnessing the occupation of the West Bank in 1967. During his youth, this struggle against the colonising force started to take more serious forms, culminating in his decision to join the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) while studying at university in Turkey. In the summer of 1984, when Abed was 23, he was travelling home for the summer break to see his family when the Israeli occupation forces arrested him. Accused of being a member of a political organisation and participating in the 1982 war in Lebanon against Israel, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Have you ever been on the dole? What’s changed in the past thirty years in the ways unemployed, sick or disabled people go about claiming money from the state? Certainly, there’s been a material shift from analogue to digital; standing in dole queues with a flimsy newspaper-thin logbook, to online courses for writing CVs and emails forcing you to read a message in your ‘journal’ lest you be sanctioned. The generation of people now receiving Universal Credit might be amazed to know that there once was a mass movement of ‘unionised’ benefits claimants who met up regularly to discuss their claims. Have you ever thought about how people claiming benefits find out information about their rights to benefits? About the multiple ways in which the job centre try and punish or trip you up? Nowadays when you go you are unlikely to regularly see anyone else in your local area. Perhaps they know that if people connect with someone over this shared experience, they might start sharing information, organising and resisting the system like people did in the 1970s and ‘80s when they started the Claimants Union movement.