Lara el-Jazairi

Leila al-Shami
BornOctober 1978 (age 47)
Other namesLeila al-Shami
OccupationsHuman rights defender, activist, blogger
Years active2000–
Employers
Websitehttps://leilashami.wordpress.com/

Leila al-Shami (Arabic: ليلى الشامي),[1][2][3] is a British-Syrian[4][5] human rights defender, anarchist political activist, blogger[6] and writer. She was a member of Haitham al-Maleh's Human Rights Association in Syria (HRAS) during the Damascus Spring in 2001, co-founded the Tahrir International Collective Network during the Arab Spring in 2012, and co-authored Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War with Robin Yassin-Kassab in 2016.

Biography

Early life and activism in Syria

Daughter of a communist and former political prisoner exiled from Ba'athist Syria,[7][8] al-Shami grew up in the United Kingdom.[9] Shortly after graduating with a master's degree in human rights from a British university,[7][10][11] in the autumn of 2000 she moved to Syria to stay with her family in the Tiliani neighbourhood of Damascus, and met Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau)'s secretary general Riad al-Turk through her father, al-Turk's "close friend and former comrade".[7] She accepted al-Turk's encouragement to dedicate her work to Syria[7] and participated in political activities and the launching of civil society initiatives during the Damascus Spring of 2000–2001.[12][13] She joined the Human Rights Association in Syria (HRAS) in Baramkeh (Damascus),[7][14] founded in May 2001 by Haitham al-Maleh and Razan Zaitouneh.[15][16] Working closely with Zaitouneh,[17] the only other female member of HRAS, she did advocacy work for political prisoners, including al-Turk.[7]

Human rights career

Al-Shami left Syria for the UK due to safety concerns not long after Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on opposition and civil society of August 2001.[12][11] She soon returned to the Middle East and worked as a human rights defender with local and global non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies, primarily in Palestine and Yemen, for a total of 15 years.[9][18][10]

At the time of the outbreak of the Arab Spring in January 2011, she continued was based in Palestine.[9][19]

Activism during the Syrian civil war

Under her pseudonym Leila al-Shami, joined the anti-authoritarian movement as part of the Syrian revolution and worked with a number of the eventual leaders of the uprising, again including Razan Zaitouneh, who now co-founded the Local Coordination Committees of Syria.[9] In 2012, al-Shami was among the six founders of the collective-run weblog Tahrir International Collective Network, where she also published individual pieces. The English- and Arabic-language blog, particularly active in its first two years, popularised the thought of the Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz and served as the first online archive of anarchist texts, while the group facilitated connections between anarchist groups in the Middle East and North Africa.[20] According to al-Shami, its purpose was to "make anarchist and anti-authoritarian struggles visible".[21] Al-Shami's 2013 obituary of Omar Aziz was translated into Greek, Italian, Catalan and French[22]. She was by far the most prolific author of texts commemorating the local councils of the initial stage of the Syrian revolution, ahead of Robin Yassin-Kassab. In October 2013, she started to blog as Leila al-Shami "on popular struggles, human rights and social justice from an anti-authoritarian perspective".[23][24]

In 2016, al-Shami returned permanently from the Middle East to the United Kingdom, settling down in Scotland.[9]

In January 2016,[25] she published Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War with Robin Yassin-Kassab. The book, which she dedicated to Razan Zaitouneh,[6] was praised as "telling the Syrian story" by the Syrian opposition intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh,[26] as an "important, honest and insightful" work by the Elliott School of International Affairs political scientist Marc Lynch,[26] and as "the definitive book" on Syria and "a must-read" by Chatham House fellow Hassan Hassan.[27] Al-Shami and her co-author toured the United States extensively to promote the book, speaking at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.[28][27] In 2017, they also toured Spain where, according to Yassin Kassab, an online protest campaign was mounted against al-Shami that accused her of being an "imperialist" and a "Salafi rat".[29]

From 2016 onwards, al-Shami, contributed op-eds to The New York Times,[30][31] Open Democracy,[32][33] The New Arab,[1] and Al-Jumhuriya,[34] an online news platform co-founded by Yassin al-Haj Saleh,[35] Her writing was also featured on the Google-sponsored[36] citizen journalism website Global Voices between 2016 and 2018, while Elia Ayoub was its regional editor for the Middle East and North Africa,[18][37] and in the In These Times magazine.[38]

In 2021, she was involved in the "100 Faces of the Syrian Revolution" campaign.[39]

Al-Shami is a member of The Peoples Want,[2] an activist network centred on mutual aid and "cultural offensive" that grew out of festivals organised by the Paris-based Syrian Canteen between 2019 and 2023 against the background of a new "transnational" series of protests in 2019 (in Algeria, Hong Kong, Iran, Lebanon), and "opened up for membership" in March 2025. The Peoples Want aims to "relaunch a genuine revolutionary internationalism" based on "the emerging popular powers born of the wave of revolutionary uprisings that began in 2011", and in al-Shami's words welcomes "people who are trying to build material and political autonomy". It sent a delegation to the 2025 meeting held by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Altamirano, Chiapas. The network's manifesto puts shared experience and practice of resistance above "visions of change or ideological convictions".[40][41]

After the Syrian civil war

Together with Elia Ayoub and Ayman Makarem, al-Shami co-founded the media collective From the Periphery, registered as a limited company in the United Kingdom in February 2025.[1][2][3] The group produces podcasts (including Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution hosted by al-Shami[41]) and YouTube content. Describing itself as "explicitly anti-authoritarian", it proposes to "center the voices of those traditionally marginalized in global reporting" and to "foster storytelling that is driven by lived experience", in opposition to "media and knowledge colonialism" and "exploitative hierarchies in media productions".[2]

In a February 2025 interview, al-Shami said it had not been safe for her until the fall of the Assad regime two months earlier to return to Syria.[12] She visited Damascus in April 2025.[42]

In July 2025, al-Shami held the Q&A alongside Robin Yassin-Kassab at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign's screening of the 2024 film Where Olive Trees Weep (featuring Gabor Maté and Ahed Tamimi) in Dumfries, Scotland.[43]

Views

In a blog entry that coincided with the April 2018 missile strikes against Syria in reprisal for the Douma chemical attack (later published by Libcom.org and Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières[44][45]), al-Shami coined the term "'anti-imperialism' of idiots" to denounce the opposition of the Western anti-war movement to Western intervention (including a no-fly zone[46]) in favour of the Syrian opposition in the Syrian civil war, which she contrasted with that movement's "silence on Russian and Iranian interventions" and apparent acceptance of the heavy civilian death toll from the United States strikes to assist the Raqqa campaign by the Syrian Democratic Forces in the war against the Islamic State. Reproaching Western leftists for following their own interests and analysis and for "placing grand narratives over lived realities", al-Shami accused the "western 'anti-war' left" of selective outrage, blindness to non-Western (i.e. Russian and Iranian) imperialism, "deeply authoritarian tendencies" leading to solidarity with "states … rather than oppressed or underprivileged groups", racist ignorance and denial of Syrian agency in conflating all opposition to Assad with extremists and mercenaries, and colluding with the far right in supporting Bashar al-Assad.[47] She later directed her accusations specifically towards Stop the War Coalition, Code Pink, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Noam Chomsky, saying "these people will never be allies in liberation struggles".[48] Al-Shami's phrase and arguments were echoed by an open letter of March 2021.[a][49] The term was adopted by Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian writers to criticise alleged "campism" on the left during the Russo-Ukrainian war,[50][51] with the British journalist Paul Mason quoting it in his call for "a dis-alignment with the inheritors of Stalinism" to face the "war being waged against the collective West",[52] and al-Shami was interviewed on the subject by the Ukrainian magazine Commons in July 2024.[53]

She has credited the local councils (LCCs) of the early stage of the Syrian revolution with "a commitment to decentralized, self-managed forms of organization", emphasising their "independence from … state control".[54] She has stated that the councils and the Syrian uprising as a whole rejected political factionalism and vanguard parties.[55] Commenting on the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) during the siege of Kobanî in late 2014, al-Shami called its self-organisation model based on democratic confederalism "a beacon of light in what's fast becoming a region of darkness" but warned that "anti-authoritarians should not romanticise the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD)" due to the alleged "authoritarianism of [its] old guard". She decried the relative lack of international support for the Syrian LCCs, attributed this to the "conversion" of Abdullah Öcalan to libertarian municipalism, and dismissed the accusations of sectarianism against the Syrian opposition.[56]

Following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, al-Shami opined to a Ukrainian NGO in January 2025: "Syria today is perhaps the only country in the world where there is some hope",[57] referring to a possible "revival of people's struggles" from the Arab Spring.[48] She said that it was more important to her that the new Syrian government of Ahmed al-Sharaa is democratic and non-authoritarian than whether it is secular or Islamist, while asserting that there was wide support in Syria for the separation of religion and state.[12] She argued that "a genuine democratic space ha[d] opened" despite the limited participation in the Syrian National Dialogue Conference of February 2025,[42] but later expressed concern with the government's attempts to control that space.[41] She also prioritised ending corruption over finding an alternative to the neoliberal economic model, saying that although it was not "Ahmed al-Sharaa's] place as [the head of] a transitional government to start putting forward an economic program", the neoliberal paradigm would be followed as the global standard "because of the need for reconstruction and development aid to rebuild the country".[12] She reported that both secularism and socialism have become associated in Syria with the Assad regime. Admitting the presence of concerns about the background of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham as the new group in power, she said she was "pleased" about the postponing of elections by four years on the grounds that this would allow alternatives to HTS to be created (noting that "the political opposition leadership in exile … doesn't have mass support on the ground", the Syrian National Coalition had become irrelevant,[48] and the revolutionary movement had been destroyed[41]), and claimed that many had taken up arms with HTS for opportunistic reasons. She described the "new regime" as "perhaps surprisingly responsive to popular pressure" and "genuinely very concerned to try to prevent sectarian conflict".[48] She later stated that Ahmed al-Sharaa "undoubtedly ha[d] moderated over time" since "coming out of the Islamic State of Iraq", that he was "very popular with the majority of the Syrian population" and that "responsive[ness] … to popular pressure" already started with Jabhat al-Nusra's governance in the Idlib province between 2015 and 2017.[41]

Al-Shami noted the "tokenistic" diversity of the Syrian transitional government,[41] as well as the "abuses and atrocities" against the Kurds by the Syrian National Army (which she qualified as "working to Turkey's agenda"), and said the Syrian Democratic Forces deserved "real guarantees" in return for giving up arms and the withdrawal of US military protection.[48] On the other hand, she claimed that forced conscription and repression of political opponents were "understandable grievances" against the DAANES administration, that Kurdish autonomy and "multi-ethnic political representation" was possible without the PYD, and that "communities [outside the Kurdish-majority areas] would rather be governed by the transitional government".[48] She said that "the PYD rule" was not successful in Arab-majority areas because "many revolutionary Syrians … saw it as a power grab and … outside interference".[41] She called for "all foreign militias to leave Syria", and for international support to organisers of "struggles for peace, for democracy, for women’s and minority rights, and for social justice" in Syria once they are identified.[48] In December 2025, two weeks prior to the Syrian–Israeli peace talks in Paris, she said Israel was "a huge threat to Syria".[41]

Al-Shami has alleged that Ba'athist Syria was a "narco state"[41] and that it had "no culture in the deep sense of the word", with "very few real thinkers, who were marginalised".[58] She said that the 2025 massacres of Syrian Alawites were revenge killings provoked by delays in transitional justice and denied their sectarian character, while accusing the former Assad regime of "sectarian engineering" and committing a "near-genocide of the Syrian population".[41]

Books

  • Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Water: Values & Rights (co-editor, with Clemens Messerschmid, Imad Khatib and Ayman Al Haj Daoud), Ramallah: Palestine Academy Press, 2009, ISBN 9789950340015[59][60]
  • Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (as Leila al-Shami; with Robin Yassin-Kassab), London: Pluto Press, 2016, ISBN 9780745336220
    • Spanish translation by Begoña Valle as País en llamas. Los sirios en la revolución y en la guerra, Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2017, ISBN 9788494645372
    • French collective translation as Burning country : au coeur de la révolution syrienne, Paris: L'Échappée, 2019, ISBN 9782373090529

Notes

References

  1. ^ a b c "Leila al-Shami". The New Arab. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  2. ^ a b c d "About Us". From the Periphery. Archived from the original on 30 June 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  3. ^ a b "From the Periphery Media Limited (company number 16275824)". Companies House. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  4. ^ "Leila al-Shami". The Funambulist. Archived from the original on 19 November 2025. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  5. ^ Spencer, Richard (20 March 2016). "Fighting over the rubble: the architectural cost of the Syrian civil war". Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 2 February 2026.
  6. ^ a b "Leila al Shami". Capitán Swing (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 10 June 2017. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Al-Shami, Leila (10 January 2024). "Riad al-Turk's Lifelong Struggle for a Free and Democratic Syria". New Lines Magazine. Archived from the original on 12 January 2024. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  8. ^ Streiff, Khagdo & Katt 2023, p. 191.
  9. ^ a b c d e Peck, Henry (22 September 2016). "Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami: Mirror from Damascus". Guernica. Archived from the original on 1 March 2017. Retrieved 2 February 2026.
  10. ^ a b El-Jazairi, Lara (September 2010), Rights to Water and Sanitation: An Handbook for Activists (PDF), Freshwater Action Network, p. iii, archived (PDF) from the original on 3 July 2024
  11. ^ a b Streiff, Khagdo & Katt 2023, p. 194.
  12. ^ a b c d e Betteridge-Moes, Maxine (11 February 2025). "It's Up to Us: Two Interviews with Leila al-Shami". New Internationalist. Archived from the original on 8 March 2025. Retrieved 3 February 2026.
  13. ^ Streiff, Khagdo & Katt 2023, p. 193.
  14. ^ Yassin-Kassab & al-Shami 2018, p. 19.
  15. ^ Schon, Manuela (24 March 2016). "Die unsichtbaren Frauen der syrischen Revolution". Die Störenfriedas (in German). Archived from the original on 6 June 2023. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  16. ^ "Violations according to Alternative media: are they bias?". Syrian Prints Archive. 8 May 2016. Archived from the original on 12 April 2021. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  17. ^ Yassin-Kassab & al-Shami 2018, p. xi.
  18. ^ a b "Leila Al Shami". Global Voices. Archived from the original on 18 December 2025. Retrieved 3 February 2026.
  19. ^ Streiff, Khagdo & Katt 2023, p. 202.
  20. ^ Woller 2023, p. 57, 69–70, 84–85.
  21. ^ Woller 2023, p. 100.
  22. ^ Woller 2023, p. 86.
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  24. ^ "Monthly Archives: October 2013". Leila's Blog. 20 October 2013. Archived from the original on 5 May 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  25. ^ Kershaw, Hannah Charlotte (2017), History, Memory, and Multiculturalism: Representations of Muslims in Contemporary British Fiction (PDF), PhD thesis: University of York, p. 48
  26. ^ a b Yassin-Kassab & al-Shami 2018, p. i.
  27. ^ a b "Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War". Middle East Institute. Archived from the original on 25 August 2019. Retrieved 2 February 2026.
  28. ^ "A Conversation with the Authors of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War". Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. 21 March 2016. Archived from the original on 30 March 2023. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  29. ^ Yassin-Kassab, Robin (14 June 2017). "Pais En Llamas". Pulse Media. Archived from the original on 14 September 2017. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  30. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (2 September 2018). "The Death Blow Is Coming for Syrian Democracy". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 September 2018.
  31. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (31 August 2022). "Bashar al-Assad Has a Syria He'd Like the World to See". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 31 August 2022.
  32. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (20 December 2016). "The tyrants bring the invaders". Open Democracy. Archived from the original on 29 August 2019. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  33. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (5 January 2017). "Fighting on all fronts: women's resistance in Syria". Open Democracy. Archived from the original on 26 June 2019. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  34. ^ "ليلى الشامي". Al-Jumhuriya. Archived from the original on 5 February 2026. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  35. ^ Ghattas, Kim (2020), Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East, London: Wildfire, p. 331, ISBN 9781472271136
  36. ^ "Sponsors". Global Voices. Archived from the original on 3 January 2017.
  37. ^ "Elia Ayoub". Global Voices.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  38. ^ "Leila Al Shami". In These Times. Retrieved 5 February 2026.
  39. ^ De Angelis, Enrico (4 May 2021). "Land, Revolutions and Lessons from Syria: A Conversation with Leila al-Shami and Philip Rizk". Syria Untold. Retrieved 3 February 2026.
  40. ^ "Who are we?". The Peoples Want. Archived from the original on 6 November 2024. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  41. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "Updates from Syria + The Peoples Want with Leila Al-Shami". The Final Straw Radio Podcast. 21 December 2025. Archived from the original on 21 December 2025. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  42. ^ a b Al-Shami, Leila (9 June 2025). "Syria stirs beneath a hesitant dawn, six months after Assad's fall". The New Arab. Archived from the original on 9 June 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  43. ^ Dumfries and Galloway Palestine Solidarity Campaign (2 July 2025). "A reminder for anyone who hasn't booked yet". Instagram. Archived from the original on 6 February 2026. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  44. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (17 April 2018). "The 'anti-imperialism' of idiots". Libcom.org. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  45. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (14 April 2018). "The 'anti-imperialism' of idiots – The western 'anti-war' movement and Syria". Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  46. ^ al-Shami, Leila; Kyselov, Oleksandr (23 January 2026). "Internationalism Is Not a Luxury, but a Survival Mechanism". Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières (Interview). Interviewed by Anna Jikhareva. Archived from the original on 8 February 2026. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  47. ^ Al Shami, Leila (14 April 2018). "The 'anti-imperialism' of idiots". Leila's blog. Archived from the original on 14 April 2018. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  48. ^ a b c d e f g Al-Shami, Leila (Winter 2025), "Syria After Assad", New Politics, 20 (2), interviewed by Sacha Ismail, archived from the original on 23 July 2025
  49. ^ "Erasing People through Disinformation: Syria and the "Anti-Imperialism" of Fools". New Politics. 27 March 2021. Archived from the original on 27 March 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2026.
  50. ^ Bilous, Taras (25 February 2022). "A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv". Open Democracy. Archived from the original on 25 February 2022. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  51. ^ Dardot, Pierre; Laval, Christian (3 April 2022). "The bankruptcy of a one-sided "anti-imperialism"". Labour Hub. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  52. ^ Mason, Paul (12 October 2022). "The Left's Fatal Longing for Life as Usual". Progressives Zentrum. Archived from the original on 15 April 2024. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  53. ^ Shynkarenko, Mariia (23 July 2024). ""Syrians Celebrate When Russian Generals, Involved in War Crimes in Syria, Are Being Killed in Ukraine". Interview With Leila Al-Shami". Commons. Archived from the original on 26 July 2024. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  54. ^ Woller 2023, p. 94.
  55. ^ Woller 2023, p. 95.
  56. ^ Al-Shami, Leila (25 November 2014). "Uncovering Kobane". Peace News. Archived from the original on 22 February 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  57. ^ Al-Achi, Assaad (2 February 2026). ""The Country Is Still Fragmented": Syria After the Power Shift and New Outbreaks of Violence". Медійна ініціатива за права людини (Interview). Archived from the original on 8 February 2026. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
  58. ^ Sosnowski, Marika (9 December 2024). "Why Bashar al-Assad's security state collapsed so dramatically in Syria". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 9 December 2024. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
  59. ^ Salem, Hilmi S. (2019), "No Sustainable Development in the Lack of Environmental Justice" (PDF), Environmental Justice, 12 (3): 147
  60. ^ "Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Water Values and Rights". Palestine Academy for Science and Technology. Retrieved 6 February 2026.

Bibliography

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