Leila al-Shami

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] 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.^[10][11] She joined the Human Rights Association in Syria (HRAS) in Baramkeh (Damascus),^[7] founded in May 2001 by Haitham al-Maleh and Razan Zaitouneh.^[12][13] Working closely with Zaitouneh,^[14] the only other female member of HRAS, she did advocacy work for political prisoners, including al-Turk.^[7]

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.^[10][15] 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][16]

At the time of the outbreak of the Arab Spring in January 2011, she continued to be based in Palestine.^[9]

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.^[17] According to al-Shami, its purpose was to "make anarchist and anti-authoritarian struggles visible".^[18] Al-Shami's 2013 obituary of Omar Aziz was translated into Greek, Italian, Catalan and French,^[19] and in the same year she travelled on behalf of TICN to Greece, Italy, Spain and Poland to discuss the Syrian revolution in anarchist spaces.^[20] 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.^[21] In October 2013, she started to blog as Leila al-Shami "on popular struggles, human rights and social justice from an anti-authoritarian perspective".^[22][23]

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

In January 2016,^[24] 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,^[25] as an "important, honest and insightful" work by the Elliott School of International Affairs political scientist Marc Lynch,^[25] and as "the definitive book" on Syria and "a must-read" by Chatham House fellow Hassan Hassan.^[26] 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.^[27][26] 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".^[28]

From 2016 onwards, al-Shami contributed op-eds to The New York Times,^[29][30] Open Democracy,^[31][32] The New Arab,^[1] and Al-Jumhuriya,^[33] an online news platform co-founded by Yassin al-Haj Saleh,^[34] Her writing was also featured on the Google-sponsored^[35] citizen journalism website Global Voices between 2016 and 2018, while Elia Ayoub was its regional editor for the Middle East and North Africa,^[16][36] and in the In These Times magazine.^[37]

In 2021, she was involved in the "100 Faces of the Syrian Revolution" campaign.^[38]

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".^[39][40]

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^[40]) 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.^[10] She visited Damascus in April 2025.^[41]

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.^[42]

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^[43][44]), 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^[45]) 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.^[46] 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".^[47] Al-Shami's phrase and arguments were echoed by an open letter of March 2021.^[a][48] The term was adopted by Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian writers to criticise alleged "campism" on the left during the Russo-Ukrainian war,^[49][50] 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",^[51] and al-Shami was interviewed on the subject by the Ukrainian magazine Commons in July 2024.^[52]

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".^[53] She has stated that the councils and the Syrian uprising as a whole rejected political factionalism and vanguard parties.^[54] 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.^[55]

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",^[56] referring to a possible "revival of people's struggles" from the Arab Spring.^[47] 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.^[10] She argued that "a genuine democratic space ha[d] opened" despite the limited participation in the Syrian National Dialogue Conference of February 2025,^[41] but later expressed concern with the government's attempts to control that space.^[40] 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".^[10] 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,^[47] and the revolutionary movement had been destroyed^[40]), 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".^[47] 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.^[40]

Al-Shami noted the "tokenistic" diversity of the Syrian transitional government,^[40] 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.^[47] 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".^[47] 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".^[40] 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.^[47] In December 2025, two weeks prior to the Syrian–Israeli peace talks in Paris, she said Israel was "a huge threat to Syria".^[40]

Al-Shami has alleged that Ba'athist Syria was a "narco state"^[40] and that it had "no culture in the deep sense of the word", with "very few real thinkers, who were marginalised".^[57] 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".^[40]

• 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 [fr], 2019, ISBN 9782373090529