"Central Square was packed: cars could not move. Trays of sweets were passed to the rebels. Mina and her sisters worked their way thought the throngs, shouldering coolers with two-liter coke bottles filled with ice-cold water. The revolutionaries grasped bottles with their grimt hands. One rebel exclaimed, 'You are the true sister of men!' The crowd grew. Abel Os attempted to speak, but his voice was submerged under the chanting, the shouting, the snging. And what songs! On one corner, people had broken into an impromptu rendition of 'Our Homeland Is Paradise.' Dancing on car tops, a second grop was crooning 'We Trample on the House of Assad.' Singing men, ululating women, car horns, clapping, laughter, cries of joy, inarticulate shouting, screaming..." This is Anand Gopal's description of the scene in Manbij upon hearing that the Assad forces had been driven out of that city and surrounding region. It's from his book, "Days of Love and Rage". There is so much more to this book which under normal circumstances would be "impossible", but as Gopal explains "I began to understand this was no normal context, because revolution is precisely one of those extraordinary events that can render impractical ideas workable and unthinkable ideas thinkable." A couple more quotes from Gopal: "Anything worth doing - falling in love, having children, joining a political movement, standing against oppression [all of which Gopal covers in his book] - puts us at the mercy of forces outside our control, at the mercy of risk." And, finally, on the funeral of one of the unsung heroes (unsung outside of Manbij), Abel Os, who had stood up to months of torture in the prisons of both Assad and ISIS: "The SDF [which at that time controlled Manbij] does not allow people to raise the revolutionary flag, or even discuss the revolution in public, so his funeral made no mention of the events that turned a roadside vendor into a household name in this small city. But later, after neighbors and relatives had gone home, his close friends gathered in a room in Sarab. They were former members of RYM [the Revolutionary Youth Movement], erstwhile supporters of the Revolutionary Council, and those who took no sides except to stand against the dictator and they sang old revolutionary songs late into the night." Anand Gopal's "Days of Love and Rage" is the most gripping book I've ever read and one of the most important.
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