In Rojava, brave and resilient people have been defending a revolution for years in the midst of geopolitical upheaval and the challenges this brings. Among the internationals who have traveled to Rojava to support the revolution have been numerous anarchists. The great people at Active Distribution Publishing (yes, that’s the publishing wing of your favorite radical distro) have documented their efforts in various releases, and it’s about time to honor the commitment.
The Active publications on Rojava vary in length and style. In 2020, there was a reprint of CrimethInc interviews with combatants of the Tekoşîna Anarşîst (Anarchist Struggle) collective. The booklet was titled One Year Since the Turkish Invasion of Rojava: On Anarchist Participation in the Revolutionary Experiment in Northeast Syria. It addressed many questions that are still at the heart of debating anarchist participation in the Kurdish Revolution: charity vs. solidarity, patriarchy and women’s liberation, gender identity and sexual orientation, militarism, and the role of Abdullah Öcalan.
A combatant of Tekoşîna Anarşîst is also the protagonist of a much more recent booklet titled An Anarchist View from Rojava on Recent Events in Syria. This booklet is a reprint of a December 2024 conversation on the Final Straw radio program. Things change quickly in the region, so the “recentness” of the events (mainly the fall of the Assad regime) is relative, but the conversation provides a good sense of where the revolution and anarchist fighters found themselves in at the time. I was happy for the reference to “a really interesting revolutionary group from Denmark” (the Blekingegade Group) and their slogan “Solidarity is something you can hold in your hands”.
Another 2025 release is the booklet Revolutionary People’s War: What Does Life Look Like in Rojava/North East Syria Today?. It was written by YPJ (“Women’s Defense Units”) international volunteers in February 2025 (an appendix was added two months later). The booklet provides a very good overview over the past decade’s political developments in Syria and their impact on Rojava. It also explains why the authors believe that World War III is already here, what they consider a revolutionary people’s war to be (“a strategy to liberate society and build alternatives”), and how social ecology expresses itself in Rojava on the ground.
An outstanding publication is the 2023 book Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home by Jenni Keasden and Natalia Szarek. The authors spent several months as international volunteers in Rojava and weave together texts that not only make their experiences tangible but touch on universal existential questions about friendship and comradeship, the relationship between the individual and society, the diversity of social organizing, and much more. There is plenty of enthusiasm but no romanticism, plenty of emotion but no cheesiness. And while the book is very much based on personal experience, it is not primarily about the authors but the movement they belong to. These are rare feats for any writer.
Single pages – single sentences indeed – can trigger days of important discussion. Example: “When I was younger, I thought I rejected leadership in any form. Now I think we need it.” (This is about “guiding”, not “ruling”.) Or: “We can’t fight nationalism and fascism by hating where we come from, we need to fight it through loving it enough to defend it from those ideologies.” Or: “Make no mistake – capitalism and the state are organised. And if we ourselves are not organised, we don’t stand a chance.”
There is an endless choice of longer quotes to illustrate the joy of this release, but, here, one will have to do. I choose it because it hits close to home. The authors formulate a compelling critique of cynicism, a veteran activist feature I am very much guilty of. With regard to Kurdish women fighting in the revolution, Natalia writes:
“At the time that these heroic women were fighting for a new world, I didn’t have their hope and belief. I was bruised from too many lost political battles, too many social movements that swept me up in their euphoria only to dissolve months or a couple years later. I carried on politically organising because it was still a big part of who I was, but by the time images of the fierce women fighters of the YPJ popped up on social media, I don’t think I really believed in it. I remember seeing a video clip of YPJ fighters dancing joyfully around a bonfire after the liberation of Kobane. I remember it being so beautiful, and powerful, and hopeful, that it brought tears to my eyes.
But then something inside me closed up again, and I kept scrolling through my feed. I couldn’t bring myself to believe in anything so big, out of fear that it would come crashing down again and break my heart. I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to reconnect with the hope that drove me in those years when I plunged heart-first into political movements that declared ‘another world is possible’. But this time it’s not a hope based on youthfulness and infatuation with a new political scene. It’s a love born from years of struggle, built on knowing what I believe in, that the path to get there will be rocky and imperfect, but choosing to walk it anyway.”
Fittingly, Worth Fighting For adds beautiful drawings to beautiful writing. The book – which also serves as a tribute to Anna Campbell, an internationalist who was killed during Turkey’s invasion of Afrin in 2018 – contains a useful map and a handy glossary as well. We learn that “welatparêzî” means “to have a bond with the homeland and to defend your country, culture and language against colonialism, oppression and assimilation, “peşengtî” is “the Kurdish revolutionary principle of being an example, leadership through embodying your values”, while “azadî” stands for “‘Freedom’ or ‘Liberation’, always used in the political and collective sense”.
I’m late on the ball here and should have listed this as a LeftTwoThree favorite of 2023. Then again, great releases stand the test of time. Worth Fighting For is every sentence as relevant as it was three years ago.
Gabriel Kuhn
(February 28, 2026)