Syria, a quarter-century after 9/11

Born in 1961 in Raqqa, Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian writer, essayist and political dissident. Arrested in 1980 for his involvement in the communist opposition, he spent 16 years in the prisons of Hafez al-Assad’s regime. After his release, he became one of the leading intellectual voices of the 2011 Syrian revolution. Far from following the beaten path, his writings offer particularly innovative analyses of authoritarianism, political Islam, prison and exile, as well as imperialism in all its forms.Among his works translated into French are Récits d’une Syrie oubliée. Sortir la mémoire des prisons (Les Prairies ordinaires, 2015), La Question syrienne (Actes Sud, 2016), Lettres à Samira (Éditions des Lisières, 2021) and, more recently, Sur la liberté: la maison, la prison, l’exil… et le monde (L’Arachnéen, 2024).In this article, he...