Syrian writer and former prisoner of conscience Yassin al-Haj Saleh speaks to Belarusian activist Marina Naprushkina about the global rise of authoritarians, the “plague” of Putinism, and why the time is ripe for new political movements.
In his fourteenth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes that he now identifies with his late mother, paying tribute to mothers around the world who bear the anguish of disappeared loved ones.
The Assad regime is much more than a mere dictatorship—understanding it, and its horrors, requires updating our conventional thinking about murderous states, argues Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
