Correction/clarification: Murray Bookchin was born in 1921 and was Janet Biehl's longtime partner. A previous version of this story misstated his birth year and in one instance lacked attribution to Biehl in characterizing Bookchin as her husband.

In a corner apartment in downtown Burlington, Janet Biehl scanned a wall of books. Some, she had written — translations of German work and texts about feminist politics. Others were authored by her late partner, Murray Bookchin, a radical philosopher and activist whose political ideology changed the world.

Biehl pulled one off the shelf, Bookchin's biography, which she published in 2015, nine years after his death.

"A good way to process a relationship?" she quipped. "Write a book about him."

Bookchin published a number of books throughout his life, most of which centered around his anarcho-socialist view of governance. He made some waves in the United States, spearheading the Green movement in Vermont and launching successful grassroots efforts to oust capitalist influence. But Bookchin's ideas had their greatest impact in an unlikely place: Northeastern Syria, commonly referred to as Rojava.

The Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, formed the basis of their ideology on Bookchin's work. The PKK, comprised mainly of Turkish Kurds, was formed in the late 1970s to fight Turkey for autonomous control of Kurdistan.

The PKK is one of many Kurdish factions seeking a model of government vastly different from that of their bordering countries. Though it all started with the PKK in Turkey, traces of Bookchin's influence can be found in all of Kurdistan.

The Kurds and their various militias, including the PKK, died by thousands fighting the Islamic State group. Over 11,000 Kurds died during the ground war, fighting both for the United States and their own freedom from the terrorist group, USA Today reports. They were integral in reclaiming virtually all of the land seized by the Islamic State since 2014.

On Oct. 6, President Donald Trump announced that US troops would withdraw from the region, leaving a clear path for Turkish forces to enter northeastern Syria. His sudden decision to abandon Kurdish allies stunned lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Three days later, USA Today reported, Turkey launched an assault on Kurdish forces in the region where Bookchin's ideas had become reality.

An anarchist in Vermont

Bookchin was born in New York City in 1921, a few years after the end of World War I. Informed by both communist and anarchist movements, both of which Bookchin eventually rejected, he developed his own form of democracy: Libertarian municipalism. The core principle of Bookchin's theory was that all hierarchy had to be dismantled in order for a true citizen-led government to thrive.

All decisions, Bookchin theorized, should be made on the hyper-local level. Bookchin modeled his democracy after the citizen's assemblies in ancient Athens. Later, he was inspired by a more modern iteration: Vermont's town meetings.

Vermont's town meetings are annual gatherings, typically held in schools and public spaces, during which local residents vote, often by raising a hand, on elected officials, the town budget, and non-binding resolutions. They're an example of the bottom-up governance Bookchin envisioned.

"He thought, 'If it can be done in these places, it can be done again,'" Biehl said.

Bookchin was so taken with Vermont's form of democracy that, in 1982, he left New York City for Burlington. Five years later, he met Biehl. The two never legally wed, but they lived and worked together until his death in 2006.

"I still think of myself as his wife, and of him as my late husband," Biehl said.

A Kurdish revolutionary emails a Vermont radical

In 2004, Biehl opened her inbox and found an unusual message: A German lawyer, serving as an intermediary for an imprisoned Kurdish leader, was trying to reach Bookchin to talk about his theories.

Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the separatist PKK who is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, had read Bookchin's "The Ecology of Freedom." The ideas were transformative for Ocalan who, after reading Bookchin, sought to transform the PKK from a militant, separatist movement to one that believed in dismantling hierarchy and championing women.

Ocalan issued statements through his lawyers and wrote extensively from prison, authoring texts about his version of Bookchin's libertarian municipalism that found influence throughout Kurdistan.

"He has re-built his political strategy around (Bookchin's vision) and developed a model to build up a civil society in Kurdistan and the Middle East," the intermediary wrote in the email exchange with Bookchin and Biehl. "He has recommended Bookchin's books to every mayor in all Kurdish cities and wanted everybody to read them."

Ocalan's ideological shift was significant in that it marked a sharp departure from the PKK's prior mission — to create a separate, autonomous Kurdish state. To achieve that mission, the PKK had launched an armed insurgency that lasted decades. Turkey is a NATO ally, and because of their violent offensive against Turkish control, both Turkey and the United States consider the PKK a terrorist group.

"I thought, oh my God, what am I going to do? They’re on the terrorist list!" Biehl remembered. "Murray finally gets some attention, and they’re called terrorists!"

Because of Bookchin's declining health, Ocalan's intermediaries communicated primarily with Biehl.

"Much remains to be explored, which my health and age prohibit me from doing," Bookchin wrote in his first email to Ocalan's intermediaries. "If you care to write me further, I ask you to please be patient with an old radical."

Fifteen years later, Bookchin's ideas are alive in modern Kurdish society, and Biehl has traveled four times to Kurdish regions of Turkey and Syria, looking for traces of his influence.

New feminism in a Muslim stronghold

In 2011, a Kurdish man invited Biehl to speak at a conference in Turkey. "'There are some things going on here that I think you might be interested in,'" Biehl remembered him saying. "You're Bookchin's partner."

On her trip, she was struck by the treatment of women in the region.

"I saw these old guys, these PKK fighters — they looked like they were about 60," Biehl said. "They're sitting there, and they're listening to these 22-year-old women talk about women's rights. They were riveted to what these young women were saying."

Biehl said she was stunned.

"I fell in love with the place then, with the whole movement then."

Rojava is an egalitarian and secular society, thus starkly unique from Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Islam does not play a role in the region's politics. As Biehl describes, they have a "separation of mosque and state."

"Bookchin was against hierarchy in general, all hierarchies," Biehl said. "But Ocalan singled out one particular hierarchy — patriarchy, and said 'This is the one that’s most important for us to address.'"

"(Ocalan) regards the women's movement as the most revolutionary movement of the 20th century," the intermediary wrote to Bookchin in 2004, because "it revealed more of the essential conflicts in society than any other school of thought did before."

In Kurdish communes and cities, there is one woman for every man on all levels of government. A neighborhood council, for example, will have one female delegate for every male. Women have their own militia, the YPJ, a counterpart to the male militia, the YPG.

"I've never seen anything like it," Biehl said.

What Bookchin never lived to see

There is no question as to the significance of Bookchin's theories to the Kurdish people. But the complexity of the region's history and the numerous militias and political factions in Kurdistan make the extent to which his ideas influenced the region difficult to parse.

"That's been the question I've grappled with since I first visited (Rojava) in 2014," Biehl said, though she is certain of one thing: "Bookchin is revered there."

Biehl laments the fact that Bookchin's work never made significant traction until after his death.

“I so wish he had lived to see Rojava," she said. "He would’ve been over there all the time. They would’ve loved him. If Murray had been able to go, that would’ve been just amazing."

In the spring of 2019, Biehl took a third trip to Rojava. She was invited to work on a documentary about her effort to find traces in the region of Bookchin's theories. Biehl told her translator and intermediary that she wanted to see Rojava's form of self-governance in action.

She describes a meeting at a majority-Arab village in which Bookchin and Ocalan's vision was palpable. Much like in Vermont, Kurds gathered in schoolhouses to weigh in on local issues.

Biehl describes multiple tiers of government in each Kurdish city: First, the "town meeting" is comprised of residents from single streets or blocks. The next level up is the neighborhood. She had the opportunity to see each tier on her 2019 trip.

"It was just super," Biehl said, "and now I could testify with my two eyes that it exists."

The fraught future of Kurdistan

Without US military support along the Turkey-Syria border, there's a clear path for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to conquer the Kurds. Within days, Turkey invaded the region.

Biehl describes the US withdrawal as "catastrophic."

"It’s shattering. It’s heartbreaking, it’s diabolical," Biehl said, lowering her voice, her pain palpable. "It’s such a stain on America that we did this."

Biehl recounted a story about her fixer on one of her trips to Rojava, now a friend. He fought with the Americans in the war against the Islamic State group.

"He was so proud of that. And I was proud that my country had such a good ally," Biehl said. "I think the Kurdish-US alliance was the best military alliance we’ve had since WWII."

Shortly after President Trump announced the withdrawal from the region, the fixer messaged Biehl, begging for help. She says he told her his life was in danger because Turkish-backed jihadists knew he had worked with the Americans. "This man could be killed tonight. Because he helped us," she said.

"It’s such an appalling betrayal. I’m beginning to wrap my mind around it, but it will take a long time to absorb the horror of what we’ve done there."

If Turkey continues its attack on the Kurds, it's possible that Rojava will cease to exist —and Ocalan and Bookchin's vision for a communal democracy could come to an end.

Email Isaac Fornarola at ifornarola@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter: @isaacforn