I find it hard to believe that, given our ability to follow the Syrian civil war in almost real time and over the shoulders of the men and women fighting in it, any person of sound faculties would throw their lot in with the dream team of whatever Jabhat al-Nusra is calling itself this week and some imagined “revolutionary spirit” haunting streets and alleys of the al Qaeda caliphate that has congealed in Idlib. It almost resembles the ideological cancer that our Marxist/Leninist brothers and sisters occasionally contract: a willingness to defend almost anything in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’, combined with a certain ‘black pill’ je ne sais quoi. Unable to walk out to the tip of the spear of DAESH IS GLORIOUSLY FIGHTING WESTERN IMPERIALISM, unwilling to see the Actually Existing Socialism growing on the northern front, our comrades have proposed a third way: we must support the FSA against both Assad and the menace of empire. They and they alone are keeping the flame of the Arab Spring burning. Please pay no attention to the transfer of the FSA brand to an al Qaeda franchise.

If “The Case for Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution” was written about any other conflict, this edgy take would be disappointing but not unexpected. There are thousands on the left who will defend the DPRK with absolute, borderline religious conviction. There is decent money to be made rehabilitating al Nusra for an American audience as Chuck Lister and Michael Weiss can attest. That Schulman and Sloughter didn’t get paid for this piece makes the complete omission of the revolution in Rojava even more bizarre.

You don’t have to take me at my word when I describe the present state of the FSA. Take Robin Yassin–Kassab, co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (London: Pluto Press, 2016) at his:

“The revolution is still strong in Idlib province, but the fighting men there tend to be dominated by Salafist or jihadist factions like Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra whose politics contradict the revolution’s democratic aims. Local councils and Free Army brigades control large areas of southern Syria, but they have been militarily neutralised by the refusal of Jordan and the US to allow a weapons supply through the Jordanian border. Northern Aleppo province is also held by Free Army groups and local councils, but in the presence of the Turkish army, and in the context of territorial conflict with both ISIS and the PYD.”

Let me make this perfectly clear: I support the multicultural, multiethnic revolution in Rojava. I support the Kurdish people’s struggle toward a stateless autonomy. I support TEV DEM as it builds an egalitarian society on a foundation of democratic confederalism and I support the SDF in its armed struggle against fascism and the constraints of capitalist modernity. We have a rare opportunity to stand in solidarity with not only the revolution in Rojava, but the revolution to come in Bakur. The cooperative economy that is being built in Rojava is a model to the world, a model we desperately need.

‘A better world is possible’ isn’t just an empty platitude. Women and men are fighting for that better world every day, and they’re fighting under the flags of the SDF. Michael Israel, one of the DSA’s finest human beings, believed in that possible world so profoundly that he was willing to die for it. The least we can do as members of the Democratic Socialists of America is stand in solidarity with all of Rojava’s martyrs.