Anand Gopal has form when it comes to war. In Afghanistan, distrustful of President Bush’s ‘good vs evil’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us’ narrative, he did what every good reporter does: ‘I learned the language, grew a beard and hit the road like a local.’

The result was No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. In its refusal to stick to the script – especially American and British propaganda about all the ‘progress’ which later proved so illusory – the book recalled Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam exposé, Dispatches. Through the lives and voices of a Taliban commander, a US-backed warlord and a village housewife, Gopal, a contributing writer at the New Yorker, told the devastating story of how America got it so wrong. It was visceral reporting which packed a mighty punch.

In Days of Love and Rage, he shifts his focus to Syria, another country which has been eviscerated by decades of savage repression followed by the slaughterhouse of civil war. It took him and his team of half a dozen Syrian researchers eight years to complete, a reminder that no one really does reporting like the Americans. Two thousand interviews were conducted for this work, with thousands more newspapers, diaries, letters,........

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