With sensational rapidity, the Assad regime has collapsed. With the support of Hezbollah, Iran and most recently Russia gone, its power apparatus has unraveled like snow in the sun even in its historic stronghold Damascus, which is now in the hands of the HTS and its allies.
This collapse confirms the analysis of those who, like us, have been arguing for a decade that Bashar al-Assad and his clan of businessmen and butchers of the Syrian people had dug an unbridgeable gulf between themselves and the very large poor mass of Syrian cities and countryside that had risen up in the years 2011-2012. And that the reconquest of military control over 70% of the country’s territory was certainly not equivalent to the reconquest of the hearts and minds of those who had taken part in the popular uprising. On the contrary, the extremization of the patrimonial and corrupt nature of the regime that took place in recent years in the presence of rampant misery, had further eroded – as we have seen – its residual credibility.
Festive scenes arrive from Damascus and other cities. The first proclamation of the National Transitional Council speaks of a “free and proud” Syria whose “unity and sovereignty” will be guaranteed, in the context of a “comprehensive national reconciliation” and a reconstruction of the country and the state “on the basis of freedom and justice”.
After more than a decade of armed clashes and violence of all kinds, a mountain of 500,000 corpses and millions of displaced persons, it is normal that the fall of the first person responsible for all this tragedy brings back hope for a g51eneral improvement in living conditions. But there are many reasons to doubt it.
The first is constituted by foreign appetites which, with the collapse of Assad and the setback suffered by Iran and Russia, have suddenly been magnified. Turkey, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates and some European states (France is the first suspect, and even the Ukrainian regime) are ready to move on to cashing in. And, be sure, they will certainly not be more lenient than Russia and Iran. Furthermore, the unknown factor of the Russian presence in the coastal area remains.
The second is the guarantee given by HTS and associates to “protect private property”. Which means protecting the frightening polarization in the distribution of social wealth that has been created in the fifty-year Assad era, particularly under Bashar, thanks to his neo-liberal reforms. After all, the great protectors of the victorious militias are certainly not models of “fair distribution of social wealth”, assuming – and not conceding – that under capitalism, especially a hyper-dependent capitalism like the Syrian one, there can be something like this. And it would not surprise us at all if the big Syrian capitalists benefited by the Assads (a dozen families) boast, in front of the newcomers, that they have favored a peaceful transition by abandoning him to his fate, and therefore that they deserve the right rewards.
The third reason to doubt that the liberation of the exploited and oppressed masses of Syria is now beginning is the Sunni confessional character of HTS and its likewise. These are, in fact, militias whose origin is marked by decades of fierce opposition to the Shiites and Alawites as heretics, in many cases composed of non-Syrian militiamen, but Chechens, Afghans, Turks, etc., who rushed to fight in Syria precisely for reasons of religious sectarianism.
The fourth is constituted by the fate of the mass of Syrian women without rights (almost all of them) who even before these events, and even during the popular uprising of 2011-2012, certainly did not enjoy a condition of “freedom” and “equality”, far from it, being in this aspect Syria a tail end in the Arab world compared to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and, above all, Iraq before its infamous devastation at the hands of Amerikans (Schwartzkopf, Albright, Baker, three names for a whole gang of genocides), and also after this criminal work of destruction. For them, the future becomes even darker than the present.
The fifth is the presence of an unresolved Kurdish question. The Kurdish armed formations, the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) and the Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria have already sounded the alarm loudly about the neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiye in Aleppo, the Shahba region, Deir ez-Zor and other areas still with a strong Kurdish density or occupied by Kurdish militias. They made a sorrowful appeal to the “international community”, i.e. the United States and the EU, to set themselves up as protectors of the “democratic model built in Rojava”. Well, without detracting from the merits of this autonomous administration in promoting public activity and protecting the rights and needs of women, it remains undeniable that the function played by the Kurdish militias of jailers and killers of jihadists fleeing Mosul (and their families) in the service of the United States, and under the protection of their bombings, was and is reactionary.
The first cautious statements coming from Washington speak of the need to prevent a resurgence of ISIS… They seem, therefore, aware that they must now be the ones to unravel the very complicated skein. Israel can certainly rejoice, but at the same time it has lost “its best enemy”, having never received any annoyance from Bashar and Co. worth mentioning. The advance on Damascus was really easy, for all the winners the difficult part comes now.
A regime of “injustice, tyranny and oppression” ends, but this is not the dawn of a liberation of the oppressed Syrian and Kurdish masses. Other very hard tests and disillusionments await them until the scene of the proletarian and popular revolts of the years 2011-2012 is repeated on a grand scale, with more radicality, consciousness and class organization. In the meantime, it will be necessary to see whether the new rulers will really free all political prisoners, even those whose militancy had an anti-capitalist sign, or only their affiliates…
A new chapter in the Syrian tragedy (and the advancing world war)
The lightning-quick seizure of the cities of Aleppo and Hama by the jihadist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, literally: Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) formation has opened another phase of chaos and civil war in Syria already torn apart by thirteen years of armed clashes and heavy-handed interference by the big and medium powers vying for its strategic territory and its resources.
Whether it is an initiative taken at the urging of Turkey, or under the direct push of the United States and other Western states, or a mix of the two, the fact remains that the seizure of Aleppo and Hama (and Homs as this text is being translated) will only multiply the chaos, bloodshed and misery in a land already ravaged by a war of all against all in which, and by which, the great popular uprising of 2011-2012 was stifled. Underneath, or above, this war is the global confrontation between the U.S.-EU-Israel axis and the Russia-Iran-China axis, with Turkey keen to profit from it, placing itself on one side or the other as the case may be.
Today’s Syria
Today’s Syria is a battlefield on which there are more than 20,000 soldiers and fighters belonging to the regular armies of the United States, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and multiple militias, some pro-Iranian Lebanese, Iraqi, and Afghan, others affiliated instead with Western imperialisms and Turkey. As of early 2022, there were 479 foreign military bases and posts in Syria: 131 belonging to Iranian armed forces and pro-Iranian militias, 116 to Hezbollah, 114 to Turkey (and affiliates), 83 to Russia, the remaining 35 to the United States (and affiliates). Not a single corner of Syria’s borders in the north, south, west and east is entirely under the control of the Damascus government, which until a few days ago somehow controlled only 70 percent of the country’s territory.
Today’s Syria is a very poor country, with about 80 percent of its inhabitants in poverty (55 percent suffering from food insecurity, 67 percent in need of food aid); 6 million refugees scattered throughout the Middle East and the world; nearly 7 million internally displaced persons (out of a total population of 24 million, as of 2011); with economic losses of $530 billion in the last decade (the 2019 GDP was $21.6 billion, one-third of the 2011 figure); a country almost totally dependent from abroad (Russia and Ukraine) for its grain needs; with 40 percent of its small and very small manufacturing enterprises mowed down by the combination of civil war, manufacturing crisis and criminal Western sanctions; with the value of the Syrian lira plunging from 45 to 3,500 to the dollar in a decade – in August 2023 it even touched 14,300 on the black market –; out-of-control inflation and foreign debt; a society ravaged by violence even in interpersonal relationships, with record rates of sexual abuse, divorce, and polygamy; with large Russian and Iranian companies (Stroytrangaz, Ros Energostroy Levant, Mapna) eager to profit from the catastrophe by imposing, on the basis of the so-called public-private partnership, colonial-type contracts (the one for the operation of the port of Tartus has a duration of 49 years) and the worsening of working conditions in the phosphate mines and ports; with Saudi companies ready to swoop in like vultures on the “reconstruction” business as soon as the rapprochement with Assad is completed, and Western money lenders equally ready to use their sanctions to dictate strangler contracts, and so on.
The great popular uprising of the years 2011-2012
This tragic situation has come about as a result of the crushing in blood of the great popular uprising of the years 2011-2012 by the al-Assad regime (with the decisive support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah) and its fragmentation and degeneration in a sectarian and militarist direction favored by the Gulf petromonarchies, Turkey and Western powers.
In the Dossier linked to this article, titled “Syria: the popular uprising caught between regime brutality and NATO gangsters,” those who read will find a more detailed analysis of those major events, and of the combined counter-revolutionary response of the two opposed capitalist-imperialist poles, yet united in the goal of preventing Syria’s poor, proletarianized, peasant masses from being protagonists of their own destiny.
The popular uprising, which started on March 15th 2011 in Deraa, a southern Syrian town on the border with Jordan, a traditional stronghold of the ruling Baath Party, was inspired by the likewise large uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and their successes in getting rid of their respective regimes. Its spontaneity and breadth, especially in the poor urban belts of large cities, are data beyond dispute. So too is its democratic and non-sectarian character: the demand for freedom, social justice and equality among all citizens, respect for all religious denominations, the initially ubiquitous slogan “One, one, one, the Syrian people is one,” meaning “we are all Syrians, we are all united,” “neither Kurds nor Arabs, Syrians are one,” “no to sectarianism, yes to national unity,” characterized the first two years of the uprising. Initially, the tone of the demonstrations was moderate, reformist, because openness was expected from the ruling dynastic elite. Rare at first was the slogan, dominant in Tunisia and Egypt: “Ash’ab iurid isquat al-nizam” (the people want to bring down the regime). The brutality first, the heinous violence later, with which the Assad regime responded to these aspirations, radicalized the uprising, pushing it into head-on confrontation with it.
In this crucial step the massive uprising showed its political weaknesses. The 427 local committees or councils formed in the wake of the uprising, the vast majority of which had popular and inclusive characteristics, were able to give themselves a coordinating body; but this was incapable of performing the function of directing the struggles and of remaining totally autonomous from the bodies of outsiders who claimed to represent the popular movement, but were totally disconnected from it and to varying degrees dependent on foreign powers. After all, during forty years of authoritarian rule the Assad family had taken care to desertify, by repression on the one hand, by forms of co-optation on the other, the landscape of political and trade union forces. Particularly active in this regard was the very Bashar whom some unhinged people continue to deem an “anti-imperialist lion” (come on!) by opening Syria’s doors in 2005 to a process of neo-liberal reforms that are known to have little or no tolerance for workers’ organizations.
The entry of the World Bank and IMF into Syria, the rapid growth of foreign investment (up from $120 million in 2002 to $3.5 billion in 2011, led by Turkey and the petromonarchies), the creation of private banks and insurance companies, the reopening of the Damascus Stock Exchange in 2009 (after 46 years of closure), the liberalization of foreign trade, the expansion of the private economy (including in education, health, and mass media) at the expense of public enterprises and public services, the lowering of taxes on the wealthiest from 63% to 15-27%, have produced great benefits for the upper bourgeois strata, particularly for some families closely linked, even by family ties, to the Assads (Makhlouf, Sharabati, al-Akhras, Qalai, Anbouba, Hasan), but have hit the vast majority of urban and rural workers with inflation, the reduction of state subsidies to essential consumption and agriculture, and increased bossial despotism in the workplace.
A picture, in short, of increasing concentration of social wealth in a few, very few hands in the face of a process of impoverishment on a very large scale. The coup de grace to social peace was delivered by the three years of drought (2007-2010) that hit 800,000 peasants and laborers hard, many of whom were forced to move to urban areas for survival reasons. When then came the brunt of rising grain prices coinciding with growing agricultural imports and declining oil revenues, the air became saturated, and all it took was a small spark ignited in Deraa for such a large-scale uprising to erupt – several million demonstrators in all, with strong youth and even female participation.
The Syrian ruling class, infected by the same mad “neo-liberal” frenzy that has raged for decades in the West, imbued with the “grand plan” of making Syria a thriving center of banking, tourism, and trade, was taken by surprise by the mass uprising. The response of the Baathist power was articulate and skillful: it aimed to strengthen ties with all the religious leaders and most influential businessmen, as well as with the leaders of the Palestinian community in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, under the control of Jibril’s FPLP/ General Command, a lifelong Assad loyalist; it did everything it could to keep the structure of social services and civil servants in place in the capital, pushing populations to move to government-controlled areas; it created special militias with a status superior to that of the army’s military. But at the same time, from the outset, it has resorted to a more than brutal repression and, as a subsidiary weapon, to the divertion of the uprising in a confessional and sectarian direction, favoring this with the release of many Islamist militants. By the end of 2013, 130,000 people had already fallen on the Syrian soil, mostly belonging to the insurgent social strata. The 60,000 defections from the army, the subsequent creation of the FSA (Free Syrian Army) and a large number of small and not-so-small anti-regime jihadist formations, often foreign-funded, amplified the slaughter to 500,000 dead (this is the estimate provided by various associations).
This carnage was ended, forgive the paradox, by the massive Russian, Iranian and Lebanese intervention that allowed Bashar al-Asad’s regime to regain much of the lost territory in 2015-2016 – the turning point being the return of forces loyal to Assad to eastern Aleppo in December 2016. The city of Damascus alone has always remained steadily in government hands, except for the outer belt (Ghouta). In the meantime, however, using the “good arguments” of fighting the “terrorism” of the so-called “Islamic State” and that of the Kurdish rebels in Syria, regular U.S. and Turkish armies, as well as emissaries from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, have installed themselves in the country, fostering the proliferation of jihadist groups capable of practices and actions no less ruthless than those of the Baathist regime.
How do we explain the rapid advance of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham?
Where does HTS emerge from? The current head of HTS al-Jawlani officially appeared on the Syrian scene in 2011 as an envoy of the Islamic State in Iraq, then on Jan. 23th, 2012 as the founder of Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that was born with a strong anti-Western and, at the same time, horrendously sectarian proclamation “against the Alawite enemy” and “its Shiite agents.” In response to its initial unpopularity, this formation responded by moderating to some extent its ideology and trying to entrench itself in the Damascus belt. But following the U.S. war on ISIS for which the U.S. put up a 60-state coalition that carried out thousands upon thousands of bombings (85 percent U.S.) on the Mosul city and area, and following the Russian-Iranian offensive in Syrian territory, al-Nusra gradually retreated to the north of the country, taking control of the very poor Idlib area, which it administered by adopting sectarian criteria and where – after breaking with al-Qaeda and its global jihadist perspective in 2016 – it reorganized its forces. Its new political line is less and less anti-Western and increasingly focused on Syria, which now appears to be partly, from Aleppo to Hama, under its control.
Two different guesses are being made as to which powers are behind the initiative of HTS (and other aggregated militias, about which very little is known so far) to take Aleppo and march south (in either case Israel is rubbing its hands together).
Because of the timing of the attack and because of the known ties HTS has with Turkey, some believe that Turkey is behind this military march (nothing to do with a popular uprising, huh!) and is trying to take advantage of the weakening of Syria and Hezbollah, hard hit by Israel’s offensive, to increase its influence in the country and force Bashar al-Assad to form a government that protects Turkish interests. Erdogan’s explicit claim, a few days after the HTS action began, lends strength to this hypothesis.
For others, however, pushing HTS and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani into action are the United States, Israel and some European countries (the mind runs, immediately, to France, the old colonial power to which the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 attributed control of the southeastern part of Turkey, the northern part of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon). This action would be aimed not only, of course, at weakening the Assad regime and especially the Russian and Iranian military presence and interests, but also at creating some difficulties to Turkey, so far credited as the No. 1 sponsor of HTS, in its attempt to make peace with Assad and weave good relations with Russia. The source of this analysis is the Turkish newspaper Aydinlik, close to Erdogan. In the same direction go the official claims coming from Damascus and Tehran that the ongoing “terrorist escalation” “is aimed at redrawing the geographical map according to the interests of America and the West,” and is “the result of the U.S. presence in Syria.” Reports are also filtering in about the presence of drones and related instructors that have come from Ukraine.
A three-day-old Wall Street Journal article by Y. Trofimov paints a benign portrait of al-Jawlani’s conversion from an advocate of global jihad also directed against the United States and the West into an Islamist-minded Syrian nationalist with an ideology “closer to that of the Taliban and Hamas.” “Instead of the flag of Islam, HTS troops [which the United States still considers a terrorist organization] have chosen to fight under the Syrian flag belonging to the republic that existed before the Baath Party-led revolution that brought the Assad family to power.” At the moment al-Jawlani, whose family is originally from the Golan, and was for five years in an Amerikan prison in Iraq, is presented as having become unideological, pragmatic, gentrified over the years, a fairly efficient administrator of Idlib territory, even tolerant of other religious denominations and Kurds. The article sounds like an accreditation from Washington, albeit with some cautious reservations. The Dec. 5th New York Times, in an article by Hassan Hassan, goes further, even presenting the HTS as a “stabilizing factor” (in fact: 280,000 new displaced persons in 4 days…), one of the “political actors” capable of filling the vacuum left by a “failed state” like Syria’s. Since it is not possible to have a friendly government in Syria capable of governing the entire country – this would require expenditures of energy and costs that are unsustainable today – Western countries must, realistically, make do with such groups. Almost an investiture, then.
Be that as it may, the explanation for the overwhelming advance of HTS – if the reports are true – even in the direction of Homs with Damascus as its target, lies not so much in its strength and, less so, in its popularity, it lies in the extreme weakness of the Assad regime, which has regained a lot of territory with Russian-Iranian help, but has certainly not regained the hearts and minds of its own people. On the contrary, the last 7 years, if they have seen Bashar al-Assad regain legitimacy in international capitalist fora (the Arab League readmitted him with all honors in May 2023), have not, on the other hand, allowed him to re-establish a hegemony, albeit passive, over the vast majority of the poor and internally displaced population. This is because the patrimonial and corrupt character of his regime has radicalized in recent years, with a further widening of the gaps between popular and proletarian masses struggling with misery, and pro-Assad bourgeois elites swimming in luxury. In August 2023 there was a (limited) resumption of protests in Aleppo’s al-Fardous neighborhood, in Deraa, and in Deir ez-Zor, triggered by the total abolition of gasoline subsidies and partial diesel subsidies (and the lack of electricity); in the southern city of Suwayda, with a strong Druze presence, the demands of protests, which echoed those of 2020 and 2022, were also political in nature: the release of political prisoners, the ouster of Russian troops, and the fall of Assad.
The two exceptions remain till now the coastal area of Latakia and Tartus (an area of strong settlement of the “Alaouite community” and Russian military bases) and Damascus, where Assad’s social base still seems large and relatively solid among state employees, in the military and security apparatuses, and in the bourgeois circles favored by neo-liberal reforms. The collapse of the regular army can be explained by this situation and also, probably, by the shift from the conscript army to the army of hired “volunteers,” decided in recent years to try to relieve the pressure on all strata of the population by recruiting only among the poorest of the poor. Who, according to the evidence these days, have little appetite to die for their government and the circle of peace and war profiteers who still support it.
It seems to us, however, very unlikely that the advance of HTS can continue undisturbed, as has been the case so far. Russia, Iran and, perhaps, Turkey itself will have to react, albeit in distinct ways, to the risk of the entirety of Syria falling under the control of a formation that appears to be under prevalent U.S.-European patronage. It is possible that the withdrawal of regular Syrian Army forces may be tactical, in order to have a way to better organize along a hypothetical Maginot Line. Just as it is likely that the U.S. will not sit idly by if jihadist groups and regular troops move toward Syria from Iraq and Iran – indeed, it has already begun its usual democratic-libertarian bombardments. New calamities, new massacres are brewing in this prolongation of Syria’s agony, in which no light can be seen.
The only way out
“No to a new Talibanistan in Syria!” is the stance of the Turkish SEP comrades, who rightly and boldly denounce the meddling of Erdogan’s Turkey and of the Western imperialist powers pushing for new ethnic and sectarian massacres and preparing new bloody scenarios in Lebanon and Iraq as well. All right: down with the HTS and, doubly so, down with Western, Zionist and Turkish imperialist schemes aimed at reigniting civil war in Syria! But there is no preferring the equally bloodthirsty, anti-proletarian, reactionary Assad regime and its protectors, fully co-responsible for the martyrdom of the Syrian people, already fully plunged into the “world war in pieces.”
As unlikely and far-fetched as it may seem, there is only one way out, only one possibility of peace and liberation for the exploited and oppressed masses of Syria, which was anticipated by the uprising of 2011-2012: rising up together with the exploited and oppressed throughout the Middle East against their own regimes and their overlords of West and East, taking up the example of the indomitable Palestinian resistance to the Zionist death machine. The peace and liberation of this people cannot be secured by any state, by any “benevolent” protector. The contribution we can and must make, here in the belly of the beast, is to denounce and oppose our government, the EU, NATO and their neo-colonial aims in Syria, in Palestine, in the Middle East, in the whole world!
Hands off Syria and the Middle East, serial murderers!