La Marx International
The workers and peoples of the world celebrate and salute the fall of one of the most terrible dictatorships, one of the most horrific fascist regimes of our time. The armed struggle of Syrian militias on December 8, 2024 overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad after 13 years of fighting. The armed revolution overthrew a regime that had been oppressing the people for 53 years since 1971 with the dictatorship of Hafed Al Assad, and then with the succession of his son Bashar Al Assad from the year 2000. This regime murdered more than half a million people, caused the forced exile of more than 5 million, and filled the prisons with thousands of political prisoners.
The revolution freed thousands of political prisoners, liberated the cities and towns of Syria from the troops and officials of the dictatorship, freed thousands of opponents, freed hundreds of imprisoned women, freed Syria from 53 years of nightmare, and shows the way to end the tyrannies that still remain in the world, the Putins, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu, Maduro, Ortega, Díaz Canel, Kim Yong, Myanmar, the oil monarchies, etc. A constellation of charlatans, “opinionologists”, “geopolitical experts”, the Stalinists, campists and 99% of the world left mourn the fall of Al Assad because they consider it a “reactionary” fact that benefits Israel and the United States, in a new example of the dead-end crisis of the world bourgeois left.
But as a slap in the face to all charlatans, Israel has begun to attack the new government that has taken office, bombing the neighborhoods of Damascus, and areas surrounding the border, in a clear attitude of stopping the revolution that is taking place on its border. In their ignorance and rupture with Marxism, 99% of the bourgeois and reformist world left refuses to support the Syrian revolution, just as it has refused to support the Ukrainian revolution. But the struggles of the peoples turn their backs on the opinionologists and charlatans of the reformist left in crisis: There are few tyrannical regimes left, and the fall of Assad puts us on the path to ending them, an indispensable task in the struggle for Socialism. When we see lose together US, Israel, Putin, Al Assad, the Ayatollahs, is another slap in the face and another nail in the coffin of the “Decoupling Theory”
Assad’s army crumbled in 12 days due to the lack of popular support, socially isolated, mired in the hatred of the overwhelming majority of the population in the face of the unstoppable advance of a coalition of militias led by the group Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS). Without the support of Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship and the dictatorship of war criminal Vladimir Putin, dictator Bashar Al Assad had to flee like a rat into the arms of the war criminal who gave him asylum in Moscow.
The fall of the dictatorship is the result of the combination of two revolutionary processes: The Ukrainian revolution as the vanguard of the European revolution, and on the other hand the 3rd Palestinian intifada, in combination with the Syrian revolution and the revolution in Rojava as the vanguard of the 2nd Arab Spring. Without the combination of the two revolutionary processes, the fall of Bashar Al Assad would have been impossible. In a work that we will publish later we will explain how these revolutionary processes developed unevenly and combined to end the dictatorship, in this declaration we propose that the Syrian revolution shows the unity of the global revolutionary process with the twinned revolutions that have allowed one of the most resounding revolutionary victories that Marxists salute with pride: Long live the revolution of the Syrian people!
Millions of us celebrate the fall of Al Assad
The Syrian revolution is a February revolution, that is, a revolution that destroys the regime and the institutions of the bourgeois state, but it is not led by a revolutionary Marxist party. So this revolution, like the one in February in Russia, opens the stage of the October revolution, that is, while the bourgeoisie will try to rebuild the institutions of the bourgeois state and its political regime, the revolution will go against its plans to destroy them again, which puts forward the challenge of having a revolutionary organization at its head to put an end to capitalism. In the revolution that dethroned Assad, the coalition of militias entered Damascus in a 12-day raid that electrified the world. In each liberated city, demonstrations and celebrations of the population broke out, the mobilizations showed the joy and emotion of the people who took to the streets to show their happiness for the end of the Al Assad dictatorship, while the mobilizations and celebrations became global.
Ukraine and Syrian demonstrations in London
Syrians went out to celebrate in all the capitals of the world: New York, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, etc. Their demonstrations had the sympathy of the peoples of the whole world, while the hatred of the population towards the Assad dictatorship has also spread to the dictatorship of Putin and the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs who have committed horrible massacres against the Syrian people to drown the revolution in blood. The thirst for revenge gave birth to an activism willing to take up arms to destroy Al Assad, Putin, the Ayatollahs, which explains the participation of hundreds of young people eager to expel the dictatorship and foreign militias.
When militias seized the facilities of the Al Rawda presidential palace in Damascus, they found an impressive collection of high-end vehicles in the presidential palace, among other disgusting displays of the dictator’s ostentatious wealth. Bashar Al Assad lived in a majestic stone and marble fortress on a hill overlooking the city in the middle of a town that is at 80% poverty levels. But as happens every time a dictatorship falls, the celebrations were followed by horror: After the rebels opened the doors of the prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the families of the disappeared were desperately searching for their relatives in the filthy cells of the dreaded Saydnayah prison, who had been detained for a long time.
Corpses began to appear, and scenes of horror showed the cells where mass executions took place, crematoria for hanged prisoners, living under torture, shaved, skeletal, barely able to give their names, living in horrific conditions of solitary confinement, in the midst of mud and excrement. People searching the prison rummaged through buildings for routes to other floors, while others knocked down walls or drilled into the ground looking for hidden cells, or built underground. The Syrian people must now face the task of trial and punishment of the officials of the dictatorship, responsible for the thousands of dead and disappeared in the Al Assad regime.
The unstoppable advance of the revolution
The militias began their offensive against the dictatorship on November 27 when they launched an attack from Idlib province towards the city of Aleppo, the country’s second city, which the regime responded with aerial bombardments. The next day, on 28 November, militias blocked the strategic highway connecting Damascus to Aleppo and seized three towns in Aleppo and Idlib provinces. The clashes exceeded 200 dead, and among the casualties fell a general of the Revolutionary Guard of Iran, a key ally of Al Assad. On November 29, the rebels entered Aleppo after taking more than 50 towns in the north of the country, and began the dispute over Aleppo in which the troops of Al Assad and his ally Putin responded with intense air strikes in and around Idlib.
The road of Syrian militias
Anti-regime militias occupied positions in New Aleppo, on the outskirts of the city of Aleppo, and on November 30, 2024, captured most of Aleppo, including the airport, government buildings, and prisons. In addition, they took the strategic city of Saraqeb while enduring the bombardments of Putin’s aircraft, but on December 1 the militias consolidated their total control over Aleppo, which was outside the regime’s control.
The dictator Al-Assad, in a defiant speech, assured that “terrorism only understands the language of force”. Amid the advances of the militias, Putin and the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs reiterated their unconditional support for the dictatorship while the planes of Al Assad and Putin bomb the anti-dictatorial militias in the northwest of the country.
On December 5, 2024, militias took over the city of Hama, the country’s fourth-largest, and the people toppled a statue of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. And on Dec. 7, the militias captured Homs, the third-largest city, and freed more than 3,500 prisoners, as they approached Damascus, just 20 kilometers from the capital. As they took over the cities, the rebels opened prisons and released thousands of political prisoners, and avoided reprisals against minorities of Christians, Alawites, Druze or Kurds. In the cities they sought to restore the supply of bread and electricity, trying to manage some kind of government which allowed them to gain a lot of popularity.
The population of Deraa in the south of the country where the Syrian revolution began in 2011 rose up in arms, leaving Damascus surrounded by militia forces coming from Homs in the north and Deraa in the south. In Deraa there was no group like HTS, so the people resumed self-organization, took police stations and checkpoints and marched towards Damascus, liberating Deraa, Suweida and Quneitra until they reached Daraya, south of the capital. The Druze community defeated the forces of the Syrian regime in Suweida, while simultaneously, the troops of the armed militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SFD), the militias of the Kurdish people fighting for their national liberation, advanced to take control of the city of Deir Zour, on the left bank of the Euphrates River.
On the night of December 7-8, the militias entered Damascus, took over Saydnayah prison proceeding to release all prisoners, while Bashar al-Assad fled Syria by plane, marking the end of his horrific dictatorship. The lightning offensive managed in 12 days to crown the triumph of the revolution that has been going on for 13 years, a triumph that strengthens all the peoples of the world in the struggle against capitalism, and imperialism in the Middle East, and on a world scale.
Assad’s fall strengthens the Second Arab Spring
Because of disinformation, or because of the misleading campaigns of the imperialist media and opinionologists, many believe that the triumph of HTS and the defeat of Al Assad is a strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism. But it is exactly the opposite, the fall of Al Assad is a brutal blow to Islamic fundamentalism, because the revolution that defeats Assad is also part of the Second Arab Spring. The First Arab Spring began in 2011, it was a first revolutionary wave in the Middle East that hit more than 30 countries and in that framework the Syrian revolution began. But 8 years later, in 2019, a 2nd wave began, the “Second Arab Spring” with the uprisings of 2019 and 2020 in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, and the “Third Intifada” of Palestinians living inside the cities of Israel starting in 2021.
Unlike the First Arab Spring of 2011 that began the Syrian revolution, the “Second Arab Spring” is a revolutionary process that confronts Islamic fundamentalism, that is, it is led by new generations that reject Islamic fundamentalism, embrace the secularism process that was expressed in the the Lebanese revolution of October 17, 2019 against the capitalist government supported by Hezbollah, the process of the revolution in Iran of November 15, 2019 against the government of the Ayatollahs in the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, and the “Third Intifada” of Palestinians living inside the cities of Israel, which as of October 7, 2023 was transformed into open civil war against the Israeli army.
The Syrian revolution with the fall of Al Assad reaffirms the content of the Second Arab Spring because it confronts a capitalist dictatorship, but at the same time it goes against Hezbollah that is backed by the Islamic dictatorship of the Ayatollahs in Iran, it goes against the pro-Iranian militias, it goes against Al Qaeda, and it goes against ISIS. The Second Arab Spring is the expression of the process of political revolution that is sweeping the world by which the peoples break with all their old directions on a global scale, social democracy, Stalinism, ex-guerrillas, bourgeois nationalism, etc. The expression of this process in the Middle East is the crisis of the Islamic fundamentalist current, which has been the most important political current in the region for 45 years, but now shows fractures, crises, public and manifest fissures.
An expression of the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism is Hamas’s public support for the Syrian revolution and the fall of Bashar Al Assad with the following statement that you can read here: “Hamas congratulates the brotherly Syrian people for their success in achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice, and we call on all components of the Syrian people to unite their ranks.” Hamas’s public pronouncement is a manifest fracture of Islamic fundamentalism because Hamas stands on the opposite side of Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, despite the fact that they act together on the same military side in the 3rd Intifada.
Hamas had already publicly supported the 2011 Arab Spring against Assad’s government and left his headquarters in Damascus in 2012, a move that angered Iran. Another example is the evolution of the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS), the group that led the entire revolution.
HTS is an armed religious group considered “terrorist” by the United States. and NATO, emerged in Idlib. The founders of this group are a group of leaders led by Abu Mohammed al Golani who broke with Al Qaeda when it made an agreement with ISIS to promote an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Abu Mohammed al Golani, whose real name is Ahmad al Shareh, broke with Al Qaeda, which in Syria was called Al Nusra and founded the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS for its Arabic acronym) on January 28, 2017 together with the team of leaders that accompanied him.
l Golani founded HTS, the Syrian revolution had suffered a serious defeat at the hands of Hezbollah’s militias, the Iranian militias, and Putin’s mercenary troops, the Wagner Group, with which Syria became dominated by the RSII Coalition (Russia-Syria-Iran-Iraq) that incorporated the Lebanese military group Hezbollah. The RSII Coalition agreed to create the Idlib demilitarized zone of between 10 and 20 kilometers, guarded by the Russian-Turkish military police, which began operating on October 15, 2018, in which all the militias that confronted the Al Assad dictatorship were integrated, after the defeats of 2016-17.
In the demilitarized areaof Idlib, 3 blocs were formed: On the one hand, the SNA (Syrian National Army), a coalition of militias controlled by Turkey. On the other hand, the militias of Al Nusra, the representation of Al Qaeda that established an alliance with ISIS and on the other hand HTS that did not agree to join either of the two previous coalitions. U.S. imperialism, seeing that HTS did not agree to integrate with the Turkey bloc or the Iran-Russia bloc, offered it a deal, money, and supplies, which HTS rejected. A battle began between these blocs in which HTS prevailed on January 1, 2019 and formed the so-called “government of national salvation”.
The fact that HTS militarily defeated Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and the SNA in 2019 began to show the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism and to express the 2nd Arab Spring. From that moment on, HTS became the most important opposition group to the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad, that is, of all these guerrilla and partisan groups that opposed the dictatorship, the most independent of imperialism, Israel, Iran, Turkey and Putin, was strengthened. After its victory, HTS immediately violated the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia by placing combat units in the demilitarized zone along the border between Idlib and the Syrian government, and attacked Al-Assad’s army camps. In March 2020 in the midst of the Covid 19 pandemic, a ceasefire sponsored by Putin and the president of Turkey, Recep Erdoğan, was imposed, but byMarch 1, 2021 it was reported that HTS defeated Al-Qaeda again in Idlib.
In October 2022, HTS launched an offensive in the city of Afrin, near the Turkish border, against Turkish-backed SNA groups. In the following years, HTS was strengthened, including the founding of a military academy in 2022 and began to specialize in the use of drones that were begun to be used by the Houthi guerrillas, but had a great development of the Ukrainian army and partisans. HTS began to receive military advice on the use of drones by the Ukrainians, with which, in fact, the Syrian and Ukrainian revolutions began to unify. In other words, HTS evolved from being a group of Al Qaeda cadres, to breaking with ISIS, and moving closer to agreements with Ukrainian militias. He did not do it for an intellectual matter: He did it because in front of them the Islamic fundamentalist militias sought to shoot them, and destroy them, they had to evolve in self-defense.
HTS was waiting for the right moment to launch an attack on the troops of the Assad dictatorship, and the moment came on November 27, 2024, the day after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, the main military backer of the Syrian government. HTS took advantage of Hezbollah’s paralysis, and Putin’s crisis bogged down in the Ukrainian revolution. He also took advantage of the fact that the Iraqi army refused to intervene in defense of Al Assad, another element that expresses the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism. HTS was able to launch the offensive that surprised the world precisely as a result not of strength, but of the weakening of Islamic fundamentalism, in a process that ratifies and strengthens the Second Arab Spring, as part of the world political revolution.
A capitalist government of HTS emerges that we do not support
After the fall of Bashar Al Assad, HTS seeks to form a bourgeois, capitalist government of “national unity and reconstruction”. He appointed Mohamed al-Bashir as prime minister for the transition, who seeks an 18-month transition until the call for elections, trying to establish a state apparatus after the collapse of the regime, trying to guarantee governability and avoid widespread anarchy. Once in office, al-Bashir assured the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “he will guarantee the rights of all people and sects in Syria”. He stressed that the “wrong behavior of some Islamist groups has led many people, especially in the West, to associate Muslims with terrorism and Islam with extremism … we will guarantee the rights of all people and all sects in Syria…”, a whole discourse that seeks to show a “moderate” government far from Islamic fundamentalism.
The HTS leader Al Golani
In turn, HTS leader Al Golani announced that he will disband the former regime’s security forces and close its prisons, agreed with the former prime minister of the Assad regime, Mohammed al Jalali, to preserve the institutions and return 400,000 employees to their jobs. HTS seeks a transfer of power and relies on its own government apparatus, but it comes from governing the province of Idlib and it is not possible with this small apparatus to govern all of Syria.
That is why HTS announced on December 9 a general amnesty for all military personnel of the Syrian regime whom the regime conscripted under compulsory service and emphasized that the lives of these people “are safe” and that “no assault against them is allowed.” However, HTS announced that it will not pardon all those involved in the torture and murder of detainees in Syrian prisons.
In turn, four million Syrian refugees in Turkey are seeking to return to their communities, which is filling Syria’s borders with Turkey with thousands of families returning. HTS announced on December 9 that it is “strictly forbidden” to interfere in women’s choice of clothing or require women to dress modestly, further moving away from Islamic fundamentalism that forces women to wear the burqa and Islamic clothing. In the past, when HTS had recently broken with Islamic fundamentalism, it still brutally repressed women in Idlib, and HTS’s “morality police,” called Markaz al Falah, arrested women for dressing “inappropriately.”
It is possible that HTS seeks to change in order to try to impose a bourgeois democratic regime, so that HTS can become a “reliable” organization for imperialism, capable of managing capitalist Syria. The combination of militias and popular uprising with elements of self-organization imposed democratic freedoms, the release of political prisoners, the return of refugees, guarantees for minorities, that is, a whole set of mobilization processes that hinder dictatorial, repressive, or Bonapartist attempts by the HTS. All imperialist organizations are acting in this direction, for example Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said that “the United Nations Organization is fully committed to a smooth transition of power in Syria.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who travelled to Jordan and Turkey for talks on Syria, is moving in the same direction, while National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan urgently travelled to Israel, quickly seeking agreements to establish a “peace” to stop the revolutionary process in Syria.
The whole world counter-revolutionary front now wants to negotiate with HTS. Putin has already sounded out HTS to negotiate the continuity of its military bases, the Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean and the Hmeimim military airport, Iran is also seeking to negotiate the withdrawal of the “Revolutionary Guards”, as well as their military and logistical elements. Regardless of the course of events, Marxists do not support the HTS transitional government, nor any of its measures. We believe that the Syrian people will sooner or later confront this government, or its successors, when they discover that Syria’s capitalism has nothing to offer them. The triumph of the Syrian revolution implies the possibility of developing a project to put an end to capitalism in the country and the Middle East once and for all.
Syrian Revolution Opens Doors to Marxists in the Middle East
Syria has been under martial law for 40 years. It stipulates that any meeting with more than 5 people must be previously authorized by one of the 15 security services, two weeks in advance. To obtain authorization, they must specify the names of the speakers, together with a copy of each speech and the full list of participants. So many years of horrific dictatorship explains why it has been difficult for activists to carry out militancy in Syria, but that does not answer a question that surely hangs in the minds of millions around the world: Why have so many young activists and militants been attracted to Islamic and religious groups in Syria? Why haven’t they sought militancy in leftist groups, in the Communist Party, or the Socialist Party?
And the explanation is very simple: Because Stalinism and social democrats have always supported the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad. Even Assad’s own Ba’ath party claimed to be socialist, which means that the Syrian people saw how these so-called “socialists” tortured and killed people, something similar to what happens in Venezuela, North Korea, China or Cuba where a dictatorship that calls itself “socialist” represses the people and defends capitalism.
The dictator Hafez Al-Assad promoted the “National Progressive Front” led by the Ba’ath Party, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Khalid Bakdash, agreed to join the Popular Front created by Al-Assad. Then the CP split into two wings, the one led by Khaled Bakdash, and the wing led by Youssef Faisal, but both, and even Kadri Jamil’s People’s Will Party, have always supported the Syrian dictatorship, guaranteeing themselves ministerial positions in the government and slandering the forces of the revolution.
So if a young activist, a fighter for women’s rights, or an anti-dictatorial leader sought to confront the Assad dictatorship, the only thing he found were religious groups, whether they were jihadists, Islamists, Salafists or otherwise. I couldn’t find the left, because the leftist groups were always defending a horrific dictatorship. This is the explanation why thousands of young people in order to organize politically against the dictatorship in Syria, had no choice but to join religious groups. They were the only ones who confronted the dictatorship.
It is not that there have not been attempts in the history of Syria to build Marxist organizations. We have the case of comrades like Munif Mulhem who was imprisoned in horrific conditions for 17 years, from 1981 to 1997. Munif created a Trotskyist wing in the Communist Party of Labor, and he himself promoted the Communist Action Party of Syria, close to Mandelism. We also had other examples such as that of the Palestinian revolutionary Salameh Keilah, now deceased, who suffered imprisonment and torture for eight years forming the Syrian Left Coalition, or Workers’ Democracy of Argentina, which sent comrades to fight in Syria in favor of the revolution. These organizations could not survive the repression of the dictatorship, but even beyond political differences, they were important efforts to provide an alternative to the Ba’ath Party and Stalinism.
But now the victory of the Syrian revolution opens the doors to Marxists in the Middle East. Thousands of activists begin to make a new experience as the revolution unfolds. This has entered a new stage, the revolution will now confront the future governments that defend capitalism and will allow thousands of new activists to access Marxism. From La Marx International we salute the Syrian revolution, and we address those thousands of activists who have achieved the enormous revolutionary effort of overthrowing the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad to build a revolutionary organization, regrouping revolutionaries to develop with more strength of the Second Arab Spring on the road to Global Socialism.
Source by www.revolucion.org.es
