March 15th, 2011- March 15th, 2024

13th Anniversary of the Syrian Revolution

In 2011, Tunisia was the spark that lit the revolution throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East, triggered by a rise in food prices. This is one of the richest regions of the planet and one that has been brutally looted by the imperialist oil companies.
Standing on the oil and gas that moves 80% of the world economy, enormous masses of starving workers rose up to enact huge revolutionary processes.
Millions took to the streets in Egypt, taking control of many factories and El Cairo main square for weeks.
Libya and Argelia also rose up. Even before that, people were fighting for bread in Iran and the US marines had to speefily withdraw from Iraq. The masses irrupted in Yemen. In Sudan the long military dictatorship fell after a wave of general strikes.

As part of these combats, a great revolution burst in Syria. The masses detached the army rank-and-file and set up the coordination committees. Middle East masses saw this enormous worker and peasant uprising in Syria as a road to Jerusalem and the defeat of Zionism.
Then, al-Assad had long algo become a direct agent of the HSBC: Middle East imperialist oil companies’ super profits fled abroad through his central bank. Today the reformist left tries to dress al-Assad as “an anti-imperialist fighter” that “the US has tried to downthrow”. A bunch of lies!

Having been forced to withdraw their army from Iraq, the US imperialism couldn’t directly intervene to suppress the enormous revolution in Syria where revolutionary uprisings kept expanding from city to city and even started to break the army horizontally. The US masses were standing up at home against the war in Iraq.
Zionism couldn’t intervene directly either since that would have sparked the process of civil war throughout the region.
This is why, at first certain native bourgeoisies of some countries, and imperialism set the trap of constitutional assembles, national unity governments and democratic fronts so as to take the masses away from the streets, only to lately smash the exploited with counter revolutionary strikes as we saw in Egypt with Al Sisi dictatorship and his Rafah wall blocking the masses in Gaza.

In Syria, imperialism needed to drown the revolution in blood. Under these conditions, it was al-Assad who did the dirty work on behalf of the imperialistic powers... and Zionism. He started a high scale massacre city by city, where millions of workers and peasants had risen and got to combat as close as 3kms from the presidential house in Damascus.
Though, the blows by fascist al-Assad were not enough. Besides the attacks by Hezbollah from Lebanon and the Iranian guard, Putin, the butcher and his troops from Moscow invaded Syria and bombed every rebelled city.
Since even with all this it was impossible to defeat the civil war, Imperialism sent the fifth column: the Sunni bourgeois “opposition” that had its Generals dissolve the rank and files soldiers’ committees and set up the Free Syrian Army with call for election promises. This was not yet enough to deceit the masses so the US sent ISIS –an appendix of Hussein’s bourgeoisie- from Iraq to control and repress the revolution while the Free Syrian Army surrendered the free cities from within.
Since this was still not enough, the Kurdish Communist Party (KCP) first settled with al-Assad, then with the US. Under their flag and discipline, the KCP brokedown the revolutionary front that drove towards getting Damascus.
The KCP and its YPG troops together with al-Assad and Putin’s bombing are responsible of shutting the way to the rebel masses that were taking over Aleppo (considered to be the capital of the Revolution together with Homs), and of drowning them in a bloodshed.

Syria: the largest genocide of the 21st. century

An scorched earth. Every city was destroyed. Every house, demolished. But most important: what once were the direct democracy organizations of the masses –the worker, peasant and rank and file soldier coordination committees- were defeated.

Syria was drowned into a bloodbath with the same counter revolutionary methods that the Zionism employs in Gaza and the occupied Palestine today.

Putin’s fascist troop’s involvement has been crucial to consolidate the counterrevolution. The images of Gaza today are barely a sample of what is left of Aleppo, Homs, Al Bab, Raqa, Deir ez Zor, Ghouta, Duma, Qusayr, Baniyas, Dariya, etc.

Today, while looking after the Golan Heights for the sake of Israel, al-Assad and Putin are kneeling together with the Iranian theocracy to help fence in Gaza: notwithstanding their rhetorical claims, they are sending neither soldiers nor doing anything to help the Palestinians. They do this after having dropped thousands tons of bombs over Syria.
In Tartus, Latakia province, in the coast of Syria, Putin has one of the largest military bases of the Great Russia, only 250 miles from Gaza. From there he custodies and looks after all the ships navigating the Mediterranean Sea with supplies for Zionism.
In opposition, the brave Yemeni nation is attacking and stopping commerce of all shipment on its way to Israel under the US or other imperialist powers’ flag.

On top of it, we have to endure the venom spread by the neo Stalinist groups, lackeys of Imperialism, which want to pass Putin as an “anti-Zionism and anti-Imperialism fighter”.

Moscow’s jackal is continuing today the counter revolutionary policies by Stalin, who had agreed with the UNO on the foundation of the Fascist State of Israel when WWII was coming to an end.

In a time when Zionism is massacring the Palestinian people in Gaza, we have to remind the workers the truth of their history, and in the first place, tell the truth to the Palestinian masses.
Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee’s camp in Syria was a prequel to what Zionism is doing in Gaza today. Yarmouk was seized by al-Assad’s troops with the help of Putin’s bombings. Over 6 thousand men, women and children were massacred. The remaining 18000 fighters resisted until ISIS got in to finish the counterrevolutionary job.
This is the true story that the traitors want to hide. They are all stained with blood and opprobrium.

Together with Imperialism, reformists have set up an “anti-terrorist front” to cover up the massacre of a heroic revolution

The Syrian masses have left 600,000 dead, 180,000 imprisoned or disappeared people and 15 million refugees. They are not responsible for this tragedy and the defeat of their heroic combats.
One by one, the revolutionary processes in the Middle East have been surrendered by the native bourgeoisies, but mainly by a front of traitors grouped in the World Social Forum. From there, and together with the French, US, German, and British imperialisms (states that own the imperialist oil companies that loot the Middle East), the Castroite, Chaviezist, Stalinist, Trotskyist renegade and social-imperialistic currents have campaigned to implied the notion that in Syria they were combating against “ISIS terrorism”, the very same ISIS that the US had used to smash partisans defying al-Assad!
By setting this “anti-terrorist front” they isolated the heroic revolution in Syria from the world working class. Dozens of thousands of refugees have arrived in European coasts, Greece in particular. They have been ignored by every Stalinist and social democrat bureaucracy in the European unions. The Mediterranean is full of their bodies.

With the defeat in Syria, also Palestine was rendered isolated after Hezbollah had surrendered the great revolutionary uprisings from the Lebanese masses, and with its multi-millionaire leader Nasrallah their party entered the government in Lebanon.
Today’s martyred Syria is the mirror in which the Palestinian and world masses must see themselves.

The chain of revolutions that threatened to reach Jerusalem from Tunisia and the entire Middle East and the Maghreb was smashed in Syria. Imperialism pulled all its strings and concentrated its strength using all its agents to smash the Syrian revolution and to cut the chain of revolutions so as to regain control of the region.
In order to achieve this goal, imperialism needs Zionism to smash the Palestinian nation and their heroic resistance.
Today’s Palestinian massacre is the continuation of yesterday’s Syrian one.

This 13th anniversary of the Syrian revolution, we want to set things right.
Stalinists who have supported al-Assad and Trotskyite renegades who have upheld him are tied to the apron-strings of Putin and Biden, today’s greatest sponsors of Zionism.
Those who dreamed with a “free Kurdish people” organized in “free communes” and “militia of progressist women” are seeing today their lies collapse in history. In each of these “communes” there is a barrack of US marines guaranteeing the security of Shell, Chevron and BP as they loot the black gold from the north of Syria and send it towards Turkey.

This is how they fenced in the Syrian revolution and let it fall, with every rebel city surrendered to al-Assad from within by the “opposition” bourgeoisies. Just like al-Assad in Damascus, these bourgeoisies repress and imprison the people partisans in Idlib. That city, once filled with thousands of combatants against al-Assad, is under HTS –a branch of Al Qaeda and an Erdogan’s agent- control, Together with Putin and the US in the north, they have shared among themselves the occupied Syria.
Today Idlib is under police and military control since HTS had to disarm every partisan who had risen during the revolution. Many of them are in prison and the masses are already taking the streets to conquer their freedom.
The traitors’ front are flatterers of al-Assad, Putin or the native “opposition” bourgeoisies, accomplices of smashing the revolution. Led by the Black bourgeoisie and Stalinism in South Africa, they are the same ones who now support the “peace plan” to surrender the Palestinian resistance. They have denounced Zionism to the International Court of Justice, which, of course, has stated that “there is no genocide in Palestine yet” which is precisely what they had said about Syria.

All of them are responsible for the fence in Gaza. Neither the Iranian theocracy, nor the bourgeoisie of Hezbollah in Lebanon, or the OLP, al-Assad and Putin have moved a finger to stop the suffering of the Palestinian masses. They are part of this fence imposed by Biden to let Zionism massacre while he Is throwing pennies to them and all counter revolutionary regimes in the region so that they are the jailers of their own people.

In the heart of the Syrian revolution, together with over 600,000 murdered people, Trotskyist militants have left their lives combating together with the masses for a revolutionary program

In the same way the rebel masses were slandered and bastardized, the traitors have treated the Trotskyists who fought in that heroic revolution.
From the Syrian resistance, we Trotskyists organized in the Collective for the refoundation of the Fourth international/FLTI, want to pay our tribute to the revolutionary socialists who have fallen in combat in the Syrian revolution.
Their names are clean for they fought in a just cause. Abu Al Baraa, Mustafa Abu Jumaa and their comrades have left this legacy together with internationalists who arrived in the battle front.
The reformist left wants to erase this internationalist tradition of struggle in the civil war. They won’t be able to.
Our comrades have died fighting under the flag of the Fourth international. They live in the struggle for its re foundation.
Honor to the Trotskyists of the Leon Sedov Brigade! Their generation is fighting and dying in rebel Palestine and in the combats against the butcher Biden on the streets of Washington and New York. Their fight has not been and will not be in vain.

Down with al-Assad, the guardian of the Golan borders!
Out with Putin, the Iranian Guard, the US, Turkey and all troops occupying Syria!

For the destruction of the Fascist- Zionist State of Israel!
In Syria and in Palestine, one and the same fight against the same enemy!

The Syrian revolution is not dead. It lives in the heroic combats in Gaza. It lives in the combats of the American working class within the imperialist beast. It lives in the clashes of the Ukrainian workers in the battlefront fighting to expulse from their nation the troops of Putin, the “Pinochet” of the insurgent peoples in Eurasia, and a base lackey of Maastricht’s imperialist Germany. Together with the Palestine flag, the flag of the Syrian revolution must lead the combats against imperialism and Zionism in the whole world.

We have to redeem the blood and the reputation of the heroic exploited who died fighting against the oppressors and were treated as terrorists and barbarians by the traitors.
Honor to the hundreds of thousand martyrs of the Syrian revolution! Freedom to half a million detainees/disappeared and justice for the murdered under fascist torture in the man-slaughtering jails of Al Assad.

We don’t forget, we don’t forgive!

Editorial Committee of “The truth of the Oppressed”,
organ of the socialists of Syria and the Middle East

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