Eight years ago, Abu Al Baraa, a Trotskyist leader of the Leon Sedov Brigade, fell in Syria under the bullets of the fascist al-Assad and the butcher Putin, in the struggle to break the siege of Aleppo in 2016. In 2011, in that country, a huge revolutionary process had begun, a continuation of the mass uprisings that broke out throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East. In Tunisia, the spark had been lit that later spread to the entire region.
Abu Al Baraa, together with internationalist cadres, converged and regrouped the forces of revolutionary partisans, thus founding Syrian Trotskyism, becoming a great internationalist militant of the working class throughout the Middle East.

Abu Al Baraa fell raising the banners of the Fourth International and fighting for the victory of the revolution in Syria. He and his comrades considered this revolution of workers, peasants and committees of rank and file soldiers as a link of a single revolution that had to take a giant step by taking over Damascus and Jerusalem.
Abu Al Baraa and his revolutionary comrades fought within this enormous mass movement that arose in the Syrian revolution, which, with uprisings city by city, reached to fight just blocks away from the government house of the counterrevolutionary jackal Al Assad in Damascus. When this was happening, US imperialism sent the counterrevolutionary troops of Putin and the clerics of Iran and Lebanon to support Al Assad and drowned this enormous revolution in blood. 600,000 Syrians killed. 15 million refugees and displaced people. More than 100 thousand prisoners tortured. 25 thousand Palestinians killed in the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk near Damascus. All cities destroyed by barrel bombs.
What Zionism is doing nowadays in Gaza is nothing new. This is how imperialism and its agents operate when it comes to crushing the revolutionary uprisings of their slaves.

However, this massacre of Assad and Putin, who were doing imperialism’s dirty work, was not enough. The masses had the weapons as the rank and file soldiers had moved onto their side. Then, imperialism and the Syrian bourgeoisie also sent the Sunni generals, a part of the officer caste of their army, with promises of “democracy” to place themselves at the front of this huge revolutionary uprising in order to dissolve and destroy all the self-determination structures of the workers, peasants and rank and file soldiers, such as the workers’ and soldiers’ coordination committees that repeated in Syria the experience of the shora of the Iranian revolution in the 1980s.
These bourgeois generals, who called themselves “democratic,” were and are under the control of Turkey and they are the ones who surrendered from within all the rebel cities that had been taken by the masses against Assad.

But that was not enough either. The forces of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of the Sunni bourgeoisie, organized by imperialism and under the name of “ISIS,” were sent to Syria to savagely murder the best of the vanguard of the revolution.

And it was still not enough… For years, a civil war shook all over Syria, which ended up massacred and its cities were demolished, just as we see today in Gaza.

As if that were not enough, at the international level, the Islamophobic currents and servants of imperialism, Stalinism and former Trotskyists, formed the so-called “anti-terrorist front”, which presented the greatest revolutionaries who fought in it as “terrorists” and “agents of imperialism”. Thus, they separated this enormous mass uprising from the international proletariat.

Abu Al Baraa was part of an internationalist revolutionary faction, of that rebellious youth who embraced the banners of Trotskyism and fought on the front line against the fascist al-Assad and the butcher Putin. But Abu Al Baraa, together with that Trotskyist youth, also fought against those who sold out the revolution from within, and against the leaderships that slandered and discredit the revolution at international level, providing al-Assad a carte blanche to massacre at will.
He fought this battle alongside our international current, as a member of the Editorial Board of the Trotskyist paper The International Workers' Organizer.

Abu Al Baraa was the leader of a revolutionary faction of the masses who fought against al-Assad, in which hundreds of youth and workers organized themselves with the support of the workers and peasants, independently of the no-battle generals of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
The Trotskyists of the Syrian revolution and their comrades fought to take over Aleppo with the program of expropriating the bourgeoisie and all the banks and putting all those funds to win the war and for the people to eat. They took over factories and placed them under workers' control. Thus, a revolutionary left wing began to emerge in the fight against al-Assad.

In the beginning of the revolution, they sought support from the Kurdish people, but the bourgeoisie and Kurdish Stalinist PKK took the Kurds, tragically, first to a pact with al-Assad and then under the discipline of the US military bases that are in the Kurdish area of Syria. Today, from there, the big transnational companies such as Exxon, Total and Shell suck the Syrian oil throughout the pipelines that run through Turkey. This way, the YPG (Kurd militias), presented as “heroes” of the world working class by the reformist left, ended up allied to al-Assad and guarding the oil wells for imperialism.

On this October 24, 2024, we pay tribute to our comrade Abu Al Baraa, fallen 8 years ago. We also pay tribute to over 15 Trotskyist martyrs that also left their lives together with hundreds of thousands of murdered.
When we see the heroicity of the Palestinian masses threatening to impact on all the exploited masses of the Middle East, we know and we are convinced that justice will be served. The murderers will end up in hell, together with the traitors that slandered, discredited and defame the heroic Syrian revolution.

Our current has the honor to had been in the front line of the struggle in the revolutions that broke out in Maghreb and Middle East since 2011. European “socialists”, various renegades of Trotskyism, referred to them as “springtime of the peoples” and praised the “freedoms” and “democracies” “gained”… Some of them were there with the illussion of “sowing democracy”, but when the counterrevolution started, they ran away immediately.
Imperialism assessed the events and saw that the process started in Tunisia and threatened to reach, from the whole region, to Jerusalem, was the beginning of an international revolution made by workers and peasants.
The trade union bureaucracies of all the union federations of the world and the so-called “Bolivarians” supported Putin and al-Assad guising them as “anti-imperialists”. This is an infamy and an evil deception. The greatest and most cynical treason in the 21st century to a revolutionary process.
US imperialism had been expelled from Iraq in 2008 by the mass resistance and the workers uprising inside the USA. Therefore, it couldn’t intervene directly and so he did throughout its agents.

THE TRUTH IS OUT IN THE WILD 

The veil has been lifted. The truth comes to light. The lie has been unmasked. The intellectual authors and organizers of this genocide, the U.S. imperialists, are now openly confessing. The reformists, those who dirtied the Syrian revolution, those who held the gun for Al Assad and Putin, are condemned by history and the truth that is coming to light.  

Andrew Exum, the former US undersecretary of defense for the Middle East, in his May 9, 2019 presentation to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee on the events that unfolded in Syria in 2011, states: 
"we worried that the Assad Regime might finally collapse – and do so quickly, in a way that would endanger U.S. interests, to include the security of the state of Israel. That's why we began talking to the Russians." 

This chief of U.S. imperialism announces that because of the beginning of the revolution, they talked with Putin and the Russians because their business in the whole region and the security of Zionism was in danger… Here the deceits and infamous lies are unraveled of the Stalinist left and their allies the  former Trotskyists who supported al-Assad to massacre the Syrian revolution, or either positioned themselves as "neutral" like Pontius Pilate washing their hands while the masses were massacred. 

This statement by Andrew Exum was made on May 9, 2019 and the same is recorded in the minutes of the U.S.A Congress and are public. The truth can no longer be hidden. Because the U.S. imperialism did not talk only to the Russians, but also to the reformist left, to isolate and betray a heroic revolution. 

Andrew Exxum also added to his statement, "Russia framed its intervention as a counterterrorism operation and invited others to join Russia as it claimed to beat back the forces of Islamist extremism. (...) Russia’s troops surge in Syria coincided with the success of U.S. military and the coalition against the Islamic State. Over the course of 2015, we had figured out that a combination of the coalition air power and motivated proxies on the ground was more than sufficient, when applied from multiple directions at the same time, to roll back the Islamic State’s territorial gains.  Our own military gains put us in close proximity to the Russian military and its partners, and we quickly determined that we needed to establish channels to prevent any conflicts between our two forces. (...).” 

The entire left was saying that we had to "crush and defeat terrorism, ISIS", passing off the people who had taken up arms as "terrorists". Now they must stick up for it. They have been exposed. The U.S. imperialists bosses claim that they created an "anti-terrorist operation" together with Russia. The World Social Forum, Stalinism and the former Trotskyists aligned themselves with this position of betrayal of the Syrian revolution. 

This U.S. official's statement continues, after clarifying that there was an exact coordination between the U.S. and Russia and the front Russia had with al-Assad and Iran: 

"It was also clear that Russia, although it professed to be engaged in a fight against terrorism, was very much concentrating its military efforts on destroying what remained of the secular and moderate Islamist opposition to the Assad Regime. We all knew where the real Islamist extremists were in early 2016: eastern Syria, primarily, and those parts of northwest Syria where the Nusra Front was particularly strong. Russia, by contrast, was focused on winning back those large urban areas like Aleppo and Damascus that were the home to more moderate opposition groups (...) we met with our Russian counterparts during months of negotiations throughout 2016..." 

What has been demonstrated here is that our current was right. We have been denouncing since 2011 that the Syrian revolution was crushed and defeated by a huge counterrevolutionary conspiracy led directly by the U.S. imperialism, with Putin and al-Assad doing their dirty work, and Turkey and the FSA handing over the rebel cities from within with the promise of "peace" and a "cease-fire". 

In the heroic Syrian revolution an entire generation of the working class left their lives. More than 15 comrades organized by Syrian Trotskyism fell in this revolutionary struggle, together with hundreds of thousands of martyrs, like Abd el Basset Sarout, the so-called "goalkeeper of the revolution" who with his indomitable fighters in Homs, as we have said, retook that city several times. 
But the lessons of this enormous revolution were written from the very trenches of the class struggle in Syria in the heat of events. One of its authors was Abu Al Baraa, who together with FLTI leaders wrote the book Syria Under Fire and its second volume, Diary of a Syrian Writer. 

When Abu Al Baraa fell in combat, his comrades of the Front of the Levant paid tribute to him, as do today hundreds of partisans from Idlib that are facing Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS, firmer Al Nusra), which posed as an ally of the revolution and has proved to be another of its jailers. The anarchist political prisoners of Greece also sent their solidarity and homage, as well as workers' and militant organizations at the international level from Japan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, different Latin American countries, England, the Spanish State.  
The silence of the Trotskyist renegades will not be forgiven. Their quasi-joy for the fall of the revolutionaries will not be forgotten. The next generations will have to know it. They have a stain on their foreheads. Some held the murderous saber of al-Assad. Others, who proclaimed themselves "friends" of the revolution, ended up subjected to the bourgeois leadership of the FSA, which sold the masses and all their conquests out and from within. 

On October 24, 2016 our comrade fell, but his struggle today is raised in resistance by the Syrian, Algerian, Sudanese, Iraqi workers and, first of all, by the heroic Palestinian masses, which are being massacred by Zionism under the U.S. imperialism’s command. The defeat of Syria was the last lost battle that allowed this fascist counterrevolutionary offensive of Zionism's war of extermination on Gaza and the entire Palestinian nation.  
The same currents that accused as terrorists the armed masses of the revolt are today which also accuse as terrorists the Palestinian resistance organizations, when these are nothing more than the masses in arms fighting with the method of civil war against the Zionist massacre. Moreover, some of these Islamophobic social-democratic currents such as the New MAS and the PTS of Argentina repudiated the legitimate self-defense action of the people of Gaza on October 7 last year. They even gave condolences to the genocidaires. 

Today, Palestine is being bombed and is resisting heroically. A key battle is being fought there, where the fate of the Middle East is being determined. Palestine defines at large the revolutions of 2011, which struggled to reach Gaza and Jerusalem, but were betrayed, surrendered and massacred a thousand times.
al-Assad guards the Golan borders, while Putin, the friend of US imperialism in the Middle East, guards Zionism's back and together with China and Iran seek to establish a “negotiating table” to impose a “Peace of the cemeteries” and to surrender the heroic Palestinian revolutionary masses with the "gun to the head" of Zionism.  

The last chapter of the revolutions of the Maghreb and Middle East is still being written in the combats of Palestine in which the youth are fighting and dying heroically. It is the same youth that fought in Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Syria... and now in the US. The vanguard of a huge international movement that seeks to break the isolation of the martyred Gaza is in that country. They revolt against the murderous and genocidal Biden and his leftist henchmen, the so-called "democratic socialists" of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez (allies of the so-called international "New Left"), who are the left support of the massacre of Zionism, criticizing "its excesses". 

We paid tribute then to the Syrian revolutionary youth, stating that their last battle is not over yet. The new fronts are in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in New York and in all the capital cities of the world.
Together with them, we pay tribute to the martyrs of the Palestinian resistance and their heroic fighters who defend their families, their homes and their land against genocidal Zionism. 

We will not forget, we will not forgive! 

Editorial Board of the International Workers' Organizer 
Editorial Board of the paper The Truth of the Oppressed of Syria and Middle East

Collective for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI