Syria  - June 4th 2017

Correspondence with the anti-imperialist fighters of the Syrian revolution of USA
From the paper “The Truth of the Oppressed” of Syria

Hello David

I have read everything you told us on your efforts to build solidarity with the Syrian revolution. We salute everything you have done to break the siege on the Syrian revolution against all odds.
We have seen you denouncing the leftist who supposedly support the Syrian revolution but they are truly another brick of that siege of silence that encircled and encircles the revolutionary Syrian masses that are being massacred every day by Bashar’s regime and Putin the killer. We have also been staging a ferocious fight against all these currents, such as LIT, which in Latin America leads trade union federations that group millions of workers (such as Conlutas) and refused to put those forces at the service of supporting the revolution in a practical way.
Also, we fought against the leftist currents that supported Assad, who separated and isolated the Syrian workers from the rest of the world proletariat. In this point we are totally in the same tune as you, i.e. we should build up an international movement in support of the Syrian revolution.

We have been fighting for this since day one of the Syrian revolution. Since 2011 we set up solidarity committees with the Syrian revolution in several countries of Latin America which were true united front organs that promoted actions for the Syrian masses. In 2012 we went to Japan, to the 50th Antiwar Assembly called by the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League (JRCL-RMF) and the All-Japan Federation of Students Self-governing Asociations (Zengakuren) to take this proposal. You can have our letter to that assembly attached.
We have followed the route of the refugees marching through Europe. In it, we have been fighting for solidarity with the Syrian revolution. We were at the border crossing between Greece and Macedonia (Idomeni) in the refugee revolt. We also took to the streets of Athens along with a group of fellow anarchists who from the jail organize solidarity for Syria.

We took the same proposal in workers' organizations such as the factory workers union of La Paz, Bolivia. We are also raising this proposal in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
As you know, we are currently in Europe presenting our book Syria Under Fire with organizations of the Arab community and we will meet with solidarity committees for Syria in Italy.
As you can see, while maintaining political differences with many of these currents, we were always ready to make a united front in defense of the Syrian revolution, as long as this allows the masses to advance even if it is only one step.

We keep fighting for it. Our proposal was and is to call for an international conference to unify and build up an international movement to support the Syrian revolution. We have taken and are taking this proposal to all the places that we mentioned before.
We have seen that you also intend to call for an international conference. We propose you that we call it together, around the following points, which we believe they cover all of us who really defend the revolution (although of course we are willing to discuss them):
- Down with the conferences of Astana and Geneva!
- Out with Bashar and all the genocidal troops! Let the regime fall!
- For all the invader troops to get out of Syria!
- Out with ISIS, the counterrevolutionary weapon that imperialism commanded to crush the uprisings of the Syrian masses of the oil zones from within!
- Victory for the Syrian revolution!
- Let us break the siege of the Syrian revolution and call for this international conference

We would like to clarify something about the assessments and concerns you have raised. First of all we have to tell you that we proposed that all the workers’ organizations of the world organize international workers' brigades to go to fight in Syria. As part of a process of the masses of Maghreb and Middle East who went to fight against Bashar from their countries, because they saw a single revolution throughout the region, we went there also and so Leon Sedov Brigade was founded. We believe that we did the normal thing of any revolutionary current that claims to be such, as it happen with different workers' organizations in the 30’s that they sent international brigades to fight against Francoism in the Spanish revolution.

Now, bearing this in mind, we want to answer your concern. We do not seek support for this or that armed faction within Syria, but for the revolution. We are not in favor of the army parties, but of mass actions. The program we promoted in the very ground of the revolution and from the battlefront was always to build up, defend, fight to extend, develop and coordinate the organisms of self-determination of the masses, that in Syria were the Committees of Coordination. We stood up fighting for those organisms to work with direct democracy, against all the army parties that came later to manipulate them, to occupy them, to cause them atrophy, to disarm them and to dissolve them in order to replace them by their military discipline and their checkpoints.
From Leon Sedov Brigade, we participated in the fight against Al Assad, defending our program. At every step we posed that each militia should be organized with direct democracy, electing its leaders and for them to be recallable at any time. We fought for every gain we collect to distribute it according to the decision taken by an assembly.
We fight for a Syrian National Assembly of delegates voted from the refugee camps, the workers and poor peasants of each area that is freed from Bashar, one each ten thousand people.
We fight for the expropriation of factories, oil wells, banks and all the property of the bourgeoisie to put all available resources to eat and win the war.

We fight to organize unions. We promote the struggle for workers' control. We were part of a factory occupation in the west of Aleppo governorate, taken by its workers in the rebel areas of Aleppo in mid-2016, whose employer paid those workers wages of almost 3 US dollars per day for a 12 hours daily shift. The FSA generals could not control or contain it and so they marked the coordinates to Bashar’s war planes so that they bomb it and for that reason this factory was reduced to rubble.
These working conditions were not an exception, but the rule. The bourgeois got richer at the expense of starvation, misery, the blood and dead the Syrian people. In the midst of war, the Sunnite bourgeoisie of FSA was doing business deals with Assad and only cared for the defense of their pockets, not for the revolution. That's why they ended up delivering it in exchange for a negotiation at the table of Geneva or Astana, as you may have seen that we denounced in our statements.

This was our program and our fight, and it still is. We promoted it internationally. In Syria, we intervened at every front where we could fight for this program, from a fight against Assad, always facing the leadership of the Sunnite bourgeoisie and its sellouts. For this reason we suffered so much rage, persecution and sell out on us by that leadership. They threatened us to kill us; they marked the coordinates so that the warplanes of Bashar bomb the occupied factories, places where were our comrades were and even our headquarters; they have also revealed to Assad’s snipers the positions of our comrades in the front.

We do not agree with the "for a no-fly zone" program. We see that this program could only be realized if the USA carried it out, which was actually impossible. Demanding the US government to impose such a no-fly zone was like telling the fox not to eat the chickens, because it was the main interested - even more than Assad – in crushing this revolution.
The United States, far from imposing a no-fly zone, filled the Syrian skies with Assad's planes, with those of Putin (with which he coordinated all the flights), and even US planes when the task was to massacre civilians of the Syrian revolution under the pretext of "bombing ISIS terrorism" or "Al Qaeda”. If he had wanted to stop those genocidal planes that bombed and devastated the Syrian rebellious cities, he would have brought them down some time ago. But he did not give even a single air-to-surface missile to knock down those planes. The United States was never on the opposing side to Al Assad. It is in fact the one who commanded and commanded all the forces that plotted against the revolution from the Geneva conferences and now Astana.

Today we see that the Astana conference (where the forces of Assad, Putin, Iran, Turkey and the ESL, all under the command of imperialism) are ready to impose the so-called "safe zones" in Syria. We send you a correspondent about this, where you can see that this is a disarming and surrendering plan.
For us, the main thing at the moment is to defeat the Astana conference and its “safe zones” plan. In there, there are the greatest traitors to the Syrian revolution, like the generals of FSA, HTS, Ahrar al Sham, etc. They sold out Aleppo, Daraya, Homs, Hama... In the name of revolution they got together in a meeting with Bashar, Putin and US imperialism to share their business deals over the blood, sweat, tears and misery of the poor and exploited people of Syria.

We do not deny the bombings of these genocidals, which have been terrible. We have suffered the death of some comrades for them. But we also know that if it hadn’t been for the sellout of the generals of the Sunnite bourgeoisie, Bashar would have fallen. Every time the Syrian exploited fought with their insurrectionary methods, without control of the "opposition" bourgeois army parties, they won, and this was in spite of all the military power of Iran, Putin, etc. This is our position, which we express in the statement we have issued about the fall of Aleppo and the Astana conference. We send them here attached.

That is why you have seen that we call to reopen the fronts and not to give up the fight against Bashar. And we are not the only ones saying it. The exploited of Idlib carry these slogans on their Friday after prayers demonstrations.
We believe that at this moment, all the international solidarity with the Syrian revolution must start from here, confronting the Astana conference and its plan of "safe zones" that wants to impose the surrendering of the revolution.

We hope you will consider this position and that we can continue to discuss the best road for success. Because, as you can, we continue to insist in setting up a united front of solidarity with the Syrian revolution at the international level. We call to form that committee uniting all the committees and groupings that exist that support the Syrian revolution. What we are doing in Europe right now is part of it, and we wanted you to know what our fight and positions are, for you to consider them.

We also know that you have read some of our statements and were planning to buy our book Syria Under Fire. We are happy to announce you that it has already been published in English and we are hereby sending it to you as an attachment.
We send you our revolutionary greetings to you, Ann, Salek and all the comrades of the Antiwar Committee in Solidarity with the Struggles for Self-Determination.

Abu Muad