November 16th, 2017

Final Words

The last chapters of the Syrian revolution have yet to be narrated. They are just now in the way to be defined in the combats that take place in the last trenches of the revolution, which still resist. They are written in the struggle of workers and oppressed peoples around the world, who are far from surrendering, at a time when imperialism only survives by attacking one by one the gains of the working class on the planet, deepening the plundering of semi-colonial nations and with new wars.
As we report in this work, 2015 was a true turning point in the calendar of the Syrian revolution.
Two years later, we find ourselves with a divided Syria, torn and occupied by foreign powers, with the imposition of a true genocide that is still far from over. When we write these final words, the bombs of Putin and al-Assad are still falling, demolishing the Syrian cities.

What we are experiencing today is the advance of the counterrevolution. The "safe zones" announced at the last conference in Astana proved to be a real trap. There, where the resistance still lives, all the fire of al-Assad and Putin has concentrated, with the support of Turkey and the USA. The bombing of the provinces of Aleppo and Hama, as well as Idlib and Ghouta, which are the most punished areas, does not cease.

As we can see, with the advance of the counterrevolution in Syria, no civilization is being imposed, quite the contrary. Syria has been taken to medieval times and is a thousand times more destroyed. The barbarism has come hand in hand with an imperialist counteroffensive, which came to crush a revolution that, from Tunisia to Damascus, moved from 2011 to the entire Maghreb and the Middle East and advanced to the world.
Meanwhile cholera, like the missiles, have taken over martyred Yemen, victim of the Saudi clan that, under the orders of British Petroleum and the armies of the United Arab Emirates, is not leaving stone on stone of that nation. Today it is counterrevolution and fascism that are advancing in the Maghreb and the Middle East.

When we close this work and the authors find ourselves engaged in writing Volume III of Syria Under Fire, the most tragic moments of the heroic Syrian revolution are developing. It is not only bombings and hunger strikes to the "safe areas", but also the direct entry of US imperialism to the north of Syria, the provinces of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The partition and occupation of Syria has begun to be consummated, now with the commander in chief of all the occupation troops in the territory itself.
In those provinces, where the “true owners” of Syrian oil pipelines and oil infrastructure are returning, ISIS begins to be withdrawn by its US chiefs and by al-Assad, who in 2014 sent it from Baghdad and Damascus to control the exploited of that area that had been the outpost in the crushing of the regime's army in 2011.
ISIS went there "to close the Circle of Death". In 2011/2012, the Syrian army, with its caste of counterrevolutionary Alawite officers, disintegrated when al-Assad gave the order to attack and massacre the unarmed people. The rank and file soldiers passed to the side of the revolutionary masses. Therefore, the bourgeoisie and imperialism -which could not intervene directly, as we have already demonstrated extensively in this work-, had sent the Sunni generals of the FSA and Al Nusra to disarm the masses. When that was no longer enough, ISIS was sent to control manu militari the oil regions of northern Syria.
ISIS went to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor as guardian of the hydrocarbons. From there he guaranteed the flow of oil to Turkey, al-Assad and Baghdad during the entire civil war. The oil extracted there during these years was processed at al-Assad’s refineries in Latakia and bought at $ 7 a barrel by Erdogan. It passed through the northern borders, transported by trucks, which were protected by all the "belligerent" bourgeois forces in Syria.

Now, towards Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor the true owners are marching of the "black gold" produced in abundance in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East: the imperialist oil companies and their chiefs, US imperialism.
Under these conditions, the masses have begun a new uprising against ISIS, which, in its retreat, loses the iron-clad military control of the region. Neither the US nor Putin or al-Assad are bombarding ISIS; instead, they make it leave the cities in air-conditioned buses.
They bombard the masses that have revolted to get rid of the terror regime of ISIS, and that in their uprising - as we see in Abu Khamal or in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor neighborhoods – are planting the flag of the revolution and shouting again: "The people want the fall of the regime!” There Putin and al-Assad are bombing. There also imperialism attacks and chastises them with its aviation fire, with its Kurdish ground troops - allied to al-Assad - and with fractions of the FSA coordinated directly by the Pentagon. All of them will cover the withdrawal of ISIS in those cities and ensure the US imperialism’s takeover of those oil wells and pipelines.
In those provinces, the torment and the bombings intensify minute a minute. Today the provinces of Raqqa and Deir ez Zor, as happened yesterday with Homs, Aleppo, Daraya or Qsair, are being demolished. Women and children flee to the Euphrates, where they are massacred by Russian and al-Assad’s aviation.
These are the "battles" of cowards and murderers who attack recklessly the helpless masses. This is the "war against ISIS": the extermination of the Syrian oppressed people who "dared" to stand up for bread, freedom and dignity. This is the Operation Massacre, which in itself testifies to what we the Socialists have been denouncing: when the counterrevolution triumphs coordinated by Russia, the USA and Turkey, with their mercenary and murderous troops, they impose in the cities they recover a regime of terror, extermination and destruction, a million times higher and more cruel than the one imposed by ISIS itself.
We are facing a policy of occupation and looting comparable to that imposed by Zionism in the Palestinian nation. The homes and property of the more than 15 million refugees and internally displaced Syrians are distributed among the mercenary troops. The workers and the Syrian people have been left, like the Palestinian nation under the Zionist occupation, as outcasts in their own land.

 

While we are writing these "Final Words", the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum) meeting, which was held under the command of the USA, has just finished. There, Trump imposed conditions -country by country- on the relationships that each of them should have with the masters of Wall Street. He ordered China to fulfill its orders to open its markets and to impose an embargo on and surround North Korea to make it surrender. With Putin, he coordinated the termination of the counterrevolutionary operation in Syria for a few weeks ahead. There was convened a short period of time to finish recovering all the territory of that country. In addition, they agreed that only the Sunni bourgeoisie generals of the FSA able to control and discipline the masses in the rebellious cities will actually be the ones admitted.

In martyred Syria, all the lies and infamies crumble that the currents of the word left, in fact treacherous fake leftists have piled up against the Syrian masses. Life is giving its verdict. Genocidal Trump and Putin take off their masks and openly discuss -before the eyes of the world- their alliance, which was always strategic, to complete the task of crushing the revolution under US imperialist command.
Here is the end of the deceit poured out by this "left", of a supposed "Third World War" that would have begun in Syria between the US and Russia. Here ends the lie of the "self-governing communes of Rojava", when we see the YPG fight very far from their "communes", and massacring, under US imperialist command and coordinated with al-Assad, the impoverished masses of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor .
Here all inventions are over. Al-Assad has been supported by all the forces of the enemies to the revolution during these 6 years. He is who has done everyone’s dirty work.
He still has work to do. The last trenches are resisting. The bourgeois generals of the FSA, kneeling in Astana, claim that they want to be the ones who deliver and control them. Meanwhile, the regime forces together with the Iranian Republican Guard offer to invade Idlib. The “operational board” of counterrevolution is planning its last blows.

 

"The regime must fall!" was the slogan that motivated the struggle of the masses in 2011-2012. "The Assad regime must not fall; instead it must stand firm by massacring the masses", is the slogan and program of the counterrevolution.
Al-Assad was the guarantor of the business of the entire bourgeoisie and imperialism in Syria and thus he was sustained with counterrevolutionary mercenary forces sent by imperialism: the Shiite bourgeoisie of southern Iraq, Lebanon with Hezbollah and Iran (which was awarded by Obama with the lifting of the embargo). These troops proved to be the ablest to fulfill this objective of preventing the fall of al-Assad.
Meanwhile, the Saudi clan -the other bourgeois gang agent of imperialism- was given the task of crushing the Yemeni revolution and the uprising of the Shiite masses in Bahrain in 2011, by blood and fire. From Qatar, this bourgeois gang sought to enter the partition of Syria, via the generals of the FSA, but has not yet managed to do so. The reason is that the real counterrevolutionary force that was able to crush this heroic revolution was the Iranian Republican Guard, the mercenary militias of the imperialist oil companies of southern Iraq, and the same ISIS, which from the Sunni triangle took great care that its "Caliphate", while it existed, stayed far, very far from Damascus.

 

The fallacy about Iran and Saudi Arabia being two quasi-imperialist  “regional powers" fighting over the Maghreb and Middle East, does not resist the slightest serious analysis of the political, economic and social conditions of that region. They are strong native bourgeoisies, but lesser partners of the true owners of the region, which are the imperialist oil companies, the "seven sisters" who manage the oil and the banks of those countries, under the command of Wall Street, the City of London, Paris and the Bundesbank.
Defining Iran or Saudi Arabia as imperial powers could be a joke in bad taste, if it were not a deception to the workers of the world about the true organizers and promoters of the counterrevolution in the Maghreb and the Middle East. But what is worse, is that they make the Iranian semi-fascist regime pass as an "anti-imperialist" champion, when it is a murderous regime, jailer and repressor of the workers that pales Zionism or the Egyptian military dictatorship.
Iran remained embargoed for years. Its industrial-financial apparatus is broken and is only sustained by Germany. We are talking about one of the largest oil producers in the world; but Iran does not have refineries and therefore must buy from Merkel its own refined oil in Germany to obtain gasoline, fertilizers, etc.
Saudi Arabia's state oil company (Aramco) is increasingly unable to demonstrate its "independence" from its real board, which is still in New York and the City of London, since British Petroleum handles the gas that this company produces.
Italian ENI plunders the Libyan gas from Tripolitania, with which 70% of the production of Italy is supplied. Benghazi oil is sacked by French Total. This distribution of Libya's hydrocarbons accompanies the partition of that nation by the imperialist gangs. Before, Qadafy was the manu militari guarantor of the delivery of gas and oil. Today this delivery is carried out directly by the different bourgeois gangs, all of them ex-Qadafists.
In the Maghreb and Middle East the “seven sisters” command.
In Egypt, the US Navy, which finances the Egyptian army with 13 billion dollars a year, are which command, because it controls the Suez Canal and all the shipping routes in the world.

Escribieron ríos de tinta para mentir y engañar a los explotados… para que las masas no perciban que el US imperialism y las potencias europeas no pudieron intervenir directamente para aplastar las revoluciones abiertas en 2011/2012 porque el pueblo iraquí y su heroica resistencia venían de arrinconar y expulsar a las tropas de los 23 ejércitos que habían invadido Irak bajo el mando de Bush .
It is time to end with so much lies and infamy launched by the Islamophobic "anti-terrorist front" of all the imperialist powers, supported by the social-imperialist left, which only seeks to cover up the ferocious imperialist plundering of a region where 80% of the energy is produced with which the world economy works.
They wrote rivers of ink to lie and deceive the exploited... so that the masses do not realize that US imperialism and the European powers were not able to intervene directly to crush the revolutions opened in 2011/2012 because the Iraqi people and their heroic resistance had just cornered and expelled the troops of the 23 armies that had invaded Iraq under Bush.
Those imperialist troops and their lackeys were defeated and forced to leave the region, because the USA, the Spanish State, France, Germany and Great Britain’s working class had risen up, shouting "Your war, our dead!"
Therefore, imperialism had to implement a strategy based on counterrevolutionary pacts, which meant that each bourgeois gang of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and even the mercenary Putin, had to be those who intervened to fill with blood the revolutionary processes that were shaking the world and threatened to reach the streets of imperialist Europe while provoking a "new Vietnam" to the US.
Ultimately, US imperialism “outsourced and leased the counterrevolution”, which it oversaw ironically from the conferences in Geneva and Astana. This he did not without sharp contradictions, as each of the forces that were an active part of the counterrevolution, have begun to dispute their share of the booty after their military victories. The clashes aimed to see who arrives first to take charge of the oil wells and oil pipelines of Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zor are an example of this.
The government of Great Russia emerges strengthened from these counterrevolutionary victories, after NATO pushed its troops back from the borders with Ukraine.
Turkey leaves this counterrevolutionary war full of bitterness. It has not been able to intervene directly, after handing over the rebel zones and agreeing to dominate Syria, because the masses did not accept it and also because neither the US nor Germany allowed it. The occupation of Syria (or part of it) by Turkey would have meant the return of the Ottoman Empire, and this is something that the dominant imperialist powers are not willing to allow.

In these "Final Words", the authors want to advance these conclusions about the current situation of the Syrian revolution, since in the present crucial moments the last acts are being defined.
If the last trenches of the revolution fall and the counterrevolution settles, what will become will not be a time of peace and stability.
That is because the imperialist plan does not end here.
In Syria a lesson is being given to all the exploited in the world. Imperialism wants its agents to finish massacring the masses, but it is Wall Street that wins the war and defines the post-war period. They seek to ensure that the exploited, from Bahrain to Morocco to Tunis to Tripoli to Cairo to Sana’a to Damascus to Jerusalem, never again "dare" to rise again and put the business of the "seven sisters" and the global financial oligarchy at risk.
If the Syrian revolution ends up being crushed, none of the "military victors" who centralize in the Astana Conference under the command of US imperialism will be strategically strengthened, as it now seems to be the case of Iran and also the same Russia. They, for now, are the victors of the massacre and the crushing of the masses. But the USA is already in the field. Wall Street has embargoed the Great Russian bourgeoisie in 300,000 million dollars so that it knows who the boss is. Those who are going to win the war and distribute business will be the imperialist powers, the oil companies and the global financial oligarchy.
Imperialism will quickly know how to discipline any agent that exceeds its functions. We already saw the fate of the YPG in northern Iraq. These had wanted to conquer the independence of that region after the fall of Mosul, and what they received were fusillades from the government of US imperialism’s protectorate.
The same will happen with the sinister and murderous Shiite bourgeoisie, if this goes further than the role that imperialism has assigned to it in Syria: that of holding al-Assad by blood and fire. The US has the scourge of Zionism to discipline Iran, placing it once again, when it needs it and decides, within the "Axis of Evil".
The directors of the companies are not generous with their managers and much less with their smaller partners, once they have used their services.

Imperialism has used the Islamic bourgeoisies and their various factions and parties to strangle the working class and oppressed peoples of the region and create a river of blood among them. The fact of being the Shiite bourgeoisie be the best agent that imperialism has to massacre in Syria has its reason in the 80% of its population being Sunni. This massacre left a hatred and fratricidal resentment among all the exploited and oppressed of that region. This prevents and disrupts any common struggle of both Shiite and Sunni exploited against imperialism.
In the 1980s, imperialism organized a war between Iraq and Iran, which lasted 8 years and left 4 million dead. That fratricidal war opened a river of blood between the Shiite and Sunni masses, and greatly facilitated the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the counterrevolution seeks to settle in martyred Syria, while the masses resist in the last trenches, drums of war are sounding in Saudi Arabia.
British Petroleum is buying most of the shares of Aramco, which is bankrupt. The fall in the price of oil is causing the beginning of an economic crisis in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE); all the governments of the region have been filled with state-of-the-art weapons, which the USA, UK, France, Turkey and Russia have sold them. Though, weapons are sold to be used.

If the world working class does not prevent it, imperialism already has a true counter-revolutionary plan on its agenda after the Syrian genocide, which if necessary will re-issue the Iraq / Iran war on a thousand times higher scale. If necessary, imperialism will have no scruples in organizing a war where not only Zionism, taking back it firepower, will attack Iran, but also in pushing a military clash of proportions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, like the one that it drove in the 1980s between Iraq and Iran. The policy of imperialism, as already demonstrated in the Maghreb and the Middle East, after its withdrawal from Iraq, is -in the last resort- that everybody confronts each other, in order to crush the revolutionary processes, and in the future to re-establish solid control devices for the oil routes, on the basis of deep historical defeats given to the masses. But this must be done in the midst of a monumental political and commercial struggle between the imperialist powers.
Likewise, the threat and the possibility of war against North Korea and the siege of China are also the counterrevolutionary wars that the USA military industry, the Pentagon and the imperialist capitals supervised by NATO have in their agendas.

But for this to be the case, for imperialism to have its hands free for such a holocaust, it must first defeat the working class of the central countries. And it is far from being able to achieve it.
The rebellion of the American working class persists and deepens day by day. The fight against labor flexibilization still takes place in France. The crisis of the Bourbons is every day increasing in the Spanish State. German youth and hungry workers showed the hell to the G20 in Hamburg. The masses have not at all withdrawn from the scene of international class struggle.
The latest acts of the Syrian revolution will not be written in the Pentagon binders or in the counterrevolutionary plans of Wall Street. The next counterrevolutionary wars will have to be defined earlier in the class war. And it has not said its last word yet.
The enormous advantage that imperialism and its agents have in the region is the perfidious counterrevolutionary helping hand of the currents of the social-imperialist left and the corrupt union bureaucracies that live on the coins that fall from the super-exploitation of the working class and the looting of the semicolonial world.
When the exploited masses of the Maghreb and the Middle East burst for their bread with a chain of worker and socialist revolutions, defeating governments, demolishing states, attacking transnational property and arming themselves, the reformist left proclaimed that theirs were "democratic revolutions", "spring of the peoples and sought the "progressive" and "democratic" bourgeois to control the revolutionary masses.
The left told the masses of the world that "times of peace, democracy and progress were coming"; thus they disarmed the proletariat so that it would not take power. They supported calls for elections and Constituent Assemblies that were a scam, while "democratic" politicians and generals ended up imposing a bloodbath in the region on behalf of imperialism as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. The "democracy" that the left proclaimed was nothing more than a detour to fascism.
In Syria, reformism was divided between, on the one hand, those who asked Obama to arm the Syrian resistance, while it was he who sent the generals of the Sunni bourgeoisie of the FSA to disarm it; and on the other, those who directly supported genocidal al-Assad. Both currents of the reformist left have argued that "the enemy is ISIS” and not the imperialist oil companies and Wall Street, or al-Assad and Putin who do their dirty work. They isolated the Syrian masses and left gave the dog Bashar s free hand for carrying out the massacre.
15 million refugees, the Mediterranean watered with blood of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa ... Is this the civilization? No. It's barbarism. It is looting. It is hunger. It is genocide.
Imperialism is reaction on the whole line. In its counter-offensive in the Maghreb and Middle East, it will even redraw the borders it drew at its convenience at the exit of the first and second world wars. It will not hesitate to draw new caliphates, fiefs and small "emirates" in Libya, to do it again in Syria or to divide Lebanon. It will not hesitate to make Yemen a second-rate Saudi province. It is the imperialist barbarism that will even push back the current nations to small fiefs and caliphates, if the imperialist oil companies so require.
What is happening in the burning Middle East today is the content of the counterrevolution. Civilization, which emerged in history fighting against hunger, against looting and for freedom, has been drowned in blood. It is a task of the world working class to do justice and end barbarism ... and it will.

The last word has not been said.

The last trench of the Syrian revolution has not yet fallen.

The last stone of the Palestinian Intifada has not yet been hurled.

The first strikes of the working class of post-revolution Egypt have already begun.

The masses of Yemen continue to claim their crust of bread.

The last battles of the American, French, Japanese, German, British, Spanish, and of other imperialist countries, working class are far from being exhausted.

In sectors of the planet, such as in the Pacific Rim and in Russia itself, those battles are still to begin.
Therefore, before the counterrevolution in Syria settles, crushing the last trench of the revolution, what will begin, as it is already doing, is a new intifada: that of the Syrian refugee camps of Jordan, of Turkey, of Lebanon, of Greece, where millions of homeless exploited survive in the worst conditions. They will be the outpost of the fight that will hit Damascus, Homs and Aleppo; they will fight in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Gaza, in Bahrain, in Cairo...
Sooner rather than later, the world working class, getting rid of so many enemies of the revolution, will break the siege that surrounds the brave exploited of Syria. And in doing so, it will find the way to defeat its own executioners: the imperialist gangs that threaten to bring the entire civilization to barbarism.
For these enormous historical challenges, the struggle to found again the Fourth International is the task of the moment. This will be the organization that will allow the revolutionary vanguard of Syria to set up an insurrectionist revolutionary party, which will lead the "second Syrian revolution" to victory.

To write these last chapters of revolution, counterrevolution and war, we will not have with us our comrade Abu Al Baraa. But thousands like him will write them on the battlefield of the class struggle.

And the truth will be told!
And there will be no forgetting or forgiveness!

Carlos Munzer and Abu Muad