November 16th, 2017

Prologue

The present work was finished on October 24, 2017. Exactly one year ago, on this same date, Abu Al Baraa, 24 years old, socialist writer, founder of the newspaper Haqeqa Al Maqhoureen (The Truth of the Oppressed)and co-author of the book 2013-2014 Syria Under Fire fell murdered by the tyrant al-Assad during the defense of Aleppo,

Abu Al Baraa was killed on October 24, 2016 struggling to break the siege of Aleppo. This city, which had turned into the capital of the resistance, fell two months later, in mid-December 2016, at the hands of Bashar al-Assad. This meant a very hard defeat for the Syrian revolution, which was cornered to its last trenches, as it can be seen today.
In Aleppo, like yesterday in Homs, Daraya, Qsair... the most heroic and advanced sector of the masses of the Syrian revolution, fought, resisted and died.
The city of Aleppo was bombed, surrounded and besieged for months by al-Assad, Putin, the YPG, ISIS and the Iranian Republican Guard. It ended up being surrendered from within by the generals of the Sunni bourgeoisie of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). From outside, other fractions of the FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra refused to concentrate forces to break the siege of Aleppo. In that city, the Leon Sedov Brigade, the revolutionary socialist fraction of the rebel militias of Syria, was forged and tested in combat and political struggle.
It was in these tumultuous events and from Aleppo that, under the lead of Abu Al Baraa and its editorial board, the first issue of the Syrian newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed was issued, of which we reproduce the editorial in this book.
Abu Al Baraa was my friend and companion. I could share with him an enormous mass revolution and a heroic resistance of the exploited of Syria, today drowned in blood.
This fight and his fight will not be in vain. There will be no forgetting or forgiveness!
Abu Muad

***

PROLOGUE

Diary of a Syrian writer

 

This is the title ofChapter 1 of this work.It is made of a set of Abu Al Baraa’swritings, elaborated between November and December 2015, when he left Syria in order to meet the co-authors of the book Syria Under Fire to prepare together its volumes II and III, as well as to help break the siege and isolation to which the Syrian revolution had been subjected.
This chapter begins with an account of Abu Al Baraa's trip from Syria to Turkey, where he spent nearly two months as a visa-free journalist. Waiting for his visa there was in vain, since both the embassy of Brazil and Argentina, countries he hoped to arrive to, did not accept his entry.
Abu Al Baraa had been invited by the Brazilian CSP-Conlutas trade union center to hold a seminar in November 2015 on "Arab Springs and the refugee crisis". All the visa application documents required to be able to participate in the event were officially sent by this union center that groups around 300 unions and influences more than two million Brazilian workers.
But the Brazilian government of Dilma-Temer, which already in 2012 was preparing to offer political asylum for al-Assad - when he was about to fall -, denied Abu Al Baraa a visa. In the same way acted the then Argentine government of Cristina Kirchner, next to the services of intelligence of al-Assad that worked coordinately in both the Consulates of Argentina and Brazil in Istanbul. Abu Al Baraa was treated in the same way as thousands of refugees who left bombed and massacred Syria towards Europe, by crossing the Mediterranean, or those who are in the concentration camps in the Syrian borders.

During his stay in Turkey, Abu Al Baraa wrote articles that we now reproduce in the first chapter. They talk about the crucial moments of the Syrian resistance in 2015, as well as othersthat deal with the tragedy of the Kurdish people in Turkey andwith the refugees.Besidesthere are two articles that are of great interest, since they give an account of what was the real command organized by the counterrevolution and the conspiracy against the Syrian revolution: the Geneva and Vienna Conferences. These conferences, since their beginning in 2013, have met to ensure that al-Assad does not fall in Damascus and for the Sunni bourgeoisie of the FSA to give in the rebellious cities from within the revolution itself.
As Abu Al Baraasaid: “the Geneva and Vienna Conferences are written with "D" of Death and their only objective is to guarantee that al-Assadstays in Damascus so that all the resistance that fights against him is crushed and destroyed until the last rebel city.” His claim was verified by the cruel developments of these last years.

That perverse counterrevolutionary pact acted in the fall of Aleppo as it does today when the forces of counterrevolution attack the last trenches of the revolution and advance in the partition of Syria. No observer, intellectual or politician, whether socialist or not, who tries to be serious can continue to hide or silence what we say here.
This counterrevolutionary pact is evident. As we said, today it acts from Astana. The same way it did in Alepo and Daraya yesterday, nowadays it covers up the siege on Ghouta. This city is suffering from famine, cholera and daily airstrikes with missiles and barrel bombs.Its houses are demolished, while the Army of Islam - a fraction of the FSA supported by Saudi Arabia –sells out this cityfrom within and assassinates the rebel forces that want to move forward to break the siege.

The same pact of Astana also acted in the fall of Raqqa, occurredjust days before this book is printed.Seeing what happened there, we can understand that in these conferences the policy of "open skies" and "cleared routes" is coordinated so that imperialism and its lackeys in Syria can divide it and complete their goal of chastising and massacring the masses and control the oil producer northern Syria directly. This time it was US turn to bomb that city in northern Syria, while ISIS was taken off in air-conditioned buses and the Kurdish forces of the YPG, supported by those of al-Assad, seized the city.
We see the same counterrevolutionary policy acting in the fall of Deirez-Zor. There is also a race to see who takes the city first. That is, to see what bourgeois gang gets that area that has the highest concentration of oil deposits in Syria. There, the Iranian Republican Guard, the Shiite brigades from southern Iraq, the so-called "Democratic Forces of Syria" (the YPG along with FSA brigades under the US imperialist command) and the forces of al-Assaddispute the city like hyenas...whileISIS massacres on the road the desperate masses fleeing from that city towards Iraq.

Also, this first chapter includes an article of remarkable depth, where the socialist writer exposes the true conditions that pushed the masses to the revolutionary combats in 2011-2012 and today.
  Abu Al Baraadefines in this work about what is the true engine of the revolution, not only in Syria but in the whole Maghreb and Middle East, which was none other than the conditions of hunger, extreme misery, wage slavery and plundering that the exploited masses suffer in the whole region by imperialism and its servants, the native bourgeoisies.

What nobody says and everyone keeps silence about is the high cost of living and starvation. This pushed the Syrian people to the streets in 2011 and to clash against the counterrevolutionary regime of Bashar. These miserable conditions are today worsen by the counterrevolutionary victories of Al Assad and Putin under imperialist command. A kilo of bread in besieged areas can cost 5 dollars while the average wage is around 90 dollars a month, if there is work. The ones that don’t fall due to Al Assad bullets they die due to starvation, especially children.
Our young writer was part of the revolutionary youth that stood up for the revolution. Abu Al Baraa was militiaman, construction worker, rebel, journalist, writer, revolutionary and socialist. Let this volume, in which he has participated decisively, go in his honor. Its first chapter, Diary of a Syrian Writer, shows him as he was: spokesman and leader of the revolutionary wing of the rebel forces of Syria.

***
In chapter 2 of this work we present what was the last interview with Abu Al Baraa together with the other co-authors of the book Syria Under Fire, carried out by the Socialist Editorial Rudolph Klement in August 2015 giving an account of the imperialist offensive and its counterrevolutionary refraction in Syria.
There the great debates that developed worldwide within the left currents arose. In them, our current, defending the Syrian revolution, unmasked at every step the perfidious politics of most reformist currents and the Stalinist and pseudo-Trotskyist left, which supported al-Assad and supported - masked as "friend of the people" - the murderer Putin.
The question of ISIS as "the perfect enemy"; the Kurdish question and the role of the YPG and PKK breaking the front of the revolution and agreeing with al-Assad, the imperialist policy of partition and Lebanonization of Syria, are developed in this interview.

 

During the year 2015 they began to plan and draw the route of the counterrevolution and to prepare the conditions for crushing the Syrian revolution completely with the final Operation Massacre.
Already at the end of 2014new actors appeared to take this plan forward. ISIS had been sent in 2014 to the provinces of Raqqa and Deirez-Zor to control those rebel provinces. The former generals of Saddam Hussein of Iraq, as well as sectors of the Sunni bourgeoisie freed by al-Assad from his prisons, were the forces on which ISIS was founded to play the role of imposing, with the method of terror, control of the masses revolted where the FSA could no longer do it and where the troops of Bashar could not enter. That is why the first thing ISIS did when they settled in these areas was imprisoning the leaders of the revolution. That is what the ISIS is about and the role of its perfidious counterrevolutionary actions.

Other important actors that emerged -together with the decisive turn of Russia in the counterrevolutionary actions-, were as we have said the Kurdish YPG and PKK, which came to sign a mutual support agreement with al-Assad, breaking the military front of the revolution, which the Kurdish masses had been part of since 2011.
The interview made to the authors of the book Syria Under Fire accounts for these two new counterrevolutionary agents of the Syrian revolution.

***

2015: Operation final massacre starts

The year 2015 was a turning point in the revolution and the counterrevolution in Syria; as it is said in the previously mentioned interview and develop in chapter 3 of this volume, whose title is “2015: A key year of the revolution and counterrevolution in Syria. Operation final massacre starts.”
In the middle of that year, after terrible massacres at the hands of Bashar and Putin, hundreds of thousands of refugees crossed the Mediterranean and arrived, by any means they could, to the coasts of Europe. Many left their blood on the road. This wave of refugees, reflected before the eyes of millions of workers in the world in the image of the Syrian boy named AylanKurdi lying lifeless on the shores of Turkey, aroused the solidarity of the working class in the imperialist countries towards the Syrian people. Thus the Syrian people could enter Europe and tell their truth about al-Assad genocide. With this,they began to break the siege of lies and silence imposed by the European and world left that openly supported the regime of the Assadist counterrevolution, like Castroism, all Stalinism and sectors also of the renegades of Trotskyism did. Theyhadbeen hiding forfour years the massacres against the masses, who already were counting their dead by hundreds of thousands.
When this siege was broken, the Syrian exploited became stronger in their battles. They came to break the limits set by the counterrevolution in Syria and surrounded Bashar al-Assad in his government palace. It was a huge mass counter-offensive that came to fight at the gates of Damascus. They struggled in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk; from Daraya, the siege was broken and the Syrian capital advanced inwards; and the Damascus working-class neighborhoods of Qaboun and Jobar revolted. This counter-offensive occurred after the regime took Homs and Qsair along with the Hezbollah forces and the Iranian Republican Guard.
At that time, Abu Al Baraa used to say “to defeat ISIS, Hezbollah and the Iranian Guard that are invading Syria together with Putin, we need to cut the head off the snake, and it is in Damascus”. This is precisely what none of the Sunnite bourgeoisie at the lead of FSA and Al Nusra wanted, as it is shown.

It was in 2015 that the US, as a response to that mass offensive, freed the skies for Putin's genocidal forces to enter directly to massacre the Syrian masses, to save Bashar preventing him from falling down. This was part of the counterrevolutionary response of imperialism, which once again centralized all its agents to start the operation final massacre.
This operation was developed with Russia placed by imperialism as a counterrevolutionary gendarme of the peoples of Eurasia and Middle East, bombing the Syrian people and placing checkpoints with their latest weaponry, but under the command of not occupying territory. Imperialism gave Putin a role of being a hitman. At the end of this chapter, the reader may find a section dedicated to address and define precisely the role of the new oligarchy of Moscow in the map of international counterrevolution.

A key piece of the final operation massacre was to use ISIS as the “perfect enemy and excuse”. With the flags of struggle "against terrorism" the murder and genocide of more than 600,000 Syrians was concealed and 15 million thrown to the borders and out of their cities.
So it was that the so-called "anti-terrorist front", headed by the US, all the European imperialist powers, Russia, Turkey, the union bureaucracies and all the parties of the world reformist left, stood up, claiming that "the greatest enemy of the whole world is ISIS" and that there was an alleged “terrorist plan to end with western civilization”. Today, it is clear that imperialism in the Europe of Maastricht leads to multiple attacks allegedly attributed to ISIS. Interestingly, ISIS never appears; it does not leave any fallen man, or signs of life. Only passports appear that serve for it to be indicted.
This antiterrorist campaign is also good for the left agents of imperialism to support Putin in his mass attack on the Syrian revolution.
On the verge of this true political scam, an Islamophobic campaign is developing from the European capitals and the US, which only strengthens imperialism to unleash more direct counterrevolutionary actionsnot only in Syria and the entire Middle East but also to reinforce an attack on the American and European workers in particular. With the excuse of ISIS, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Catalonia, were militarized...
After so much "anti-ISIS" campaign, what happened was the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists marching in the USA against immigrants and the black movement. In France, the bandits of the imperialist Fifth Republic launched the attack on the French workers with labor flexibilizationand removing from them the gain of having 35 working hours a week. In the Spanish State, after the "attack of ISIS in Barcelona", the direct and repressive large-scale intervention of the monarchy against independent Catalonia began.

***
In the year 2015, imperialism concentrated its counterrevolutionary forces to crush the Syrian and Ukrainian revolution, two of the most advanced centers of a revolutionary ascent that threatened to spread to the entire planet. This mass offensive threatened to burn not only the Middle East, but also Europe and the US, at a time when an explosion of the capitalist world economy was taking place starting with the crash of 2008.
The siege and massacre of these revolutionary foci was not because of the strength of the counterrevolutionary troops that attacked them, but because of the betrayal of the reformist left, which depicted the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchyin Ukraine and al-Assad in Syria and the murderer Putin in both, as allies of the world working class, when actually they are their greatest enemies. In these conditions imperialism could advance in a counter-offensive that led to the operation final massacre that we are witnessing today.
But this did not end here. The massacre in Syria had the goal of chastising all the workers of the world.

***
In Chapter 3, it is noted that in 2013 and 2015, the World Social Forum held its two meetings in Tunisia. The entire world's left participated there: Stalinists, pseudo-Trotskyists, native bourgeoisies servile to imperialism transvestite of "anti-imperialists", and, as it could not miss the appointment, the smoke-vendor leftists ofSyrizain Greece, and Podemos, the left of the monarchy of the Spanish State. Castroism participated, which today has handed over Cuba to imperialism and the Colombian resistance to the regime of the USA imperialist bases of that country. Chavezismalso participated in it, which has becomea new executioner of the Venezuelan working class and a serial payer to the IMF of the external debt scam.
In those years, the Syrian revolution was still on the offensive. The World Social Forum meeting in 2015 was the platform for imperialism to launch the final massacre in Syria. As they have done in 2013, thousands of organizations of the world defined that “ISIS was the enemy” and not Al Assad that was killing the masses. It was a true smoke screen that left the Syrian masses isolated and exposed to counterrevolutionary attacks.

That of Syria was the cruelest of the treasons made by the reformist left to the masses of the world. But it was not the only one. In the other focus of revolution, in Ukraine, Stalinist cadres as remnants of KGB went from the Spanish State to murder by the back every leader of Donbass brigade who don’t accept surrendering to Obama and Putin’s Minsk pact, which meant not to advance to Kyiv, the capital city. Imperialism wanted to put down the Donbass masses cry in 2014: “Let the USSR return”.
The sellout of Cuba to imperialism and FARC rendition in Colombia are landmarks in this counterrevolutionary policy.
Thanks to a thousand and one treasons of the trade union bureaucracies and socialimperialist parties to the workers and subjugated people of the world, imperialism moved onto the offensive. With the fascist forces of Kyiv they attacked Donbass. USA invaded the north of Syria and left the skies opened for Al Assad and Putin to bomb the rebel cities (with which they coordinate). And now it is aiming its cannons to North Korea, just to provide a few examples.

***

As we have seen, the revolutions in Maghreb and Middle East marked before and after in the 21st century, since they were the most advanced processes of revolution and counterrevolution in a highly convulsive huge capitalist crisis period, opened since 2008 economic crackdown.
These revolutions threatened to penetrate in the imperialist countries. In 2008, the workers of USA and Europe were marching against the war in Iraq, forcing the imperialist powers to withdraw their troops.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary processes were de-synch. That was the main role of the World Social Forum of Chavez, Castro, Lula, Syriza, Podemos, Stalinism, imperialism funded NGO’s and renegades of Trotskyism. Ultimately, that was what the latest meetings in Tunisia in 2013 and 2015 were about.

This New World Left proved itself as agent and lackey of Wall Street, as we have already seen, around the Kurdish question. They have assembled an amalgam, an invention and a forgery drawn from the arsenal of Stalinism about the role of the Kurdish YPG and PKK. Wanting to cross-dress Rojava as "socialist communes" or "self-managed cantons" is a falsification of a clumsiness that can only be credible due to the absolute ignorance of the majority of the world's masses of what happens there. An YPG barracks in each "commune" of Rojava is right in front of an al-Assad barracks ... both supplied from the 11 US military bases in northern Syria.
In fact, as expressed in chapters 2 and 3 of this work, the Kurdish cantons of northern Syria are small villages of an oppressed people, not only in Syria, but also in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. In the beginning of 2011 they were part of the revolutionary tide of combats against al-Assad. Then, by the actions of the PKK that agreed with al-Assad, they broke the military front of the revolution and became a true fifth column within it under the USA imperialist command. The Kurdish servile bourgeoisie decided to act in Syria as it had done in northern Iraq: as mercenary troops of imperialism in the latter’s two invasions. We are in the presence of a rich and corrupt Kurdish commercial bourgeoisie, tied like servant to the plans of USA imperialism in the north of Iraq and the north of Syria, that does not tremble to leave to 20 million Kurds under the oppression Great Turkey, subjected to an inhuman life under the Erdogan regime.

We have here the YPG and Kurdish Stalinism, which act, as we see it today, under the direct orders of US imperialism, as ground troops in the attacks on Raqqa, Deirez-Zor, Mosul in Iraq, etc.

We also see, at the time of editing this second volume of Syria Under Fire, the treatment that imperialism gives its servants. The Kurdish bourgeoisie was waiting for their prize after they were used as a shock force in Mosul: their independence in northern Iraq to manage the huge number of oil wells there. But the Kurdish nation cannot get out of the historical law that "every people who oppress another cannot free themselves." Thus, imperialism, after using the YPG, the PKK and the Peshmerga to even govern occupied Iraq, far from giving the Kurds independence in the north of that country, sent its Iraqi mercenary army and the Iranian Shiite militias to enter by blood and fire the Kurdish cities and put their lackeys in order.

As we can see, the Kurdish bourgeoisie and Stalinism have long since handed over the struggle for self-determination of the Kurdish people, since they subjected it to the USA imperialists and to NATO, whose head and military command in the Middle East is in Turkey. From there, the USA imperialist invasion of Iraq was organized, to give just one example.

The operation massacre that begins in 2015 in Syria is the result of an enormous betrayal of the working class and oppressed peoples worldwide by the historical waste and residues of Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism that sustained, legitimized and accompanied it in its policy of surrendering the revolution at full sail.

Breaking the siege of the Syrian revolution also means defeating this falsification that dirties the revolution and presents the friends of the workers of the world -the millions of refugees and all those crushed by al-Assad's barrel bombs- as their enemies; and which contrariwise, depicts their real enemies -al-Assad and Putin, supported by imperialism- as their allies.
***
The conditions of the operation Final Massacre launched "under the reign of Obama" were determined by the crises that its withdrawal from Iraq meant for the US. They were forced to act from behind the scenes afterthe imperialist troops had to leave Iraq from 2008 due to the uprising of the American and European masses. In the US in particular, the American people no longer wanted to die for Wall. Street.

The imperialist pirates of the Democratic Party organized the map of the counterrevolution very well as soon as the revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East began. They were the real organizers in the back rooms of a mass murder. Today, all the opportunist left currents want to wash the murderer Obama’s dirty clothes. Under his command al-Assad was supported, Putin was ordered to sustain him and massacre. Under his command a re-grouping of 9 armies led by Saudi Arabia was organized for the invasion and massacre in Yemen where the bread revolution had unified the Shiite and Sunni masses of the north and south who came to take the capital by defeating the Hadi's government. The counterrevolutionary coup in Egypt was also organized; the massacre in Bahrain; and Zionism was supported to continue occupying Palestinian land.

On the other hand, the bankruptcy of the imperialist systemburst in a crash whose epicenter was in the US in 2008, and prompted Wall Street to make counterrevolutionary pacts and trade agreements. These agreements were to throw their crisis to the world, while the counterrevolutionary pacts were to concentrate forces and agents of imperialism throughout the world, to isolate, suffocate, surround and crush the foci of revolution, and destroy the most advanced conquests of the world working class.
When the uprisings began in 2011 in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and threatened to reach Jerusalem, the masses of Iraq and the US had already made the USA imperialists withdraw from the region. The counterrevolutionary governments had been weakened and the masses attacked them.
A new direct imperialist invasion was no longer possible to contain a revolution that threatened to radiate to Europe and the world. As the piecedemonstrates with which this book culminates, it was Obama who imposed, with defensive counter-revolutionary pacts, the siege around the most advanced revolutionary processes, what later on allowed fascism to crush them. In other cases, with these counterrevolutionary pacts, he imposed the surrender of his agents, such as Castroism, which delivered the Colombian resistance and Cuba itself to the USA imperialists.
For this, imperialism centralized all its agents within the workers' movement and the oppressed peoples of the world. The native bourgeoisies worked as hired guns against their own people. All the bureaucracies and social-imperialist parties of the world were recruited to stop and betray the revolutionary attacks of the masses.

This happened not only in Syria with the Vienna conference and the Geneva pacts, but also as we could see in Ukraine. There the Donbass was surrounded by the perfidious counterrevolutionary policy of the communist parties of Europe and the "Great Russia". The revolutionary masses were subjected to Putin and surrounded by fascism. These are the so-called pacts of Minsk, which prevented the revolution from arriving from the rebellious Donbass in the east to Kiev, the capital, in the East, where a mass eruption had begun in Maidan Square, which was later aborted by imperialism and its agents. Had it succeeded, the Ukrainian revolution would have raised its head, united its working class, and undoubtedly would have put on the order of the day the expansion of its revolutionary waves both to Russia and to imperialist Europe. Imperialism knew that it had to silence the cry of the masses of Donbass with which in 2014 they won the streets: "Let the USSR return!".

As we can see, it was through this treacherous policy of counterrevolutionary pacts that Obama and the USA imperialist pirates organized a counter-offensive of final massacre in Syria, with the US opening the skies for Putin and al-Assad to shoot and bomb without mercy. Then, with ISIS, the imperialists were able to contain and strike hard at the rebellious masses that the Syrian Sunni bourgeoisie could no longer control with their deceptions and "siren songs".

***
Under Trump’s command, they intend to crush the Syrian revolution… and it resists in the last trenches

This book is published in times when Trump is the new president of the USA and the bleeding Syrian revolution resists in the last trenches. We are facing a new administration of the business of the US imperialist pirates that starts from and consolidates this counterrevolutionary policy of its predecessor Obama. The USA regime has not yet achieved a social base for superior military offensives on the planet, to be the one which has direct firepower against the workers and the oppressed peoples of the world. This is what Trump is attempting to achieve: a social base in the US for new military adventures, a question that is still far from accomplishing.
This means that he has not been able to resolve in a single act the final crushing of the revolution and has had to make pacts and agreements with his agents, where each one (like Russia, Turkey or al-Assad himself) also disputes his own interests.
US imperialism has not yet conquered the conditions for an offensive of direct military intervention, as it did with Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. They need their agents: the army of mercenaries of al-Assad and also Putin’s,  the gendarme of the Muslim nations of Eurasia, which from the military base it has in Tartus is sent as the great whip of imperialism to consummate the genocide.
The advances of the counterrevolution and the defeats of the mass offensives in the Middle East have already created the conditions for the commanders-in-chief of the operational tables of Geneva, Vienna and Astana to appear directly on the battlefield. The US imperialist generals and their flags are already being installed, with their massive bombings, throughout northern Syria.
US imperialist plan, ultimately, is to transform its tactical weakness into strategic strength. That is, while al-Assad and Putin massacre the masses, it is the USA who wins the war and enjoys the victory of crushing the revolution. By taking the north of Syria, the USA will impose all the conditions on Damascus and prohibit Putin to occupy even a single millimeter of Syrian territory, except for the military base of Tartus, from where Russia is installed as a gendarme of the peoples of the East.
Marxists know very well what imperialism is capable of doing with Iran and Hezbollah, after using them as shock forces. Trump is already denouncing that both return to the "axis of evil."

***

Today, once the revolutionary foci and the mass offensive that began in 2008 have been defeated and the masses are removed from the scenery, imperialism not only throws its crisis on the exploited: in a bankrupt capitalist system, the imperialist powers have begun to dispute a shrunk global market which is sustained by phenomenal debts from the states and the banks. This means that capitalists are still spending in advance what human society has not yet produced.
Thus, imperialist Germany in alliance with France has climbed onto the ship of the European Union of Maastricht and begun openly to dispute the USA’sspheres of influence.
Imperialist Japan is now united by thousands of ties to the US pirates, with whom it plans to dominate completely and control the Pacific.

The Trump government has broken the pacts, such as the Atlantic and Pacific pacts, with which the US with Obama tried to maintain its supremacy in world politics and economy. US pirates voted "USA first" and broke trade agreements with Germany and the Maastricht EU. They announced that they will take to a Congress committee all the companies that use dumpingto trade with the USA,to sanction them. They closed the borders with Mexico from where Germany with its 2000 companies floods the USA market. They deepened the embargo on the accounts of the new Great Russian oligarchy and aristocracy. This indicates that they are going to dispute Putin's agreement with Merkel that allows her to receive cheap gas directly from Russia without going through US-controlled Ukraine. That is what the last US sanctions against Russia are about, they aim to prevent the completion of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline.

***

The crisis, the crash and the shrinkage of the world market, as we have said, have already led to an open trade war that raises the following question: if the US is doing well, the imperialist Maastricht Europe will do badly, and vice versa.
The "USA first" policy also means that, in order to maintain its supremacy, the USA must lock itself and at the same time kick open the customs barriers of the world and its competitors. "USA first" means that the US doubles its military budget and multiplies the production of destructive forces by a thousand.
All this is indicating that the defeats of the revolutionary processes that were opened after the crash of 2008 are creating the conditions for imperialism to go on new offensives against the world masses and against their own working class, and to dispute a world market that has shrunk and where the financial oligarchy continues to parasitically eat the benefits that the world economy has not yet produced.
The balance sheets of the big banks are frayed and full of totally devalued derivative bonds. Here and there the crash of 2008 re-emerges as in the BRICS today. The imperialist world capitalist system urgently needs to generalize the conditions born from the defeat of the Syrian, Ukrainian, Greek masses, of the Latin American masses’ anti-imperialist struggle and of the thousand and one crushing of the Chinese revolts, to the whole planet.
As Trump said, no empire dominates the world without winning wars. This is what US policy is about today in Syria: to have used all its agents to massacre, but to reserve for itself the victory of war. Hence, the direct US intervention in the territory itself and the new US military threats against North Korea, which in reality are aimed at China to subdue it and make it kneel before the US command.

As we saw, the USA under the Trump government advancesin the Middle East along Obama's road map, which has already enabled it, on the basis of the defeat of the revolution, to return to intervene with its own troops in the territory. The direct intervention of US imperialism is nothing more than the consequence of the victories of al-Assad, Putin and all the counterrevolutionary forces, and the actions of the Sunni bourgeoisie that has delivered from within, city by city, the Syrian revolution since the pacts of Geneva and Vienna.
US imperialism seeks, with Trump, to move towards China and Eurasia in its business, in dispute with Maastricht’s Europe. Its back is well covered in the Middle East with these counterrevolutionary pacts, and in Europe with what Putin gives to strangle the Ukrainian revolution. No doubt that with Stalinism and the Bolivarians handing over Cuba, starving the Venezuelan people, they have guaranteed the increasingly irony control of its backyard.
Without any doubt, these international conditions, together with the massive betrayals of the world reformist left, are what have defined today the tragedy of the bloodied Syrian revolution, which is resisting in its last foxholes, with a nation heading on the way to becoming an enslaved colony, if the government of al-Assad is definitively imposed; for now, with the help of the Russian and USimperialism bayonets.
When the last sigh of the Syrian revolution is over, it will not be the servants of the US, al-Assad and Putin, who define the destiny of that nation. The imperialist oil companies, the true orchestrators of so much bloody counterrevolution, will have the final word.

These elements of Trump's government and US policy today, which we provide in this prologue, will make it easier for the reader to understand the international conditions that, under "Obama's reign," marked all of 2015, a key year in the revolution and counterrevolution in Syria, which chapter 3deals with.

***
Homages

The fourth chapter of this work is dedicated to the Homagespaid to Abu Al Baraaon the occasion of his murder. For the authors of the book Syria Under Fire it is a great responsibility to present this second volume, and above all to have been able to arrive on time to do so on the first anniversary of the death of Abu Al Baraa. But this is also an obligation and a commitment to all the heroic martyrs of the Syrian revolution and to the socialist militants who irrigated the Syrian revolution with their blood.
We know that the flags of the Fourth International came clean to the revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and Syria in particular. Abu Al Baraa was a faithful representative of this program and this fight within the revolution itself. The program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International is already written in Arabic. This program is followed by all the young people and workers who fight for the victory of the revolution within Syria, the Middle East and the world.
The proximity of the edition of the fourth issue of the Arabic newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed, whose director was Abu Al Baraa, is a fact in itself that shows that his struggle has not been in vain.

For this reason, we publish a compilation of tributes paid a year ago, when the fall of Abu Al Baraa. We include the tribute that the young Greek anarchists, political prisoners in the D wing of Korydallosprison, who were in solidarity with the revolutionary fight of the Leon Sedov Brigade and took in their hands the struggle for the Syrian revolution at international level. We also publish the tribute by the revolutionary Marxists of the Pacific of the JRCL, by the Front of the Levante of Aleppo, the one realized from Radio Free Syria, plus that paid by the authors of this book, among others. We could not, due to their number and extension, include all the tributes that came to the Editorial Rudolph Klement at the time of the assassination of Abu Al Baraa. Of course, we apologize to those whose tributes are not printed in this work. But they have been reproduced by mass media such as the Editorial's website, social networks, party presses, etc.

***
"Write a book, I have in my hands the book of a dead man"...

We Socialists were part of that struggle, part of that revolution, and with our blood we also irrigated the Syrian soil. Before his murder, Abu Al Baraa, along with the Syrian socialists, watched for Mustafa Abu Jumaa, his father, who was recognized throughout Syria as "the first martyr of the struggle to break the siege of Aleppo." Mustafa was the founder of the Trotskyist current in Syria. He had adopted as sons all the young people who fought with Abu Al Baraa, both in Syria and the rest of the world. The farewell of his father was a very cruel moment for Abu Al Baraa and for all of us the socialists who accompanied the struggle of the Syrian revolution.

Rafael Spregelburd, an Argentine dramatist, wrote a tribute to Abu Al Baraa for the newspaper Perfilof Argentina, which is reproduced in this work. He did it with the sensitivity of an intellectual announcing that the author of the book he had in his hands (Syria Under Fire), had been killed. He was not one more dead man,or one more dead writer.
We, coauthors of this book, affirm that this is so. But also, together with this, we say that his assassins and enemies would never be able to kill his fight and the program he defended. Already a new generation of young people has rebelled against this rotten capitalist system, which is what generates genocides, famines and wars throughout the planet.

The reformist lefts of the world, hanging from the bourgeois parliaments, in the upper layers of the labor aristocracies and bureaucracies, see today's Syria as a historical anomaly. Well, no. It is the norm of this rotten capitalist system, where "democracy" is a privilege of a few rich countries that live subjugating their own working class and oppressing and plundering the colonial and semi-colonial world.
It is enough to see the martyred Africa, China ruled by a regime of terror, as everywhere in Asia ... It is enough to see Eastern Europe and Putin's Russia ruled by the saber of the generals... It is enough to see the majority of the European working class, who is an immigrant one, mistreated worse than their masters do in the colonies, to realize that today's Syria is nothing more than a photogram of a film of a system that is sustained with hunger, war, fascism, counterrevolution and barbarism.
Reformism cannot hide this reality. Day after day the blood and murder of the masses of Maghreb and the Middle East arises and will emerge from all the seams of the planet. Sooner rather than later millions of workers will become aware of the enormous treachery that their leaderships imposed on the workers and the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. Life is already giving its verdict.

The bourgeoisie, imperialism and the murderers of the people want everything to be forgotten. Much more do those who concealed such a massacre before the masses.
Those who in the name of socialism and the struggle of the oppressed peoples supported Bashar al-Assad and Putin, the sniper dog of imperialism, will increasingly be less able to justify what facts and life already tell for themselves. Syria has been demolished. A scream of Freedom!keeps coming out of his insides. At the moment this book is published, of the more than 40,000 political prisoners who once passed through the prisons of al-Assad, about 550 remain alive in Homs, ready to be transferred to Damascus, where a real death sentence awaits them, same as in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. From the prison, they have taken out a letter in which they are staging a mutine, which states: "We are the prisoners of the central prison of Homs and have five hundred and fifty detained on occasion of the revolution that has taken place in our beloved country." (
"This is a call to all humanitarian organizations to intervene immediately to prevent any incursion into jail. (...)
We demand to be evacuated from prison, as a matter prior to any negotiation, as happened in each area or city that was evacuated in just hours, under the auspices of international observers.
We only want our freedom and our dignity, together with that of our families, so that we can go back to them, with our children and our loved ones. "

Even from the dungeons of the regime, the vanguard of the Syrian revolution continues to resist. In the last trenches of the revolution the fire has not died down. On October 14 of this year, called by the US anti-war movement, a Day of Rage for Syria was developed, where thousands of young people and workers won the streets around the world, and in Syria in particular. The authors of this book, like the members of the Syrian newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed, actively participate in these actions. The reader will be able to find the declaration of endorsement to this day of international struggle, as well as photos of it, on page XY.

***

A new call for international solidarity with the Syrian revolution, before it is too late

Imperialism prepares its final blow. The fall of Raqqa and Deirez-Zor, delivered by ISIS (who is protected from those cities by al-Assad, Putin and the US troops), announces that the final battles are in the making and that a split, colonized Syria is formed, one with the regime and the al-Assad government fulfilling until the end its roll of executioner of the revolution, and with the US imperialism distributing the businesses.
The "safe areas" plan of the Astana conference conceals the attack that has been launched to finish crushing the last trenches of the revolution.
Turkey is waiting. It threatens to enter Idlibby blood and fire. The final massacre is in the making. We must prevent it. This is achieved by stopping the murderous hand of imperialism that sustains this enormous counterrevolution. The entry of sectors of the US anti-war movement into this struggle opens up this perspective of giving new leaps forward in this fight.
The rupture of the siege, to prevent the final massacre of the Syrian revolution, is a pending battle. The passivity of the leftist currents that claim solidarity with the Syrian revolution like the English SWP, the French NPAor the US’s ISO, is striking and arouses indignation. They proclaim their adhesions to the Syrian revolution in their congresses and conferences just to wash their dirty clothes, since they are incapable and have refused to call for decisive action in the streets or to coordinate an international action to end the torment and the massacre of the Syrian masses.
But there is no less repudiation than currents like the MAS or the Argentine PTS deserve, or sectors of the anarchist movement that, waging the flags of the "fight against ISIS" and "in defense of the Kurd YPG", conceal the massacre of al-Assad against the Syrian masses.
Against them, other revolutionary currents of the anarchist movement, like those grouped in the D wing of the Korydallosprison in Greece, have correctly located themselves in the trenches of the revolution, from the beginning, while its most advanced and combative elements were the vanguard throughout Europe of active solidarity with the Syrian refugee movement. To them goes our greeting.
At the proposal of the Syrian Socialists, the last congress of the militant trade unions in Brazil, organized in Conlutas, voted for support and solidarity with the political prisoners of Homs. Representatives of millions of workers did it. This is a step forward, along with the actions that are unified and coordinated for Syria in order to make new leaps and break both siege and isolation. Already, on May 1, the factory workers of La Paz, Bolivia marched with the flag of the Syrian revolution on their front and they sent their solidarity to the resistance.
The revolutionary Marxists of Japan of the JRCL-RMF have also accompanied the enormous struggle of the revolutionary socialists of Syria and their fight against al-Assad.

On the Day of Rage on October 14, there was an episode that, to those who know the last trenches of the revolution, made us vibrate with excitement and enthusiasm. It was in the city of Ainjara where the largest mobilization took place inside Syria, to the cry of "we keep fighting; we want the regime to fall". The remains of our comrade Abu Al Baraa are buried there. There is his land. And our commitment is to break the siege of the Syrian revolution, defend the last trenches of the revolution and our effort is directed to call the workers and the oppressed peoples of the world to revolt and stop the monstrous war machine imposed by barbarism in each sector of the planet where the exploited struggle for their dignity, their conquests, for bread and freedom.

Before it is too late, we must regroup all the international forces that are willing to prevent fascism and counterrevolution from imposing in Syria. There is no time to lose. The oppressed peoples of the East and all over the world will see, sooner rather than later, that if the Syrian revolution is definitely defeated ... Syria will knock on the doors of your country, your city, your neighborhood, your home.

***

And the truth could not be hidden ... The truth was told

This is Chapter V of this work, and as part of the struggle to break the siege of the Syrian revolution, we publish a review on the presentation of the book Syria Under Fire held at the National Library of Argentina on August 22, 2015. This book was also presented in different cities of the world, highlighting the one held in Madrid at the Book Fair and through a talk-debate on June 1, 2017, which featured the presence of prominent activists and fighters of the Syrian cause .
We have also included a claim to different writers, poets and authors of books on the Syrian cause, who raised their voices in the silence of the brutal genocide. His courage also showed the cowardice of the world reformist left that surrounded the revolution and tried at every step to break the bonds of solidarity of the international working class towards the Syrian people. That is why in this chapter we present a series of poems, excerpts and chronicles about presentations of different books that we have shared in Europe and Latin America with these courageous writers, poets, intellectuals and fighters with whom we were and are part of the international solidarity with the revolution Syria.
In this same sense we highlight the work of Suzanne Zaura, journalist of the Spanish State, who led in that country the solidarity for the revolution, along with other activists. We also mention the work of Radio SiriaLibre, which was a spokesperson for the Spanish-speaking resistance.

***
Dedication

We dedicate this work, as Abu Al Baraa would have done, to all the comrades fallen in the struggle to the cry of "bread, freedom and the fall of the regime": Mustafa Abu Jumaa, Abu al-Jud, Abu Issac al-Janubi, Hamza al Twil, Mohammed Sheikh al Jeb, Mohammed Abdallah, Mohammed al Hamudi, Abu Attia, Abu Nur, Abu Mwawyah Al-Massry, Abu Mussa Al-Jazaery, Abu Al-QayssHesham, Abu Salamah, Sanad Abu Khattab.

In Syria, as in the whole planet, an alternative is actualized: Socialism or Barbarism.

 

Carlos Munzer and Abu Muad