Syria - June 13th, 2018

Russia bombs massively Idlib while Turkey surrounds it with military posts

From the conferences of Astana and Geneva, Trump, Putin and Erdogan besiege Idlib and seek to take this last great trench of the revolution

In the Idlib governorate, in the areas of Aleppo and the north of Hama, there’s one of the latest trenches of the Syrian revolution. The workers and exploited that were resisting until the last moment in Aleppo, Homs, Daraya, Ghouta, Douma… were evacuated to the Idlib governorate. In that area, the bombings of Al Assad and Putin don’t stop for a second.
After defeating the rebel cities and suburbs of Damascus, now the counterrevolutionary forces that invaded Syria and support the fascist Al Assad for him to complete the genocide, must conquer Idlib governorate.
In mid May, Russia, Turkey and Iran gathered together in Astana conference in order to impose this counterrevolutionary plan. In there, they agreed what they are doing today: Turkey installed military posts all across the border of Idlib while Russia and Al Assad bomb merciless, city by city, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, house by house. Idlib is besieged as it happened yesterday with Aleppo, Douma, Homs, etc. The Russian and Al Assad’s warplanes attack and it is fenced by the Turkish military posts.
Turkey installed 12 of these military posts and completed the siege, closing its border with this governorate and closing the passage of the Syrian exploited, shooting to kill everyone who tries to cross that border. At the same time, they agreed that Russia will install 9 of these military posts, although they haven’t been placed yet. Meanwhile, Putin keeps bombing massively with his planes, with tens of dead every day, as it happened in Zardana on July 7th.
This is how the Geneva conference works, with the counterrevolutionary forces that have gathered together in there to crush the revolution and partition and subjugate Syria. They are preparing themselves to end with the last trenches of the revolution.

What has been presented as a “war between Turkey and the rebels against Russia and Al Assad” turned out to be a lie. Those who asserted this are at odds with reality. In the offensive against the last great trench of the revolution, all the actors get their masks off and show what they truly are. It is clear that they have played different roles to crush the revolution and partition Syria, while they keep supporting, under US command, the government and the regime of Al Assad, which is the spearhead of the fascist attack against the Syrian revolutionary masses. Today, Turkey and Russia, together, have besieged Idlib just as yesterday the PKK surrendered Afrin to Al Assad and he did so to Erdogan. There cannot be lies anymore.

Today, the counterrevolutionary forces need to take Idlib quickly, because they need to reconstitute the bourgeois state (the armed men band that defends the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole), which was dismantled by the working class and the masses in the 2011-2012 revolutionary uprising, when they split the army, the rank and file soldiers moved onto the side of the revolution with their weapons and Bashar the dog lost control of over 70% of the Syrian territory.
This is the great goal of the Geneva conference, sponsored by the UN. They supported Al Assad in Damascus with the praetorian guard of the counterrevolutionary Iranian theocracy. With the Russian invasion, they advanced on the rebel cities while they were being disorganized and sold out from inside by the Sunnite bourgeoisie that leads the FSA. USA acted on the ground taking possession of the oil wells and the oil pipes. For this, it relied on Turkey, which controls factions of the FSA, with which advanced to Euphrates and Al Bab to keep the route of the oil pipes. In the meantime, the US, with the Kurdish YPG Gurkha troops, it retook Raqa and Deir ez Zor, where the oil wealth of Syria is; the place where it previously sent ISIS to attack the masses.

This is the pact of Geneva of the UN, from where there’s a conspiracy to organize the counterrevolutionary forces that today have partitioned Syria and slaughter the people.

The role of Russia and Turkey is a key one for these counterrevolutionary operations. Russia controls the officers caste of Al Assad on the ground and Turkey controls the Sunnite bourgeois generals of the FSA that have sold out all the cities that were conquered by the resistance.
In Ghouta and Douma we have seen how this works: massacring the masses and with the generals of the “Army of Islam” of the FSA acting as Al Assad’s police in the besieged cities, while many of them entered to the officers caste with the Assadist generals. That is to say, they went back from where they came from when the revolution started. The generals of the Sunnite bourgeoisie, were sent by the US and Turkey (some of them with democracy banners and some others with Islam banners after the masses got radicalized) in order to disarm them from inside and prevent them from advancing to attack the property of the rich bourgeoisie in the rebel areas. They disorganized the coordination and soldiers committees, disarmed the masses, imposed army-parties and, as it happened also in Aleppo, they ended up selling out the cities openly, hiding tons of heavy weapon and what’s even worse, hiding food as they stored it in order to sell it at a very high price to a population that was besieged by the fascist troops of Al Assad and Putin.

The plan of Geneva (a counterrevolutionary pact to finish crushing the Syrian revolution) starts from the point of scorched earth in every rebel city. But what’s more important, it has to reconstitute the power of the state. This is what they have being doing with the army and the generals of the fascist Al Assad, to which the generals of the FSA that sold out the revolutionary Syria are integrated and so is the Shiite bourgeoisie of Iran.
The Turkish-Russian plan is to finish this job of reconstituting the “Syrian armed forces”, the ones of Al Assad and the FSA officers caste, under a common command that won’t be that of Bashar’s or Putin’s, not even Erdogan’s. They are just guarantors of this plan. When the counterrevolution settles completely, Syria will end up partitioned as a protectorate under the command of US imperialism, which will be the one that distributes the loot of the business deals in the reconstruction of Syria between the lions and the hyenas. This is so because Syria, as the entire Maghreb and Middle East, is a sphere of influence of the “Seven Sisters”, the biggest oil companies of the world that posses and control 80% of the oil wells and pipes of the region.

The role of Turkey and Russia is to start top ut an order on the post civil war Syria: a counterrevolutionary officers caste that represents the interests of all the bourgeois gangs and imperialism, a local joint police of Al Assad and the FSA in every city, and of course, the Gurkha troops must withdraw from Syria… Iran and Hezbollah will have to “return home” after the services they provided. Zionism is returning to the centre of the scene as the counterrevolutionary gendarme, which starts to rise after the siege on Yemen and ongoing the crushing of the Syrian revolution.
No analyst of the developments in Middle East that is has an inch of seriousness can talk about Saudi Arabia or Iran as “powers” in the region. The lie of a “war between Russia against Turkey and USA” is buried under the rubbles of the Syrian devastated cities. The “Saudi power” with 9 Gurkha armies wasn’t able to take over Yemen and is living a hard crisis. The Iranian theocracy, after being used for doing the “dirty work” together with Al Assad, of killing over 600.000 oppressed in Syria, goes back to the same status it had before 2015 when Obama lifted the embargo. Today, Iran goes back to be a semi-colony under an embargo and besieged by imperialism. Imperialism knows very well who its gendarme in the Middle East is: Zionism, as we said before, which is the one that it truly needs and to which Trump has placed its “capital city in Jerusalem”. With the process of the Syrian revolution defeat advanced, Zionism has started its counterrevolutionary large-scale military actions inside the occupied Palestine against the masses in Gaza, and it will do it quickly also to put discipline on all the bourgeois gangs in Maghreb and Middle East, like the Iranian guard if it doesn’t accept to withdraw from Syria.

From Geneva, the imperialist powers start to re-arm Middle East, which is slaughtered, plundered and devastated by counterrevolutionary actions imposed in response to the heroic revolutions that shook the entire region in 2011-2012. These revolutions have dislocated all the counterrevolutionary devices of imperialism, started from before with the US defeat in Iraq. The US and European troops had to withdraw because the working class and the masses of those countries didn’t allow that more than a million of Iraqis were massacred in one of the biggest counterrevolutionary attacks in the Middle East, maybe comparable with the mass murder and genocide made by French imperialism when it retook Algeria at the end of World War Two.
Imperialism must place again counterrevolutionary devices of control in the oil routes after its hard defeats. But it must do it in moments when the imperialist powers cannot intervene directly, under the risk of setting the region on fire. That’s why the Geneva pact is there. In there, all the imperialist powers and their different agents organize the big massacres, split the spoils of war, channelize their clashes and different interests and, mostly, conspire to crush the revolutionary processes and impose Geneva’s “pax”, that is to say, the “pax” of the ruling powers.

The curtain is raised. The final battle for Idlib has started. With the Turkish border closed and the military posts besieging that area, there is a siege war all across the line. Russia, Turkey and USA only recognize the officers and soldiers of the FSA which are paid by Erdogan as available to enter to the agreement of Geneva and Astana. Al Nusra, which integrates a front called Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), prepared itself to enter to this agreement, expressing a very powerful faction of the national trader Syrian bourgeoisie, which is linked by finances and trade to Turkey. Al Nusra removed its headquarters and barracks and weapons far from the cities of Idlib. In that city, there are daily mass demonstrations demanding the brigades to be united and to open the fronts and to march to Damascus and defeat Al Assad. The more the mass demonstration advances, the further HTS put the weapons from the exploited, while the generals of the FSA started a fratricide war to force HTS to unconditionally subordinate to Turkey, to enter the agreement of unity with Al Assad, Putin and Trump. HTS did all the homework. It put elected local councils in every city made of engineers, religious, lawyers, traders, etc. under its strict control. As we said, it put the weapons away from the masses. So it prepared to enter to the agreement.
However, Trump, as the chief in Geneva and Astana, didn’t let HTS to enter. In the Syrian protectorate there’s no room for any of the native bourgeois gang that wants to claim or have an autonomous play in the businesses deals of Geneva’s “pax” that will be imposed after the genocide is complete. In the protectorate there will be no room for the Iranian Shiite bourgeoisie and also no room for the national Sunnite bourgeoisie and its most autonomous and independentist factions. Syria is partitioned and if they finish to crush the revolution, it will be a colony. The winners will be the imperialist powers that will be the ones that will decide, ultimately, the regime, the government, how the business deals of reconstruction will be shared, and the way the protectorate is definitively organized in order to plunder Syria.

However, they have to finish crushing the masses first. The Yemeni resistance does not surrender. The Iranian masses have taken to the streets with the war cry “the clerics live as kings and the people live like beggars” and “get out from Syria”. The open clash of the Palestinian masses against Zionism has started. The battle for Jerusalem, today contained by the PLO, is in the making. The uprising of the Jordanian masses for bread against the IMF has started. The last acts of the revolution and counterrevolution haven’t been written yet.

Turkey, with its troops installed in Euphrates, controls the oil pipes in a direct agreement and under the command of NATO and US imperialism, which is installed in Raqa, Deir ez Zor and in PKK and YPG’s Rojava. Many observers ask themselves, “what about Russia?” And the curtains are lifted again: Netanyahu attend a rally for the anniversary of the Russian victory against Germany in World War II, and he was visited by Putin in Jerusalem, the “capital city” of the Zionist troops that occupy Palestine. This is Russia’s role: to be the hitman in Eurasia, the one that keeps Tartus base in order to support Zionism, as it did before with Al Assad, and be once again the scorge of imperialism in Middle East.
What about Al Assad? The fascist agent of imperialism has been a key stronghold of this counterrevolutionary offensive. For years, the “US-lover” left, riding the coat tails of the Sunnite bourgeoisie with one hand, demanded for a “transitional government” to be made without Bashar the dog. Meanwhile, with the other hand, it requested USA to send bombs and heavy weaponry for the Syrian resistance. None of this happened. There were even some voices heard inside USA asking Trump to impose a restriction to the opened skies in order to stop the attacks of the Russian and Iranian warplanes on the Syrian cities. This is a total fallacy… Al Assad is in good health. The skies were always opened for him to massacre. Trump made some simulations of attacks after the brutal denounces of the usage of chemical weapons by Al Assad. He bombed an empty air base of Bashar and he fired some bombs in the outskirts of Damascus, which did not hurt anyone, because if those had exploded in some warehouse of napalm or white phosphors, the entire capital city would’ve blown up. It was all a lie and an infamy. Al Assad stays until the last of the lat trench of the resistance falls and until the last militia man that came out of the guts of the Syrian revolution is killed.

However, the victory in this war and the loot won’t be for Bashar the dog. They are letting the Alawite bourgeoisie and its mercenary troops to take the “spoils of war” from the devastated cities such as refrigerators, televisions, motorcycles, bicycles and the furniture of the 15 million Syrian refugees. The high Alawite bourgeoisie is thinking how will it get associated, from its banks, in the reconstruction business deals in Syria. But this won’t happen. Its generals and fascist troops will remain disciplined to NATO and US fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. Al Assad will stay until he finishes in doing the “dirty work” on behalf of all the imperialist powers. They will define the fate of their heads afterwards.

However, there’s still a lot of excess fabric to be trimmed. As we have seen, The last of the revolutions in Maghreb and Middle East hasn’t finish to burst out yet. Idlib didn’t surrender. At each step, the Sunnite bourgeoisie tries to make the masses to surrender and to negotiate, but it has sold out the revolution so much that imperialism thinks it is no longer needed, not even for that. The result is yet to be seen and it depends on the international class struggle. The Palestinian masses are fighting and also the working class in France, India, Brazil, Greece. In Jordan, the workers and the exploited fight against labour flexibilization and against imperialism. The last word is not said. It is not yet a fact that Jerusalem will be the Zionist capital city or that Idlib will fall to the counterrevolutionary troops of Putin, Al Assad and the murderer Erdogan.

Idlib is besieged as it is Gaza. But the biggest siege on the last trenches of the Syrian revolution is the one imposed by the social-imperialist left, the leaderships riding the coat-tails of Al Assad and Putin and those no less traitors that made the masses believe that with the US or Turkish generals (to whom supported for years) the Syrian people will be able to conquer bread and freedom. All the pseudo-theories, lies and ignominies of these leaderships against the Syrian revolution have fallen apart. They said “the best thing that could happen is that the Kurdish people win”… and the PKK surrendered Afrin. They said “world war III is starting”… and today Turkey, Putin and Trump besiege Idlib together. They claimed that “Al Assad was confronting imperialism” but all the oil wells and oil pipes were given by Bashar to USA in Raqa and Deir ez Zor, and to Turkey in Al Bab. “There are two sides” they said and still say in a cynical way… when today all these “sides” are united to crush Idlib, the last great trench of the revolution.
Of course there are two sides in Syria. On the one hand, there’s the exploiters, their governments and counterrevolutionary army-parties, which is the side of the miserable national bourgeoisies, supported by the traitors. On the other hand, there’s the side of the workers and the oppressed in Syria and the whole Maghreb and Middle East, a thousand times betrayed, a thousand times sold out, a thousand times slaughtered. In the middle of these sides, there’s a river of blood, the same one that separates reformists from revolutionaries in the world working class.

Idlib hasn’t fallen. The best of the militia men and fighters of the Syrian revolution are concentrated there. They know how the bourgeois generals of the FSA or HTS have sold them out city by city. They and their families know that a kilo of bread, the rent of a room or the gas cylinder for heat in Syria cost the same as in the cities that are under Bashar the dog’s fascist boot. They know that the oppressors and the businessmen were saved in the revolution and the masses were the ones that died and gave their lives. They know that HTS has hidden the weapons because they saw how the FSA generals have done it in Aleppo, Hama or Homs.
However, imperialism also knows that the final battle is being prepared. HTS is mounted on a volcano. The concern of imperialism is that the masses recover the weapons and impose the unity of the brigades, and the oppressed re-take the resistance in their hands. If this happens, there won’t be mercenary army or occupation troop that can defeat them easily.
The exploited from Idlib and their brave women are in Idlib and resist. They opened their doors for the refugees of Douma, Ghouta, Homs… They haven’t surrendered and neither did the Trotskyists, the revolutionary socialists, who resist together with them and have the honor of fighting in the heroic Syrian revolution.

Carlos Munzer and Abu Muad
For the paper The Truth of the Oppressed
Spokesperson of the socialists of Syria and Middle East