Syria – September 11th, 2019

Ahmed Rahhal, the brave journalist of the Syrian revolution has been detained by HTS* soldiers

 

Ahmed Rahhal is a young man from Idlib who did not hesitate for a second in joining the mass demonstrations that started to take place in 2011 in Syria with the war-cry “The people want the fall of the regime”, a slogan that echoed all through Maghreb and Middle East.

As the days passed, he joined the Coordination Committees. He found his place quickly in the revolution, deciding to be the one that raises the voice of his brothers by filming, taking pictures and writing daily reports about what was happening in Syria.

Day by day, thousands of people, thanks to his journalistic work, were able to witness the crackdown on the peaceful mass demonstrations with live ammunition and mortars, which caused deadly wounds on the youth, the elder, women and children.

Without hesitation he went once and again to the enormous marches that the masses tirelessly carried out against the hungering Syrian regime. Thanks to him and through his eyes it was like hundreds of thousands of us could see how the young people defended themselves from the attacks of the Syrian government that intensified with the days.
We witnessed the progress made by the masses, how Bashar's troops and their reinforcements of Iranian and Hezbollah mercenaries were gaining ground. We lived in flesh and skin the intense bombings suffered by the poor Syrian people by the dictator Bashar. We learned of the entry of Russian soldiers, of the Turkish invasion, of the battles of Aleppo, of the suburbs of Idlib.
This young man with guts of steel knew how to reflect through his work, not only the miseries of war, but also the euphoria of a determined people, their tears after each killing, or their smiles on every Ramadan and holiday. Ahmed with his most dangerous weapon, his camera, went through trenches in cold days, went to buildings in rubble and flames after the terrible explosions, risked his life once and a thousand times to show the atrocities that Bashar and his allies commit.
His pulse never trembled to inform and also report irregularities of the leaders of the rebel factions, their shady deals, the agreements between the famous Islamic State and Bashar, or the indiscriminate bombing of the Syrian civilian population in liberated territories, the shelling from powers that are shown as “allies”, be it the case of the United States or Turkey.
This courageous young man, with his charisma, his kindness, his courage and the conviction that there is no other way to win the revolution other than with the fall of the Basharist regime and all its allies, joined our group of collaborators and correspondents in Syria in 2016. Ahmed did not hesitate to show solidarity with the socialists who fight alongside the Syrian masses throughout the world so that their revolution is triumphant because we see in it the most advanced of the working class and we understand that defending the poor Syrian people until the end, is the best way to put a brake on the owners of this hunger system that will come for all of us to immerse ourselves in scenarios equal to or worse than those in Syria, if their business requires it.
Ahmed sympathized and greeted the martyrs that we, the Socialists, lost in historical battles such as Hamza, who fell in the front line trying to break the siege of Aleppo in 2016, or the socialist leader Mustafa el Haj Abu Jumaa, who was hunted by a Russian sniper in the Aleppo front after giving his solidarity with workers who had taken a factory in liberated territory. Ahmed reproduced and raised the photo of our beloved comrade and editor of the newspaper "The Truth of the Oppressed", Mahmoud Abu al Baraa, who was mortally wounded by another sniper after being threatened with death by several FSA generals. For Abu al Baraa, as writer and socialist leader of the Leon Sedov Brigade fought to expropriate the bourgeoisie and to generalize weapons to the masses.
While many left-wing organizations worked comfortably from their homes every day to dirty, slander and hide the Syrian revolution, Ahmed was doing the exact opposite, risking his life at every minute.
This is how he won the trust and solidarity of all those who support the Syrian revolution.
However, yesterday, forces of the bourgeois fraction called HTS that maintains control in the province of Idlib, who were once the famous Al Nussra Front, an organization allied with Al Qaeda, broke into his house in the best style of the regime forces, beat his wife and took him out with great violence, carrying him away detained.
What do they accuse him of? To share a video in which an HTS member denounces the embezzlement made by this bourgeois fraction, as well as a perfidious role in the battlefront in which they paid people to leave their positions and force the withdrawal of the young people who were exposed to the advances of the mercenaries of the Bashar regime.
In recent months, Russian mercenaries and regime forces have made enormous progress over razed territories, leaving behind rivers of innocent blood and debris dust from what used to be the home of those people. But not a millimeter of what was conquered by the regime could have been so without the betrayal of the “rebellious” bourgeois factions, which, far from uniting to confront Bashar, handed over their bravest fighters, hid the heavy weapons and stole all the money possible sinking the masses into more and more misery.
Yesterday the cursed bourgeoisie of the FSA imprisoned our comrade Khero Abu Mustafa, brother of Abu al Baraa. Today HTS, who keeps Jumma, the younger brother of Khero and the martyr Abu Al Baraa, locked up, fiercely advances in his plan to take out of the scene any young man or combatant who does not submit to the orders dictated by the Astana conference in which Turkey, Russia and the US have agreed. A pact in which the US stays with all of Syria and distributes the crumbs to those who did the "dirty work" of annihilating the revolution and massacring more than 700 thousand people.
The arrest of comrade and correspondent Ahmad is part of that. He, with his camera on his shoulder, is the voice and expression of the thousands of Syrians who say no to Astana, not to the US, not to Turkey, not to HTS, not to FSA, not to PKK, yes to the fall of the regime, yes to open the fronts, yes to the revolt of the Syrian brothers ansd sisters who are today in territories under the control of the mercenary forces, yes to the unity between the Kurdish and Syrian people, yes to fight until Bashar falls in Damascus and the fire of the revolution spreads throughout the region, until the flag of the Syrian revolution rises majestically in Palestinian Jerusalem.
That is why Ahmed was arrested, because today he is not just a correspondent, he is a song of victory, Ahmed is a light of hope, he is a loudspeaker of the oppressed, he is the breath of those who live in the trenches. Ahmed is the cry of the mothers who lost their children, it is the shelter of those who suffer, refugees under the trees because they have lost everything. Ahmed is the roar of applause from those who mobilize day by day, it is the cry of those who broke into the Turkish border. Ahmed is revolution. And if there is something that the imperialist powers and their lackeys fear, whether from the left or from the right, it is the revolutionized people.

Freedom to Ahmed now!

Abu Muad
from the Editorial Committee of
"The Truth of the Oppressed", newspaper of the Socialists from Syria and the Middle East.

 

* HTS, Hay’at Tahrir al Sham
Former al Nusra Front