Syria – September 8th, 2019

A nation divided occupied and a starved tormented people

Turkey besieges Idlib; Assad and Putin slaughter everywhere; HTS disorganizes the resistance and agrees with murderers of the Syrian people

The “Operation Final Extermination” is being launched to smash
the last rattles of the Syrian revolution in Idlib

The division of Syria under US supervision is deepened with the advance of the counterrevolution

With the blow on the last trenches of the Syrian revolution in Idlib, the definitive shape of the post-revolutionary Syria is being drawn, which imperialism is trying to use to settle the counterrevolutionary victory of Putin and Assad, who have already done imperialist powers’ dirty work. We are witnessing the definitive partition of Syria, organized from the Conferences of Geneva and Astana, which gather USA, Russia, Turkey, al-Assad and even the Sunnite bourgeoisie, like FSA and HTS (former Al Nusra) generals who sold out the every rebel city from within. But in order to achieve this, counterrevolution must settle the last blows with an operation of final extermination to the masses of Idlib.

While we write this article, Turkey is entering with its army to northern border of Syria, in a joint action with the US troops. The latter are in that region with Turkey to guarantee the precise limits of the territories that Erdogan will control. Turkey will get Afrin, Euphrates and the areas of the border with the oil pipes used by imperialist oil companies to plunder the “black gold”.
Also, after they were used as mercenaries and ground troops of the US to smash the Syrian revolution, the cynical Kurdish bourgeoisie and PKK (Kurdistan Communist Party) and the YPG must surrender the border cities in northern Syria, while they are sent back to their cantons in Rojava by their bosses. What commands there are the 10 US military bases. From there the safety of the oil imperialist companies is supervised, like Exxon, Total, British Petroleum and Shell around Raqqa, Deir ez Zor (the big oil producing cities under US direct control).

Thus in Syria, the Kurdish people are far from conquering their national self-determination as an oppressed people. Because after being used as shock forces with al-Assad and Russian troops to re-take Aleppo’s control and after advancing with the USA over Raqa and Deir Ez Zor, the Kurdish people was submitted with double chains to al-Assad, US imperialism and Erdogan in Turkey.
This is how the adventure of the Kurdish bourgeoisie and their YPG ends: locked in cantons, controlled by Erdogan’s bayonets in the borders and the US from within, as we have seen. It crumbles the vile lie and deception showed by the Leftists and Anarchist that in Rojava there were “socialist democratic communes”. This is the same lie that Zionism sold for years when they talked about “Socialist” kibutz. It is crystal clear that imperialism conquered as YPG and their homonyms in Iraq –Peshmerga- as shock forces, like Zionism (although at a higher scale), to discipline the Arab masses from Maghreb and Middle East.

In agreement with Russia and the US, Turkey has already entered in mid 2018 to the province of Idlib, besieging it with 12 check-points. Erdogan said it was part of “Defending Idlib from al-Assad and Russia’s attack.” A brutal deception, since we say back then how those check-points only worked as contention and fence over the masses of Idlib and to prevent them from advancing over al-Assad’s troops by unifying their brigades and opening new fronts against the Jackal of Damascus.

So Turkey has entered Syria besieging Idlib and following Afrin’s and northern border route.
In the divided Syria, Damascus in under the fascist al-Assad’s command, supported by the troops of the hitman Putin. He will keep the military base in Tartus, as gendarme of the masses of Eurasia and Middle East and will stay next to al-Assad until the last free rebel in Syria is massacred. After that, USA and imperialist powers will define their fate. Dog Bashar and Putin have only done their dirty work of massacring on their behalf.

In the meantime in the Presidential Palace and Central Bank of Damacus the discussion over the business to re-build Syria’s destroyed cities has begun. Al-Assad’s gang has already taken houses and small agricultural productions of over 15 millions Syrians, who were forced to run away to the borders when their cities where destroyed by Dog’s barrel bombs and Russian Air Force’s missiles. What al-Assad does stealing lands and houses is what Zionism has done with the Palestine people.
Al-Assad’s bourgeoisie is that of the thieves, predators, mercenaries. They want to get the loot taken from the masses by counterrevolution. But there is no doubt the big business to re-build Syria is and will be for the US and their circumstantial allies of Maastricht imperialist Europe. We have already seen how BP, Shell, Exxon and Total have kept the oil fields and will get the biggest share of re-building this divided Syria whenever imperialism decides so and that becomes a profitable business. 

But before sharing the loot, the counterrevolutionary forces must complete their dirty work. They must smash the heroic resistance of the masses in Idlib and the exploited who are revolting in al-Assad’s rearguard, due to starvation and desperation. This happened in Daraa (see box). Syrian workers earn 90 dollars for more than 280 working hours a month (12 a day), when they need at least 700 dollars to survive. Working districts get starvation wages, like the refugees who work as slave labour force in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey… They, with their remittance, support millions of starving Syrians.
This is what the US, their hitmen and agents in Syrian “pax” means: a divided occupied nation and a starved tormented people.

Idlib: the last trench of the revolution has not fallen yet
Now, the HTS must surrender it from within

In Idlib, there are air bombings every day on urban centers, markets and houses in cities in this province. The attack is concentrated in the Southern area of the province, where these fascist armies besieged with artillery, missiles, mortars, tanks and besieging cannons. Such is the devastation than families had to leave their houses and became displaced in Syria, looking for shelter under trees, since there are tents available in the camps on the borders.

Based on the massive destruction, Russian and al-Assad’s infantry launched an attack over the South of Idlib. They managed to pass over several cities, gaining control on those in rebels’ hands in Norhtern Hama like Kafr Zeta, Latamneh or Tal Melah. In Idlib several towns were lost in hands of the fascist forces, but mainly the city of
Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib’s fourth biggest city. The massacre continues. Now they have focus on Kafranbel and its suburbs. From Khan Sheikhoun, these fascist forces want to move towards the capital of Idlib. Al-Assad and Putin are carrying out a true extermination operation to drown in blood what is left of the Syrian revolution.

As we have said before, while al-Assad and Putin are attacking, Turkey besieges Idlib. It closed the borders; its army shoots whoever is trying to go to Idlib. It has set 12 checkpoints surrounding the province and precisely al-Assad and Putin’s fascist forces penetrate through those checkpoints.
From within Idlib, HTS has already started disarming the masses with the threat imposed by massive bombings from Russia and dog Bashar. This is the pact made the coward Sunnite bourgeoisie a few weeks ago with Erdogan and the US in Turkey. (see box)

Imperialism used all its agents against the Syrian revolution, including the pro-imperialist left
that isolated the Syrian oppressed from the world working class

Looking at the process of imposing the advance of the counterrevolution in Syria today, one can clearly and neatly see the true contours of the Stalinist counterrevolutionary policy, renegades of Trotskyism and other social-imperialists, who openly supported fascist al-Assad and Putin. They have been with them both in Syria and internationally in a common political and military field. They claimed that the dog Bashar and Putin "faced the US, Turkey and NATO."
Suffice it to see how al-Assad, Putin, Turkey, the United States and the UN as a whole today are going to slaughter the last trenches of the revolution in Idlib, so that all the infamy, lies and ignominies that traitorous leaderships of the world working class used to leave the masses of Syria isolated, would collapse like a house of cards.  These leaderships have a stain on their forehead, which will remain unwashed historically, for their betrayal, i.e., their covering the counterrevolution’s rearguard in that nation in the Middle East.
The scoundrels that covered the counterrevolutionary forces of the PKK and the Kurdish bourgeoisie, supported by the US Navy and Airborne missiles, will also be buried in the mud of the Syrian revolution.

In the same way, those who, speaking in the name of the Syrian revolution, subjected the exploited to the Sunni bourgeoisie, their generals-without-a-battle, the commanders of the FSA and HTS, who spent these years doing million-dollar businesses in the liberated areas at the cost of the hunger of the people and the blood of the martyrs that fought against al-Assad and Putin. These currents have abandoned long ago any struggle for the working class and the exploited to take the political and military leadership of the civil war against al-Assad in their hands.
The stubborn facts show what was clear since the beginning of the Syrian revolution. The US monitors the massacre and organizes partition and business. Assad and Putin are the executors of the genocide. Turkey controls the Sunni bourgeoisie charged with delivering the revolution from within. This is the pact of Geneva and Astana under the command of imperialism.
But this also controls the reformist left that either openly supported al-Assad or raised the theory of the "two demons", stating that the FSA and HTS were the same as Bashar. A cruel lie. Al-Assad was the one who, with Putin, crushed the masses, while the officers of the Sunni bourgeoisie, such as those of the FSA or HTS, were the "Trojan Horses" which, with their siren songs, disarmed the masses from within the rebel zones, as we just said. Al-Assad did not manipulate or disorganize the resistance, but instead massacred it directly. The Sunni bourgeoisie was the one who played the perfidious role of riding over the revolution to give it out from within. Paraphrasing Trotsky in his fight against the sinister policy of Stalinism in Germany in the 1930s (which posed that Hitler and social democracy were the same thing), here we could say that today Bashar is the one who comes to shoot the masses, while HTS and FSA are the ones that poison them every day. First you have to crush al-Assad and that is the way to overcome the limits of the bourgeois leadership of the civil war.
The masses struggled to overcome and get rid of that bourgeois leadership in a multitude of opportunities in these 8 years, as we saw lately in huge mobilizations in Idlib demanding that the brigades unite and the fronts open. The strategists of the "two demons" theory condemned those mass actions, which kept the 2011/2012 revolution alive, accusing them of "terrorists" and being “part of ISIS." Traitors! Together with al-Assad and the Sunni bourgeoisie they were and still are another counterrevolutionary factor in the crushing of the Syrian revolution.
With the "two demons" theory, the left posed as "neutral" and ended up letting al-Assad slaughter and the Sunni bourgeoisie disorganize and hand out the revolution. That is, the left of Astana and Geneva covered the backs of all agents of the counterrevolution and reaction in Syria.
Thus, all this left ended up entering the "anti-terrorist front" commanded by Macron, Merkel, the queen of England, yesterday Obama and today Trump, justifying the worst massacres to the Syrian masses. This “anti-terrorist” front, in the excuse of "fighting ISIS" found the justification to even harshly attack the working class of their countries, as in France, England or the United States itself.

A group of Stalinists, anarchists, former Trotskyists, various social democrats thus managed to separate the world working class on the planet from the heroic Syrian masses. The latter were left isolated and fenced so that the fascist forces of al-Assad could massacre them at will.

Without all these agents, imperialism would never have been able to subdue the Syrian revolution, which for 8 years presented and still presents in its last throes a heroic resistance to the enemies of the Arab and Muslim masses.

The bourgeois leadership of the civil war closed the way for the victory of the Syrian revolution to the masses and opened the doors for al-Assad and Putin to slaughter the working class and the exploited

Despite all this, even after 8 years, they have not yet managed to take the entire province of Idlib and its capital. In these heinous conditions, the masses win the streets and present fierce resistance. Their militiamen, the expression of the most advanced rebel youth from all over Syria, have already announced that when the last city falls -where HTS refused to unite the brigades and open the fronts- they will open them in the rear of al-Assad, in Hama, in Daraa, in Damascus, in Daraya, in Homs ... The vanguard of the free of Syria prepares to organize a fierce anti-fascist resistance, in case the revolution is strangled definitively. Proclamations such as these and open complaints for the sell out by the Sunni bourgeoisie, are issued from the most advanced fronts of the Idlib fights against the invading troops. They and the masses that won the streets in the revolution of 2011 are the only ones consequent in the fight for the fall of the regime.

For the Sunni bourgeoisie, the slogan of the 2011 revolution of “let the regime fall” meant and still means the possibility of making an agreement with the Alawite bourgeoisie to create a common transitional government and share business. For the masses "that the regime falls" meant and means to conquer the bread, to leave misery, ostracism, unemployment behind, and to conquer their freedom, all of wich amounted to throw down al-Assad in Damascus. The masses went there. It was not the courage or military capacity of al-Assad, Putin and Trump that has left the resistance scattered in small foci in the last trench today, but the betrayal of the leaderships of the orld working class that isolated it and also of the Sunni bourgeoisie that handed out the revolution from within. The crisis of revolutionary leadership, that is, the overabundance of treacherous leaderships, was then the determining factor of the enormous defeats accumulated in that great revolution, which was the one that went farther among the chain of revolutions that have shaken the Maghreb and the Middle East since 2011 .

The Syrian revolution created in its development and in its offensive phase the political premises necessary for an immediate struggle of the proletariat for the conquest of power. It was the betrayal of their leaderships, the cowardice and miserable cynicism of the Sunni bourgeoisie that gave it up from within, the traditions of conciliation and pacifism that it imposed on the masses to bend them, which closed the way to victory. The contribution of the world reformist left, which sustained al-Assad and Putin, reconciled with the Stalinist counterrevolutionary leadership of the Kurdish people that surrounded and attacked the masses alongside the dog Bashar under US imperialism’s orders, was a key factor for the masses not to become politically independent from the Sunni bourgeoisie to take the lead in the civil war. Why would the masses go “socialist” when currents who proclaim themselves “socialist” support al-Assad who massacres them? The “backwardness in the subjectivity” of the Syrian masses and their heroic revolution is the absolute responsibility of the social-imperialist left, which played a direct counterrevolutionary role in the revolution and still splashes in the mud and the blood of the Syrian exploited.

The civil war, following Clausewitz, is the continuity of politics, only by other means. This means that the outcome of the civil war depends only on one tenth of the march of the war itself on the military ground. In the remaining nine tenths, it depends on the political preparation of the masses, how much they break their servile hopes in the clemency and loyalty of the slave-owners of the Sunni bourgeoisie, how much this thrust of the masses was not debauched once and again by the shots in the back that these bourgeois gangs inflicted on them, and how much a revolutionary leadership could, at the international level, defeat the sinister policy of Stalinists and renegades of Marxism that have sustained the massacre of al-Assad and Putin as a fifth column within the world working class.

The bourgeoisie and imperialism directed their blows using all their agents on the battlefield. The proletariat and the oppressed could not, in the course of the civil war, free themselves from bourgeois leadership. It was the bread, the hunger, the land the program that united the exploited in the cities surrounded by the troops of al-Assad with the masses in their rear, in Damascus ... and also in Moscow, where millions claim to collect their wages today in arrears for almost a year, and recover their retirement. The struggle of the Syrian revolution, attacking the capitalists, the businessmen, linked the Syrian working class to millions of workers who faced and continue to face the worst attacks of the bourgeoisie either in the Maghreb and the Middle East, in Russia and throughout Imperialist Europe
By expropriating businessmen who benefitted from the masses’ hunger in the civil war, the masses could get the funds to buy and get weapons. That was the way to multiply their military forces, revolt the people in the refugee camps and arm and organize the thousands of young people who today refuse to join the army of al-Assad to attack Idlib.

The last flame of the revolution has not gone out. We will not be the Trotskyists who fight for the revolution who will flee the battlefield in this tragic moment of the civil war.
And the last spark of the revolution is still burning, because the metallurgical workers, sugar workers and students in a ruled by the counterrevolutionary regime of the Ayatollahs Iran, are still standing up. An anti-labor regime and a fierce dictatorship of capital, which throws all the crisis imposed by the US imperialist blockade on the poor people; the fact is that regime has agreed a thousand times the handing out of the wealth of the Iranian nation to US imperialism, such as it has also done with the imperialist powers of Europe -Germany and France in particular.
The fires of Algeria and Sudan have not died out. In there, the revolutionary processes have not fully developed yet. The rise of the masses is underway. The European and world working class have not given up. Their lives are at stake, as it is decisive for them that the imperialists and their fascist agents don't defeat the last trenches of the Syrian revolution. In the midst of the commercial war, the marasmus and the capitalist crac, imperialism and the bourgeoisie have downloaded the whole crisis over the masses. In Syria, in Ukraine and with the surrender of working-class and peasant Cuba by Stalinism, imperialism concentrated forces and caused severe partial defeats to the world working class. This has allowed it to launch a fierce counteroffensive of colonization and recolonization of the semicolonial world and also has allowed it to throw on the shoulders of the working class of the central countries and internationally the entire crisis in which it has been immersed since 2008.

The world crisis of the pestilent capitalist system does not give peace. More than 200 million immigrants travel the planet, from Africa and Latin America to Europe and the US, looking for bread and a decent life. The treatment they receive is no different from that endured by the Syrian masses that are taken to refugee camps under conditions of misery and unprecedented ignominy.
That is why it is decisive to end this counterrevolutionary scourge in Syria, since today or tomorrow it may be in your country, your city, your neighborhood, your home.

 

We must regroup the resistance around a revolutionary program

Today, imperialism is using Syria as a lesson for the workers of the world, to show them what will happen to them if they fight against adjustment plans, food price increases, labor flexibility, etc. Upon the defeat of Syria, imperialism takes a breath in its offensive against the masses and oppressed peoples of the world. But nothing is still defined worldwide. New fighting opens in different sectors of the planet's working class, as in Hong Kong. In them there are the allies of the Syrian masses, as in all the exploited who refuse to leave the streets in the Middle East! At the international level, an effective solidarity coordination committee with the Syrian revolution must be set up before it is too late. May workers' organizations win the streets in support of the Syrian masses in Idlib against the al-Assad massacre! We have to go to all the embassies of the dog Bashar and the butcher Putin!
The fight against al-Assad is inseparable from the fight for the destruction of the Zionist-fascist state of Israel. The Syrian resistance has a great ally in the Iranian workers fighting the murderous clerics of Tehran. Algeria and Sudan are the new revolutionary winds that have shaken the Middle East.

In Syria, the resistance has not given up as the latest marches in Idlib show. It is necessary to regroup it, put the coordination committees with direct democracy back on their feet, disarm the bourgeois generals who have already agreed to the surrender and betrayed the revolution, open the arsenals and make the weapons available to the exploited to fight against Bashar. A program of expropriation of banks, workshops, factories, oil wells, mainly in the liberated areas, must be proposed to put all available resources to solve the problem of bread and win the war.
The demand for a minimum living wage of 700 dollars a month to cover the basic needs and mobile according to the inflation, the call to recover the homes and lands that al-Assad has stolen, the fight to expropriate the central bank of Damascus to put into operation a public works plan to rebuild the homes of the exploited, they are heavy ammunition and missiles in the hands of the resistance in order to regroup the ranks of the exploited, upraise al-Assad’s rearguard and launch into combat millions of Syrian refugees, who are now displaced in tents or under the trees

The brave youth of the heroic Syrian resistance, in order to overcome the cowardly Sunni bourgeoisie, needs to have in their hands a program for the victory of the workers and peasants revolution. At every step, these businessmen have handed over, disarmed and exploited Syrian workers every day in their companies and factories... With a program of reforms and social changes the revolutionary youth, who is resisting in Idlib, could present quickly a tough battle today and prepare a tenacious and heroic resistance in the rear of al-Assad tomorrow. It should be a program to make the Syria of the oppressed, the millions who are in refugee camps, who want to recover their homes, their lands, their homes, to stand up.
In the youth and workers who refuse to be recruited into the Assadist army and refuse again to kill their brothers as at the beginning of the civil war in 2011, and also in the solidarity of the world working class, may this youth of Idlib find the strength to get rid of the bonds of businessmen and be able to take the resolution of the civil war and their own destiny into their hands.
The Syrian revolution was born from the hungry people, from the workers, from the rebel youth. Thousands of martyrs left their lives for her. Their blood cannot be negotiated, neither in Geneva nor in Astana, or in the checkpoints of Turkey, much less in the Cenacles of the Sunni bourgeoisie that conspire in the rearguard of the resistance to disorganize the masses.
A new regrouping of the Syrian resistance and the exploited of Maghreb and the Middle East is necessary with a program for the victory of the workers’ and peasants' revolution, both in Syria and throughout the region, and to settle accounts with Zionism, rescuing the heroic Palestinian masses from surrender and betrayal. Before the last trench of the revolution has falling completely, the intifada must begin! From Daraa to Damascus, from Homs to Jerusalem, from Hebron to Gaza ... The revolution is not dead!

Long live worker and peasant Syria, which left its blood fighting imperialism and all its lackeys!
For the working class and the oppressed to live, imperialism must die.

Carlos Munzer
Abu Muad

The bourgeois Generals of HTS and FSA, businessmen, business and financial partners of Turkey… and al-Assad In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), former Al Nusra, has already entered the Astana Agreement. Its Generals have signed a pact with Turkey to enter the business deals in exchange of selling out Idlib and dissolving both their own organization and those which are not under Turkish control, while those Generals were part of FSA brigades which were directly under Erdogan’s command (now called “Front of National Liberation” also known as “National Army”). There are sectors of the resistance have denounced that HTS biggest leader, Mohammed al-Jolani, travelled to Turkey to close the deal and got money to create a new Officer Caste of the bourgeoisie Sunnite to join Erdogan’s command. That is why they have been trying to impose their control, disarming the resistance, persecuting any element of opposition and imprisoning them. The Generals of HTS and FSA are bourgeois and during this war they have made fabulous business with Assadist Generals. From their check-points they negotiate good trade (mainly towards Turkey) and charging taxes. They use the same currency: Syrian Lira. They got rich at expenses of the blood of hundreds of martyrs, of brutal super-exploitation of workers in factories and workshops in free areas and of conditions of starvation and misery of the masses. Now they want to settle their business with the administration of Idlib or areas around it. In order to achieve it, they must be under Turkish direct command and end up playing their role within Idlib. That is why while al-Assad and Putin attack, HTS refuses placing all their forces to defeat them, they hide arms, control who can and cannot go to the fronts, imprison the left wing of the resistance or they left it at Putin’s bombings mercy.

 

Daraa: The masses take to the streets in al-Assad’s rearguard On August 27th, in Daraa, occupied by al-Assad, the masses took to the streets. Thousands marched downtown, challenging al-Assad’s fascist boot and taking the risk of brutal repression that may have been unleashed over them by real ammo, bombs, persecution and prison, which means a sentence to torture and death. It was a huge demonstration, but it was not the first one in the city under this situation. There had already been an enormous demonstration last March. The situation of starvation and misery can no longer be bear. Al-Assad’s fascist boot can no longer be bear. The people want the fall of the regime. The people want bread and freedom. Nobody wants al-Assad’s army and they want to avoid compulsory draft, by bribing officers, running away, deserting, self-inflicting injuries, etc. That is why there are demonstrations in Daraa with flags of the Syrian revolution, claiming for the fall of the regime and supporting Idlib, under the nose of fascist al-Assad. Out with al-Assad! Out with all invading troops of Syria! Expropriation of all banks from where they steal the wealth of the Syrian people!