October, 24th 2020 Tribute in the 4th anniversary of Abu Al Baraa's death   Speech by Leandro Hofstadter, journalist, correspondent and part of the Editorial Committee of the Arabic language newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed   "Abu al Baraa, together with his acquaintances, comrades, with workers who fought with him, put up a nucleus of revolutionary workers who fought to get in place the leadership we needed to succeed. ...the Syrian revolution alone could not get victory. Because it was not just a Syrian revolution, but a revolution of the entire world working class." My name is Leandro Hofstadter, I am a journalist, a correspondent, also part of the Editorial Committee of the newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed of Syria. I had the opportunity and the honor of covering the Syrian and Libyan civil wars as a correspondent, i.e., the revolutionary processes in the Maghreb and the Middle East that have been developing since 2011 and that are continuing. I am a Trotskyist revolutionary socialist; I am a working class journalist. And we working class journalists, revolutionary socialists, had to be there. That was our place. There, where the Syrian working class was fighting, in the Maghreb and the Middle East, in the Libyan revolution, etc. We went to cover these events, to bring to the world working class what was happening there. There we met a generation of young revolutionaries, who had won the streets for the fall of the regime, asking for bread and freedom. Together we met and recognized that we wanted the same thing. That we wanted a dignified life and to fight for the victory of the socialist revolution. From these basis, when we met, we organized ourselves together and stayed fighting for the triumph of this revolution. Today we pay homage to one of these young revolutionaries, who was the leader of a nucleus of socialists, Trotskyist revolutionaries,; one of the founders of Syrian Trotskyism as is comrade Abu al Baraa and also founder of our newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed. I had the honor of knowing him personally. He was, not only one of those young revolutionaries who marched and won the streets for the fall of the regime ... of those whom the Islamophobic left called the "backward Muslims". He was a young construction worker. He had signed up to study at the university too, because he wanted to perfect his technique in air conditioning repair... Tell me what's so "backward" and "barbaric" about that. Is it because there are other countries that are not of the Christian religion or are not secular? Does the fact that they are in Muslim countries make them stop being workers? The truth is that they were hungry workers who were winning the streets. That was also our partner. A young man of 19 when the revolution began. I met him at that age. When I arrived in Syria and saw him for the first time, he was already telling me the truth about how the bourgeois generals of the FSA were, who already from that moment on wanted to give up the whole struggle. The comrade, from his class position, already understood by himself what the bourgeois multimillionaires in uniform were, that they were only going to give orders, to take over everything that the masses were building and everything that they wanted to carry out. They came to get over the masses and go forward to try to disarm them and undo what they were doing. That's why we recognized ourselves, because we knew that to succeed it was not only necessary to defeat the regime, since we were in the front line to destroy that fascist, murderous, war criminal regime, which was massacring the masses that by the thousands were winning the streets calling for the regime's fall and asking for bread. We also knew that we had to get rid of those battleless generals who were cutting off the masses and their struggle for the triumph of the revolution. We discussed the revolutionary program a lot. We argued that, just as there are those leaderships that give up the fight, we needed a revolutionary leadership to win the war, for the victory of the revolution. We needed a leadership that could put forward the conditions for victory, that could put forward a program for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and put forward all the resources necessary to solve the problem of the bread that was missing and is still missing in Syria, to put forward all the resources to win the war and defeat al-Assad, because those bourgeois generals of the FSA, the only thing they were doing was negotiating with him over the blood of the hundreds of thousands of martyrs of the Syrian revolution. The only thing they did was business and they filled their pockets. They were not there to confront and defeat the regime. They were not then, nor are they now, and they have proved it, because they gave in one after the other the rebel cities. Thus Abu al Baraa, together with his acquaintances, comrades, with workers who fought with him, set up a nucleus of revolutionary workers who fought to put in place the leadership we needed to succeed. And, above all, we understood that this program had an essential point, the Syrian revolution alone could not get victory. Because it was not just a Syrian revolution, but a revolution of the whole world working class. If the revolution was isolated, even if we were to reach Damascus, imperialism would concentrate all its forces and we would lose it in 24 hours. That is why it was necessary for that revolutionary leadership to be international. That is the fight that the comrade gave. A leader of a revolutionary nucleus that was fighting to give back to the world working class the leadership it deserves in order to triumph. And, like this, in the group we had a fundamental task, which was to defeat and break the infamous siege of silence and slander that the reformist left had imposed on the world. Because the left not only did not go to cover the revolution with its correspondents, actually it was either on the side of al-Assad or painted itself as "neutral" and imposed an ignominious siege to isolate the Syrian revolution and the whole Maghreb and the Middle East revolutions. They imposed a siege of silence on the dead, on the massacre, the genocide. We did the opposite. We fought to break that siege and to follow the Trotskyist tradition in, for example, the Spanish revolution in the 1930s, which was also to organize brigades to support the Syrian revolution, the refugees. We fought in every union to have fundraising made in support of the Syrian refugees. A motion that was left aside by all the bureaucracies and also by the reformist left. As part of that fight, I was voted from Syria to go to Tunisia to meet comrades to break the siege. As part of that fight, Abu al Baraa left for Turkey, trying to get to Greece by following the route of the refugees, and then to Latin America to tell the truth against all that siege by the left, through bringing the living testimony of what the Syrian working class was experiencing. But, as happens to revolutionaries, he was denied a visa. The left began to fortify its Islamophobic campaign throughout Europe. The regimes shut down, al-Assad's intelligence services moved all their contacts in all the embassies to deny any visas. The comrade returned to Syria, although the fight of the revolutionaries, of the internationalists, of the Trotskyists did reach Greece, following the route of the refugees. Abu al Baraa even got to know the young Greek anarchists who were imprisoned for defending the refugees and who took the flag of the Syrian revolution into their hands. These comrades, who are still in prison today and for whom we are fighting for their liberation, wrote a tribute to Abu al Baraa that is published in the book Syria Under Fire Part II and is also on our website. After returning to Syria, along with all the revolutionary comrades there, Abu al Baraa continued to fight for the same battle that had remained unfinished. Already in October 2016, thousands of workers were fighting in Aleppo and the surrounding area to break the siege that al-Assad, Putin, the Iranian Guard, the PKK with their YPG troops and the skies liberated by the United States had imposed on that city, which was one of the great capitals of the revolution. Those thousands of young people said, "Not only will they not be able to take Aleppo, we are going to stay here and it will be a before and after, we will not only stop them here, we will begin a counter-offensive and we will not stop until Damascus." And our handful of revolutionaries were fighting for a program to enter and break the siege of Aleppo in the only way that could be done, by expropriating the capitalists and putting all the resources into winning that war. Thousands went to try and conquer the triumph. It was the generals of the FSA and Al Nusra who acted again. The FSA ordered to leave the fronts, called for an end to the battle against al-Assad saying that it was "impossible to defeat him". All those who wanted to fight against al-Assad were told by the FSA that it was not possible; it did not give them weapons, either uncoordinated them or sent them to fight at the opposite end of the battle. They left groups alone, isolated, at the mercy of al-Assad's bombing. Groups that were resisting said "we need support". The FSA rank-and-file itself asked their commanders and generals to send in more ammunition and weapons. The response was "no more". They asked for food to sustain themselves and were told "there is no more, withdraw from the front" and those who refused were massacred by al-Assad. And the survivors who retreated found not only the weapons they had asked for, but also food stores stocked up for at least three months. This is the FSA bourgeoisie that was preparing to surrender the cities and associate with al-Assad. Many were already changing their uniforms. They took off their uniforms with the flag of the revolution and put on the flag of Al Assad and openly handed over Aleppo. Those comrades who denounced this called Abu al Baraa and told him "what you warned us about was true, you were right, that's what's happening now." A few months earlier, in the same battle, comrade Mustafa Abu Jumaa, who was also part of this fight, had fallen in Aleppo under the bullets of al-Assad as part of the surrender of the FSA. From Idlib came Jabat Al Nusra saying that they were "more combative than the FSA"; they went ahead, threw two bombs and left, they withdrew and took all the weapons with them, saying that "it is not possible to break the siege of Aleppo",took refuge in Idlib and hid the weapons from all those who wanted to fight. Thus, thousands of workers and youth were massacred by al-Assad. And Abu al Baraa in that fight to break the siege of Aleppo fell by three shots from a Russian sniper. A revolutionary who fought to the last breath, always being where he had to be, fighting against fascism and all the traitorous leaderships. But his fight did not die. His fight multiplied. Because, as an outcome of that fight, the newspaper "The Truth of the Oppressed," which today circulates in all the trenches of the Syrian resistance and  all over the Maghreb and the Middle East, was founded and, translated into three languages for the whole world, it is the tool for breaking the siege on Syria and on all the revolutions in the Middle East. Because Abu al Baraa's fight left enormous lessons that today are necessary (to consider) in order to succeed in all the processes that are opening in Lebanon, in Iran, in Iraq, as well as in those that the world working class is leading, as in Belarus against the government that is a friend of the murderer Putin. This is the fight of comrade Abu al Baraa that is still going on and is more present than ever. I am going to finish my greeting in the same way that the video of the great comrade Jorge Terracota just said. Comrade Abu al Baraa, towards socialism forever!