October, 24th 2020 Tribute in the 4th anniversary of Abu Al Baraa's death Sppech by Abu Muad, from the Editorial Board of the paper "The Truth of the Oppressed"   “… It was under the program of socialism… of world revolution… to make the workers of the world understand that what was there was a struggle of the hungry against oppressors and not a “holy war”, not “a war created by imperialism against a socialist regime"... Abu al Baraa had seven thousand tasks in his hands... he carried them all together on his back and carried them through to the end"   Tribute to Abu al Baraa   Abu Muad:     A huge greeting to you and allow me to greet Comrade Khero, who is the brother of Abu al Baraa. [Greets and welcomes Khero in Arabic, NdeR] It is quite a hard date for us and for me in particular, where words intersect, Arabic mixes with Spanish and emotions are also running high. I have to start by saying that it is not an honor, at all, to be paying homage to a fallen comrade, because we want (instead) each other alive and triumphant, but unfortunately there are things that do not depend on us. I want to tell a little about the genesis. Because, one has to wonder what, of the 7 billion inhabitants that the planet has, only one had gone to fight in the Middle East, for the Libyan revolution, when we should have been thousands? Or should it have been neither? "What am I doing here?" I wondered, and this was going around my head in 2011, when the revolutions broke out in the Middle East. Although I had my convictions, when I began to be an active participant in the Libyan revolution, when I began to enter into the combat driven by the Libyan masses, who rose after almost forty years of oppression, an oppression that was carried out in the name of "socialism". An oppression that did not admit criticism, that starved, that marginalized, with a working class like I have never seen, oppressed from every point of view. The more I watched the news and the more I found out that the only thing the left was doing was slandering the Libyan revolution and the more I asked myself that question: "What am I doing here?" I was trying to lend a hand, "I will be here to help," he said to me, "Is it my destiny to write so that everyone knows what is happening in Libya?" As time progressed and I became more deeply ingrained, there began to be an exchange of correspondence with an organization, with a current that cleared up my doubt about "what am I doing here?" And made me understand that it was the other way around, that is: "What are others doing who criticize us, who criticize this revolution, that they are not here?" That was the real question. In the midst of all that fury, that euphoria, in the midst of the bullets and bombs, it happened that, through correspondence, calls, videos, we began to get to know each other with the FLTI and the picture became increasingly clear. It was increasingly clear to me what I was seeing. It was becoming clearer and clearer how to proceed. I was a 23 year old looking for answers. And in this merger with the FLTI, what started to come to my head was more light. I don't think it was because the members are “the best”, but I do know that it was because they have fought the best battles, that they have learned the best lessons. And those lessons were the ones that served us on the battlefront, even though we were thousands of miles away to know what to do and how to succeed, which was ultimately what we wanted. I remember having reached one of the cities with the greatest resistance in Libya, which was the city of Misratah in a ship loaded with onions, dodging the NATO bullets, which did not let any ship pass, no international solidarity, but still, once I put my feet on the ground in Misrrata, it was demonstrated that you could reach Libya, that you could reach the Middle East, that you could be an active participant in the revolutions that were taking place. Many comrades also fell there, many comrades who also helped the merger, with impressive political clarity, such as Comrade Yuseff, who had even traveled to Ukraine because he was Trotsky's number one admirer. That allowed us and allowed me to understand that the revolution was not only in Libya, that the revolution was in the whole area, that the only way to succeed was for it to spread, to be propagated. That is why, the last drop of blood had not yet fallen of the scrap jackal that was Khadafy, executed by the comrades in Sirte, and we were already planning how to get Syria and be able to give a hand to that sister revolution that was in there, on the borders with Zionism, where we saw all our hope of liberating Palestine. Little by little, that 23-year-old young man got involved with other comrades who understood that the revolution was worldwide and, together with approximately 10,000 young people and as part of that process, we arrived in Syria almost without understanding what was happening. Because, beyond what we understood, the international press was in charge, once again, of throwing dirt in the eyes of the working class. So we got to Syria and we didn't know what to do. The boys were in the same condition I was in when I arrived in Libya, "what do we do?" they all wondered, although there was one objective that was clear: Bashar was killing the population that was rising and we knew that there was no other place than the front line to help. For this reason, our contribution was, precisely, to penetrate the battle front and thus, a week after my arrival, in the working-class neighborhood of Salahadin, I knew Abu al Baraa, a young man, much younger than me. At first I thought he was from a wealthy family but, as I got to know him, as we were chatting, I realized that we were both chewing the same hunger, the same anger and the same hardships as me, as all Libyans, as all Syrians, that all Argentines and the entire world working class. Abu al Baraa was part of a Coordination Committee that was in charge of protecting the protesters, as was done at that time, because every demonstration that took place was repressed with live bullets and fire. We met in the heat of that beautiful process that took place in the city of Aleppo, which unfortunately did not last long because the Free Syrian Army (FSA) with its generals, most of them commanded by bourgeois from abroad (from the diaspora, NT), arrived precisely to uncoordinate what the masses had spontaneously coordinated. They came to blow up the democracy that the masses had spontaneously conquered. It did not last long and we were thrown into the Aleppo bombings. As the FSA took over the fronts, all it did was betray them and hand them over to Bashar. So much so, that thousands and thousands of workers had to flee to the outskirts of Aleppo, to settle in the countryside and in the suburbs. Then it happened that I come across the “Mahmoud boy” [Abu al Baraa] again. There he was and he came up to me and asked me "Do you have any clothes to wash?" "No," I answered, "how am I going to have clothes to wash if I have almost no clothes." "Well," he told me, "I'm here to see how I can help." I looked at his hands and thought that he did not have hands to wash clothes, without detracting anybody. "What is your job?" I asked him. "I'm a construction worker," he replied. I told him “those hands are for holding a rifle too, but in reality I should ask you the question, how can I help you? What do you need from me? because you are the ones who know the territory. What can we do for you? because it is you who are rising up against this disgusting regime, protective to Zionism. " That's where the friendship began. From that day on we were inseparable. I offered him what I had in my power to defend ourselves. So we started on our way, a road that was long and he had to make his experience. Just as I did in Libya and came across a current that brought me a program that enlightened me, we had to go through that experience day by day with Comrade Abu al Baraa. Imagine, a current with two comrades who claim to be "socialists" in the midst of all the calumnies raised by the left, in the midst of all the lies and dirt in the eyes thrown by the international press, in the midst of all the accusations that "They are only barbarian peoples", "terrorists", a current that speaks of the world revolution and the welfare of the workers, against currents such as the Al Nusra Front or other Islamic fronts that raised the flag of "anti-imperialism" because they said that "they had fought against the US imperialists in Iraq and Afghanistan”. It was a deadly fight. The bullets, the bombings and the hardships that we suffered on the front lines were terrible, but the discussions that arose among ourselves and within the nucleus were also terrible when we tried to move forward as a socialist group, because we had to explain seven thousand times what socialism was, it was necessary to explain seven thousand times how imperialism had to be fought and we had to accompany each of the comrades to have that experience. Abu al Baraa was one of the quickest to understand. So he committed himself in a way that I never thought he would commit. His family opened the doors for us; we met his father who proudly said that “his son belonged to our brigade, the Leon Sedov Brigade”. Comrade Mustafa Abu Jumaa, Abu al Baraa's father, called me and said “the truth is that there is nothing that makes me more proud than to see my son fighting for this program, of all the bourgeois currents and the army parties that there are here fighting, that he has ended up fighting alongside you, it is a blessing from Allah ”. Because there Allah, who supposedly it again to does not exist. There, culturally, if you pray, you pray, and if you don't pray, you don't pray. Just as the church bells ring in Buenos Aires or in the places where we live, so the cry of the call to prayer sounds in Arabic there. There is nothing backward about that, nothing “Islamist”. Imagine that here the bells ring and in the Middle East they sing, recite and, the one who wants goes and the one who does not want does not go. It was under the program of socialism, it was under the banners of the world revolution, it was under a task of making the workers of the world understand that what was there was a struggle of the hungry against oppressors and not a "holy war", not "a war created by imperialism against a socialist regime”… Abu al Baraa had seven thousand tasks in his hands. And he carried them all together on his back and carried them forward to the end. The funny thing is that the whole family ended up being part of this beautiful experience of leading a Brigade, of sitting down to discuss that the fighting was not simply against the enemies in front of us, but that it was also to be careful about the shots that came from behind. That's when Mustafa Abu Jumaa, Abu al Baraa's father, desperate to enter the fight, buys a truck and says: “I am old to fight, I am in my 50s, but I know how to drive and handle well, I can rescue the wounded”. This is how our leader, Mustafa Abu Jumaa, was gaining the trust of each of the combatants who were on the battlefront giving their lives to overthrow the Bashar regime. This is how Mustafa earned the hatred of the treacherous FSA leaderships who marked his forehead as a target and, one of the times he went out (no longer as an ambulance driver, but to accompany the young people and boys who were at the front), in a typical maneuver, the FSA left him alone for one night, a sniper appeared and fired three shots at Mustafa Abu Jumaa. He was the only one who fell that night. Imagine that losing a family member is hard. They killed Mustafa, they would demoralize Abu al Baraa; it was killing two birds with the same stone. "Dead dog, dead rabies", they must have thought, those garbage. Abu al Baraa lost his dad. Mustafa left a family of three young men and a woman who, far from demoralized, continued on. Because they were no longer a single family, the Leon Sedov Brigade was their family. The first martyr of the Battle of Aleppo was, Mustafa Abu Jumaa. And, far from stopping his children to continue fighting, far from stopping the young people with whom he spent all day, the fighting intensified and the doors of Aleppo began to open. The battle seemed to be won. The Brigade had managed to get a vote in an assembly, not to enter Aleppo by the path that the FSA ordered, which was through the working-class neighborhoods; the assembly voted that you had to enter where the regime would be hurt the most, you had to enter through the neighborhood of the rich, of the bourgeoisie, like Hamdaniya, the neighborhood that never had the power cut off, it was the only star that shone on the night of Aleppo. Why did they have electricity, did they have gas, did they have food, did they have parties? Because they had money! They were the masters of Syria! Abu al Bara'a and the Leon Sedov Brigade knew that if you entered through Hamdaniya, there were the resources to be able not only to take all of Aleppo, but to continue to Damascus and continue to Jerusalem. They had already threatened Abu al Baráa, they had gone to his house to knock on his door, they had already bombed the headquarters of the Lion Sedov Brigade, they had already killed his father and, even so, Abu al Baraa continued. We were at our (FLTI's, NT) premises in Buenos Aires. We were planning a meeting to see how, from there, we could show solidarity and send as much aid as possible for the combat that was taking place at the gates of Aleppo, where the destiny of the revolution was in the works of being practically defined. At that meeting I didn't see the missed call, I didn't see the photo that came to my cellphone. Once the meeting was over, I went to my cell phone and saw him, lying on a bed. It had been the same modus operandi: they left him alone in a watch and, a sniper gave him three shots. The difference is that he was young and survived those shots. But the problem was that later the FSA wanted to get rid of him and they sent him to Turkey in an ambulance that was practically a junk, to the worst clinic that existed, without the family being able to accompany him. One morning on October 24, 2016, Comrade Khero told me that Abu al Baraa's heart had stopped… but no, “No!” I told Khero, “his heart didn't stop, it keeps beating, that heart continues beating in the battles that take place in Syria to this day, it continues beating in the battles that occur in Chile, that sister revolution, continues beating in each and every one of us, in each worker, in each young person who stands up, continues to beat in each political prisoner for whom we have to fight to free him; that blood that that heart pumps, is the ink with which we wrote the newspaper La Verdad de los Oprimidos, it is the ink with which the two volumes of Syria Under Fire were printed; it is the will that Comrade Abu al Baraa imposed on each of us to move forward, despite everything, to move forward, under the same program: not a drop of confidence in the bourgeoisie; to unmask everyone those who speak in the name of the revolution and all they do is coming to expropriate it; to expropriate the expropriators of the poor people and rise up all over the world, because if we stay in one place, they defeat us. " That is why it is not necessary to say, or shout "Comrade Abu al Bara'a, Present here!", Because he is still with us today. I give the floor to the brother of our comrade Abu al Baraa, Comrade Khero.