October 24th, 2021

“We pay tribute to Abu Al Baraa, a construction worker who had taken some subjects at the university, who prayed, and who became a Trotskyist; who was convinced of the battle for the program of the Fourth International and who gave his life to break the siege of Aleppo because he knew it was the first step to reach Palestine”

Good afternoon comrades. 
This is a very difficult day for those of us who were side by side with Abu Al Baraa.
Abu Al Baraa was a young worker from the city of Aleppo, a Syrian and a Muslim, like hundreds of thousands in the Middle East. We had the honor of meeting them and knowing him particularly, after having been part of that huge revolutionary tide of young people that rose up throughout the Middle East and overthrew the pro-imperialist governments of Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak or Ben Ali. The success of their revolution in Syria was for those workers a question of life and death. It’s as part of that revolutionary tide that we arrived in the city of Aleppo in 2012.

 A comrade once told me that revolutionaries always recognize each other on the front lines. And it was so.  It was in 2012, in the Aleppo uprising, that we recognized ourselves with Abu Al Baraa as comrades, comrades and revolutionaries. At that moment we began a huge journey that today, 10 years after the start of the Syrian revolution, isn’t over yet. The comrade knew how to fight the best and fiercest battles with us against the Bashar regime. But he also knew how to be perceptive and realized that it wasn’t enough to raise the rifle against the enemy in front. A political battle had to be fought because of those who were riding on that revolution to destroy it.

It was thus that in the heat of the battles we were fighting, with bullets whizzing in our ears, we always had a moment to discuss the politics we had to carry out and how to get rid of that filth of the Sunni bourgeoisie that was riding on the victory of the young revolutionaries in Syria and did nothing but betray the revolution little by little. The further the young revolutionaries advanced, the more the bullets that were fired from behind not only by the Sunni bourgeoisie, but also by radical Islamism, which, with the banners of anti-imperialism, were rearing their heads to take and snatch from that revolution the best of the vanguard and put it in a trap in which they would end up defeated, assassinated or co-opted by treacherous leaderships and generals as disgusting as Bashar's.

Abu Al Baraa was approached by the program of the revolution. We began to suggest that the bourgeoisie should be expropriated. There was no other way out. Abu Al Baraa in the battle front realized that the ammunition was not enough, that we were short on fuel and that we had to feed ourselves at the front. We saw no other option but to expropriate the Shiite, Alawite and Kurdish bourgeoisie, which was already beginning to do juicy deals with all the blood of the fallen.

The fundamental axis of our program was also -and Abu Al Baraa always said this- to coordinate all the combatants on the planet, because the Syrian revolution was one more link in a chain of revolutions throughout the Middle East. Abu Al Baraa was insightful and realized that his fellow workers were also in the imperialist countries, that there were treacherous leftist leaderships that had taken it upon themselves to separate the workers of the Middle East from the workers of the imperialist countries, accusing him and so many other comrades of "jihadists", "terrorists" or "barbarians".

As the revolution progressed, we consolidated our revolutionary nucleus. Abu Al Baraa was very clever in declaring that he was exchanging the Syrian revolution for an international center, an international revolutionary party that coordinates all the struggles and gives those of us who were on the battlefield the vision that we so badly needed in order to achieve victory. He knew that we were fighting not only against Bashar, but also against the imperialist powers like the United States and France, NATO, Turkey, Iran and the Hezbollah militias.  Russia entered the battlefield and Abu al Baraa did not loosen his grip in the fight.

We had the honor of being interlocutors of the program of the Fourth International. We had the honor of passing on the lessons of Spain from the 1930s and, although it seemed an impossible mission, we were able to pass the Transitional Program inside Syria under a radical Islamism that controlled all areas, and we clandestinely studied it with all comrades. That was the Leon Sedov Brigade.

 Abu al Baraa proposed to leave Syria to form an international center in Turkey and collaborate -as he did- so that we could systematize the different experiences and conclusions in a book that we were finally able to present at the National Library of Argentina in 2015, under the title "Syria Under Fire: A Bloody Revolution".  Proudly, Abu Al Baraa showed this book to all the comrades of the Leon Sedov Brigade.  When radical Islamism came to give sermons and after those sheikhs with long beards, as long as their lies, retired, Abu Al Baraa made the comrades of the Leon Sedov Brigade watch videos about the Russian Revolution, about Trotsky in the battle front. Thus he raised the combat morale of the comrades.

Abu Al Baraa changed his family to come to Latin America to confront, side by side, together with us, this scourge of the LIT-CI and the reformist left, who walked the bourgeois generals of the FSA throughout Latin America saying they were the revolutionary subject that everyone had to support inside Syria, while another sector of the left supported Bashar calling him “anti-imperialist”.
As part of the same team and everything voted in an assembly, as the Brigade was managed, with revocable leaders, it was resolved that a part of that team would travel to Greece. We had to catch up with what Abu Al Baraa was doing in there. While the bullets he was receiving from all fronts buzzed in his ears, we went to Greece to help the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. We accompanied the struggle of the refugees and culminated in Idomeni, in a mobilization that brought together more than 10 thousand people, facing battles with the Macedonian and Greek police, who guarded the borders so that the refugees stay there and die of hunger.

We fight in Spain and France. We traveled the world reaching Japan. Abu Al Baraa proudly displayed all those political battles within Syria. And that was where the final battle was fought. It was there that imperialism wanted to chastise all the revolutionary youth of the Middle East who had dared to sweep away the control devices that imperialism itself had imposed on the region.

A siege had been imposed on Aleppo in 2016, the city that had seen Abu Al Baraa grow up with his brothers, his family, a young man like any other, a construction worker who had taken some subjects in the university, who used to kneel down and touch the soil five times a day with his head to pray, and that he was now a Trotskyist, who was convinced that breaking the siege of Aleppo was the first step towards reaching Palestine. Abu Al Baraa's father joined this fight under this same program, when he suggested that they should defend the factory that they had expropriated in 2016. They put a cross on his head and a sniper ended his life.
Still Abu Al Baraa went ahead. He was threatened several times by those “Jacobins” from the FSA. They went to Abu Al Baraa's house to tell him "you stay quiet or we will kill you." Bashar and Russia bombed the house where the Leon Sedov Brigade operated.

And yet Abu Al Baraa didn’t lower his arms. He continued to organize the left wing. They marched into the arsenals to prevent the Sunni FSA bourgeoisie and the Islamic bourgeoisies from hoarding arms. They sought to break the siege of Aleppo by passing through one of the richest neighborhoods in that area: the Hamdaniya neighborhood, where Abu Al Baraa led more than 500 young revolutionaries entering the area of ​​those bourgeois who in 5 years of revolution had not had a single lamp burn out while all of Syria that was under siege by Bashar had to cope with 2 hours of light a day. NATO and the coalition didn’t hesitate to bomb those young comrades. Abu Al Baraa was part of that tide that gave their life to liberate his native Aleppo.

One fateful morning he had to succumb to sniper bullets. He had been left still alive. He was transferred to a hospital in Turkey. And there, what Russia started with its sniper was finished by the Sunni bourgeoisie of the FSA.

We pay tribute to that young man, who on October 24, 2016 closed his eyes, but began to pump blood everywhere. That young man who with his example teaches us and illuminates the way to move forward. That young man who left in our hands the legacy of the newspaper "The Truth of the Oppressed." That young man who knew how to denounce the Kurdish PKK when it made the first counterrevolutionary pact within Syria, cutting the spinal cord of that enormous revolution in half. That young man with whom we drew the conclusions from that revolution and others and put them at the service of all combats. That young man who showed solidarity with the prisoners of Las Heras. That young man who had contact with the anarchist prisoners, who brought us closer to those prisoners with whom we fought a fierce battle in Greece and we were even able to publish a book in common. That young Abu Al Baraa whom we want to remember today as a combatant, as a revolutionary, as a friend, as a brother and as a human being. That is the legacy that he leaves us, for which we are going to die as he did, to carry it on. Internationalism and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie were our axes and what we have to carry forward today with more strength than ever.