From Syria
14/09/2013

Correspondent from the León Sedov Brigade, from the battlefields in Syria against Al Assad and imperialism

It is urgent to concentrate forces and march to Damascus for the insurrection to succeed that smashes Bashar, imperialism's Hound dog!

We have to conquer again the Coordination Committees of the fighting masses! Get out from the resistance the bourgeois generals of the FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra!

 

A strategic vision from the battlefield

After the re armament of Bashar's army thanks to the Shia bourgeoisie of the Iranian Ayatollahs de Irán and Hezbollah, under imperialist order, and allowed by the entire World Social Forum  -which caused the smashing of the masses around Damascus and the passing to the defensive of the combatants there where the regime does not control the terrain, a division was marked in Syria and every bourgeois faction controls a portion of territory and the masses in it; so the revolution is on the brink of being defeated. In one of these zones we are now, together with so many Syrian workers and exploited that live here. These zones are called "liberated zones" because in them the troops of the regime have been expelled. Here is the place where the revolution was fought from the start and the fight against the regime is still very live and well.

 

Everybody that is fighting here, however, knows that bourgeois factions as the FSA or Jabhat al-Nusra (a.k.a. Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham) have mounted from the top over the places to administer and keep in their hands a slice of the businesses in these territories. Therefore the name "Liberated zones" we keep between inverted commas; the bourgeois fronts have controlled this part of Syria, specifically preventing the masses from expropriating the local bourgeoisies. So the great dilemma for everyone of us that has fought the revolution is, before this situation, what can be done now?

“…but we know that we have enemies in front of us and behind us… the masses have been left atomized and dispersed in several molecules which it is necessary to regroup. It is necessary to coordinate the 75 frontlines that there are presently in Syria, so that we will be able to prepare an offensive over Damascus”

Although we still keep our weapons, the military frontline is completely controlled by the bourgeois factions that survey and keep their portion of the business, and sometimes, if they have not negotiated previously the division in due course, they scramble over it at gun point. And if there is any possibility of a profit, every faction asks for its share. For example, some day or other the food for the positions held by Bashar's army are intercepted and confiscated. There are 75 frontlines or no-man's lands in Syria now where Bashar's troops face the "liberated zones", or sometimes those troops are defending a position where they are encircled by the "rebels". Well, but where do these foodstuffs go, once they have been confiscated?
Had a local coordination body been organized, one that functioned with direct democracy for everyone of us that fought the revolution, the same would expropriate the cargo and decide how to distribute it. If the expropriation would have been made by mass organizations of the armed and fighting masses that were under the control of the above mentioned coordination body, all that is expropriated would be put to the service of the surviving of the Syrian exploited and for the war effort so the fighters could be well fed to win the war. Though, as there is no coordination body to achieve that, it is imperious to create toss coordination committees, to prevent the current situation, i.e., these expropriations seldom, or never, escape to the control of the bourgeois factions that dominate the "liberated zones". So the "booty" is divided among them: the generals, the chiefs of the brigades of the FSAm the "authorities" of the "Islamic State" or the "Victorious Front, etc. Very sporadically a small percentage of the food is left even for those that effected the operation.

Therefore among those that seek to fight a revolution and not to serve this or that bourgeois faction, the move is to organize far from the control of the latter, and so, from a somewhat isolated position make an operative to take some load of foodstuff or other useful things that were destined to Bashar's army, or apprehend some spy, some whistleblower or official of the regime, always with the thought put in finding some form of setting p again the organizations of the exploited. But when this happens, the bourgeois of the FSA or of Jabhat al Nusra always know about the blow and take the booty from us and divide it among them.

“It is necessary that all  of us that are doing this could be able to converge in setting up again the coordination committees out of the control of the FSA, of Jabhat al-Nusra and Co., functioning with direct democracy, in order to coordinate the battles.”

The martyrs and the imprisoned workers are "small change" in the negotiations between Al Assad the Dog and the FSA

Another front where the fight for the success of revolution is still live and well is the struggle for liberating the prisoners that are in the jails of the regime. The regime has armored them and surrounded with heavy weaponry, almost as much as the own house of Bashar. That's because those prisons are full of combatants of the revolution, the true ones, and there are lots of them, really, kept hostage for the regime to use them as pieces of negotiation.
At first, Bashar fusilladed some dozens of them weekly as a part of his plan to massacre his opponents. Later, he took however notice that they where more useful for him as prisoners, so that the masses stopped trying to take the prison by force: he threatened them to retaliate their attempts by killing the prisoners if they tried a frontal assault. and the masses want to liberate them because they are their brethren; but the bourgeois leaderships are not interested at all in their liberation, as they know they would not be able to control those freed combatants easily, they are hardened people and the majority of them do not respond to any chain of command, neither the FSA, al Nusra nor any other. On the other side,  the bourgeois factions use to negotiate with Bashar the supply of those prisons, for which they siege them from time to time. And thirdly, to liberate the prisoners those leaderships should have to risk being defeated when attacking a position so heavily defended, and they do not see any economic advantage in doing that.

This has been a constant attitude by the FSA all along the revolution: the regime's centers that are heavily guarded are not attacked;  at most they are besieged to serve as a basis for a negotiation; then, maybe there is some attack  as a part of the pressure to negotiate, or if the negotiation has ended, to let the masses believe they have an upper hand over Bashar troops or to control their drive to attack, the FSA either calls some group of rebels and asks them to attack Bashar troops, or leaves the affair in al-Nusra's hands, which this way takes some portion of the business for itself. And if the regime's troops advanced to disband the rebels and the FSA saw that the fight was an actual battle, those brave generals retreated and left the masses alone to be massacred by Bashar.
In spite of all those cowards, we still continue trying to liberate the prisoners and get away with those jails. Though we know that we have enemies in front of us and behind us. And once more we go over the subject of the masses not having their institutions to fight, and have been left atomized and dispersed in different places, which means the main problem is how to reunite  and organize them again.

“The Syrian masses are not yet prompt to surrender… Another of the frontlines where the fight for te victory of the revolution still lives is the fight for liberating the imprisoned revolutionists that have been taken hostage in Bashar's jails”

The mass resistance does not give up...

This is heroic…

The Syrian masses do not yet feel vanquished. They try to find a breakthrough. They seek to go on living and resisting, how to feed their families and themselves. They get some kind of day labor as drivers or recycling things or metals, or anywhere they find any kind of trade or production in order to get some money and buy bread for their beloved. They seek for any military action carried on by some brigade of they knowledge that is really fighting against the regime to join it for a while, and if it is possible take a portion of an expropriation made against Bashar's army so that they can keep it to share with relatives and mates. In order to survive they take anything they can, and a great part of what they get they give for the sake of organizing something to be able to go on fighting against the regime. It is necessary that all of us that are doing this could converge in setting up again the coordination committees out of the control of the FSA, of Jabhat al-Nusra and the rest, functioning with direct democracy to coordinate the battles.

Meanwhile the control and greediness of the bourgeois factions do not stop, indeed, they are growing daily. The conditions are worsening every day. There are people that fears the checkpoints of the FSA more than Bashar's planes bombings (which have not ceased) because in those checkpoints they are robbed of their belongings, only because the men of the FSA want them, and the persons are falsely accused to cover the theft and have no chance of defending themselves. From time to time the outrage accumulated bursts in the form of protests, sometimes small, taking only a family o two for personal or local affairs, sometimes the protests take whole towns or cities in the form of rallies or demonstrations. There have been large demonstrations in cities as al-Dana or al-Raqa, which were harshly repressed  by the local bourgeoisies, as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, which wherever it governs applies to the letter their version of the sharia, which in fact is a ferocious dictatorship and oppression against the exploited masses, that are submitted to a terrible exploitation (even worse than that they suffered under Bashar) rendering big profits to the bourgeois of that Front.
It is important to remark that all those movements were spontaneous, as the bourgeoisie of the Syrian National Coalition (Free Syrian army), the Sunni from Saudi arabia or Qatar (Jabhat al-Nusra), and also the Kurdish bourgeoisie have deviated themselves to destroy the coordination committees and the the armed organizations of the masses as independent bodies of their self-organization. In this the World social Forum had no small role, as it called to support either any of these different bourgeois factions or Bashar al-Assad; the latter was the gun pointing to the masses' temples for them to accept the control of the "opposition" bourgeoisie that was allegedly "fighting against him". But the main role of the WSF was to build a fence around the revolution so that the world working class does not intervene in what is and always was a chief arena of the global struggle of the exploited against the exploiters.

The masses have got it more clearly that the world reformist left
about Al Assad being the Hound Dog on account of Obama and imperialism to crush the revolution

As they are living the reality of the situation, the Syrian masses have not given up yet.  We can assert this because in the midst of our combat, we can see that it is not only against Bashar, but also against the US-French looming invasion.  Most of the exploited syrian masses from these zones think that if USA and its allies attack militarily basher from afar,  either by air or the sea, and destroy him posts, it's ok. But if USA and its allies dare put a single toe on Syrian land, we will fight against the invaders up to defeating and expelling them.

Nobody wants the attack of the US, because the people know that the US is their worst enemy. They know that if US imperialism attacks Bashar, the attack by US over us will be much worse. We know that if US launches drones and the Apache choppers, all these will attack mainly us, and we are preparing for that contingency. This is the same Libyan fighters had to live through, as each time that the militias advanced against Qadhafi's army and took significative positions, NATO would bomb them if it could intercept them and get to them with its warplanes; then it  would give excuses as "friendly fire", "errors", etc., to conceal that what they really wanted was preventing the masses to  go ahead and defeat their great agent, Qadhafi.

 

“…Nobody wants at all the attack of the US forces, because  everyone knows theta they are our main enemies. Every once knows that if the US troops attack Bashar, we will receive a worse attack. Furthermore all of us know that they are our main enemies, as they were in Iraq, where many Syrians went to fight against the US invasion.”

 

Moreover, we all have tired of hearing time and again the US government speech about the invasion of syria and  of helping  the Syrian people against the massacre: up to now the only thing we have seen is a complete inactivity from the part of US  though it knows to the minute everything that is happening here, which demonstrates that the help hasn't gone to the syrian people but to Bashar, he who is massacring us, because Bashar is, as Qadhafi was, also its man. That's why many Syrians believe that US in not going to help in any way.  In short, nobody believes the big lie of US and France the liberators".  

Actually, everybody knows that US is our main enemy, as it happened in Iraq, where many Syrians went to fight against the US invasion. Furthermore when we see that they continue saying that they  must find  a political negotiation as a solution, in the so called Geneva II, where US and russia met to tell Bashar to give in his chemical weapons. that is,  he can go on using his warplanes, cannons, missiles, grenades, rifles, etc., with which he has already murdered more that 300,000 Syrian exploited. It is very clear who is in whose side. That's why we reject the declarations of the SNC and the high general staff of the FSA, which support a direct invasion, and in fact they ask for it to be up to the end, quitting Bashar and putting instead themselves in the government, and they even abhor of the agreement with Russia about the chemical weapons.

 Any way, no matter what they resolve to do, we are always on guard, because what is very clear is that this has not yet ended. Furthermore when there are millions of Syrians that had to leave their homes and get a refuge in other places within Syria or maybe in other countries in refugee camps or living as outcasts. These consider this situation as "tempoary", and they hope to go back to recover their homes and all that was in them. Therefore every day, at every our, they try to look at news or hear news about what is happening in their cities of origin, their towns or villages or even neighborhoods, where they have their houses. And experience has shown that every time a way is open, a fight is developed in that zone,the regime leaves a control post and the area passes to the hands of the FSA, or is even left without a master for a time, they think that the possibility to go there or to fight there is in their hands and they go back to recover what is theirs, they go back to their homes to seek  their belongings, because it is all that they have in the world. Out of their homes they only have two or three things to survive in a state that they consider temporary. They are alway waiting for a break to go back to their homes an to what is theirs and to a dignified life in which they could have their family, a decent job, a decent house and a decent life. And when they go back they expropriate the bourgeois that colluded with the regime and had taken the things they had left  behind and got rich while they where suffering as refugees. they expropriate the collaborationist bourgeois either because they want to recover what was theirs and they were deprived of, or to take revenge for all those long years of oppression.

That's why imperialism knows that it is necessary for it to deal a transition for stabilizing the counterrevolution in Syria and in the rest of the region. On one hand it fears that if it embarks in a full action to take Bashar out of  the stage and put another bourgeois faction in his place there is a risk that the masses resume their combat when they go back to their homes and begin to recover everything and so they escape from the control of the FSA, Jabhat al-Nusra, etc. But imperialism also knows that Bashar cannot remain in a transitional government, because his sole presence in power would make the masses deny to give up. Imperialism has to force everyone to make concessions, an agreement and a transition where all the bourgeois factions seal a deal and get together against the masses. the military attack (if it comes) or at least the threat of it that is presently so spoken about serves the end of limiting the strength of and obliging each bourgeois faction to agree in a covenant, and at the same time to discipline the masses there where Bashar's bombs cannot. We know that for each US-French attack against Bashar there will be 100 attacks against the masses. As a proof, we know that these last days, when the ere threat of US invasion has increased considerably the attacks by Basshar.

“… The masses go back to their homes to find out what is theirs from the refugee camps, because that is all they have in the world… and when they go back, they expropriate all the bourgeois that  got rich collaborating with the regime, while they were not there, and in that way the recover what was taken from them…"

But the masses, which are armed, are not yet bent to surrender. they go on trying to find a breakthrough. It is necessary to go back to the coordination committees and the armed militias out of the control of the local bourgeoisies, so that we can expel every invader of the Syrian soil, but for that, it is necessary to march to Damascus determinedly to theow down the regime. It is necessary that the capital city surrenders, that is, that Bashar's stronghold surrender, because Bashar is the great agent (and one of the main ones) of the US in Syria. The revolution is in danger. Among every one that is seeking how to organize the combat, it is necessary to achieve this organization with the methodology of the working class, going forward to destroy the regime, expropriating the bourgeoisie in the road to winning the war and recover what belongs to us, opening the way to the homes and the belongings of the refugees that have lost everything. This is the way of keeping fidgeting this revolution: with the masses coming back for what is theirs, marching to Damascus, organized independently and armed.

 

Correspondent, from the Leon Sedov Brigade
(Sevian al-Laith)