Bourgeois propaganda about Syria

  We publish here a letter from a close sympathiser, which we think is a very lucid denunciation of the current campaign about the 'good news' coming from Syria with the fall of the Assad regime - a denunciation based on the ICC's position on the decomposition of capitalism and the slide into military chaos.

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….Peace and goodwill on earth may have to wait a little longer.

In Syria, the lying talk of a ‘peaceful transition’ following the abrupt downfall of the Assad regime is just desert dust thrown up to confuse and disorient.

Similarly, the pleas to ‘maintain the territorial integrity’ of the Syrian nation state which has seen 12 million of its citizens forcibly displaced since 2011, are belied by the frenzy of competing imperialist sharks and their proxies attempting to feed off the decaying corpse of the country or salvaging what they can of their prior possessions there.

Every man for himself!

Chaos, war, famine, disease, mass movements of refugees destabilising the status quo across the Middle East, Africa, Europe and beyond. This is how the first quarter of the 21st century ends as it began … only much worse!

The partial takeover of Syria by the forces of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – the Sunni ‘rebel alliance’ who were yesterday’s outlawed Jihadist Terrorists rebranded and resurrected as today’s saviours of Syria and role model for Islamists and moderates of all stripes – has brought no relief for the population inside Syria or anywhere else.

Before the vapour trails of the plane carrying the fleeing rat Assad from Damascus to his nest in Moscow had melted in the sky and while some began to celebrate the ‘liberation’ of the country:

• “The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) said on Sunday [December 8] that it had struck more than 75 targets, including ISIL (ISIS) leaders, operatives and camps, to ensure that the armed group does not take advantage of the end of al-Assad’s rule.” (Aljazeera website). This ‘action’, this rain of fire and steel from the sky, claimed “no civilian casualties”, the US military said.
• “The Israeli military on Tuesday [December 10] said it had carried out about 480 strikes across the country over the past two days, hitting most of Syria’s strategic weapon stockpiles, while Defence Minister Israel Katz said the Israeli navy had destroyed the Syrian fleet (my emphasis) overnight... Of the 480 strikes carried out by the Israeli Air Force, about 350 were manned aircraft strikes targeting airfields, anti-aircraft batteries, missiles, drones, fighter jets, tanks and weapon production sites in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia and Palmyra, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said. The rest of the strikes were in support of ground operations that targeted weapons depots, military structures, launchers and firing positions.” (CNN website, December 11). The ‘ground operations’ mentioned here include an extension of the so-called buffer zone between Israel and Syria and a further Israeli incursion into Syria to create a “security zone free of heavy strategic weapons and terrorist infrastructures” in southern Syria, “beyond the buffer zone.” A land-grab, in other words. Some reports (unverified at the time of writing) claimed Israeli tanks were within 15.5 miles of Damascus.
• “Fighters with the Syrian National Army (SNA), a rebel group supported by Turkey, crossed the Euphrates in the direction of Kobane under the protection of Turkish jets. Turkey’s military intelligence agency also said it had destroyed 12 military trucks, two tanks and ammunition stores after they fell into the hands of the YPG, a Kurdish militia. Under president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has sought to dismantle Kurdish footholds in Syria. Mr Erdogan views Rojava, the autonomous region carved out of the Assad regime’s control in 2012, as a safe haven for anti-Turkish terrorists.” (Daily Telegraph, December 10). These ‘Kurdish footholds’ are supported by the US, Israel and the UK and police thousands of captured ISIS (Islamic State) fighters and their families in virtual concentration camps. Thus, Turkey’s action pits it against its NATO allies. In October, Turkey launched airstrikes against suspected Kurdish militant targets in Syria and Iraq after blaming the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) for a deadly attack on the headquarters of the Turkish national aerospace company that killed five people. In fact, “Turkey carried out more than 100 attacks between October 2019 and January 2024 on oil fields, gas facilities and power stations in the Kurdish-held Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)”, according to data collated by the BBC World Service. These Turkish air strikes in drought-struck north-east Syria “have cut off access to electricity and water for more than a million people, in what experts say may be a violation of international law… The attacks have added to the humanitarian crisis in a region reeling from a years-long civil war and four years of extreme drought exacerbated by climate change.” (BBC News website, 19 November 2024).

Everyone participates in the picking of the decomposing corpse. None planned it. No one will benefit from it. The working class will pay for it.

If Iran (whose now-weakened Hezbollah forces in Lebanon had supported Assad) and Russia (without whose arms and air strikes Assad would have fallen after his brutal suppression of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in 2011 and the subsequent civil war) are the obvious losers in recent events (Russia fears for the security of its naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean coast - it anchored its fleet offshore following Assad’s fall and flight - and its Khmeimim Air Base near the port city of Latakia; Iran will find it harder to filter supplies through Syria to the Hezbollah rump in Lebanon), no one nation state can claim ‘victory’.

Just as the US didn’t want to see – yet failed to prevent – the escalation and spread of war in the Mideast after October 7, 2023, the fall of Assad and the rise of the ‘Terrorist’, ex-Al Qaeda, HTS provides little solace, threatening further instability. Israel was relatively content with a weakened Assad in place, and while it has taken the opportunity to destroy weaponry and bases of use to present and future adversaries, it too will not regard the either the HTS’s extension (The Taliban was the first to congratulate it, followed by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas) nor Turkey’s attacks on the Kurds, with any kind of glee. And for Turkey, its actions have as we’ve seen, brought it into conflict with those of its erstwhile allies, including the US, which has issued dark ‘warnings’ to Ankara…

It's another fine mess. A gangsters’ paradise. A free-for-all, not a bloc-building exercise regrouping allies and foes for a titanic third world war clash – the final countdown - as so much of the proletarian milieu appears to think (as far as it thinks).

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s speech in Brussels on Thursday December 12 highlighted the “critical need” to ramp up defence spending and defence production in ‘an increasingly turbulent security environment’, calling on NATO members and allies to “shift to a wartime mindset and turbo charge our defence production and defence spending.” In GB, ex-military chiefs have raised the spectre of conscription. But there’s no guarantee that this weaponry, these armies, won’t in future be turned against each other or their proxies, as in northern Syria today. And the arrival of the Trump administration threatens only to add to the chaos of what passes for international relations and solidarity.

No: today Syria demonstrates in sad spades, in bodies and broken dreams, a further step in the decomposition of the capitalist social order under the irreparable pressure of the global economic crisis, of human-enabled climate catastrophe, both expressed through the irrational and unbridled growth of militarism. Capitalism is war!

While the media toured Assad’s notorious torture prisons, feeding off grief and the hunt for the thousands of ‘disappeared’, on the sidelines of a closed-door UN security council meeting on Monday, Syria’s UN ambassador, Koussay Aldahhak, said: “Syria now is witnessing a new era of change, a new historical phase of its history and Syrians are looking forward for establishing a state of freedom, equality, rule of law, democracy.” (The Guardian, Tuesday December 10). More desert dust and pious hopes. “The security council appeared united on the need to preserve Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and will work on a joint statement in the coming days, US and Russian diplomats said after the meeting,” the report continued. But here’s the nub of the situation: “‘No one expected the Syrian forces to fall like a house of cards, and it took a lot of people by surprise,’ US ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said. ‘It’s a very fluid situation’”. For ‘fluid’ read chaotic, uncontrollable, unpredictable… Only more conflict is certain.

Conflict as in Gaza, on the West Bank, in Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, Nigeria, Libya, Ukraine: all this war, all these arms, all this production of the means of destruction; everywhere increases in military budgets as the infrastructure in nation after nation falls into disrepair, and production is interrupted by flood and fire; as millions are forced at the point of a gun or starvation to uproot in search of sustenance... of life.

And the global producer class, the proletariat, the exploited class of capitalism whose collective labour provides the surplus value on which the whole system feeds, also remains the only true “revolutionary” sector in this society, the real “rebels” in this mix, the only historic force with a past of struggle and a vision and programme for the future. One way or another, the modern, international proletariat still holds humanity’s future in its collective hands. It’s struggles against this decaying social order haven’t been extinguished.

So, season’s greetings, comrades: as products of and active factors in the proletarian struggle, your clarity and determination to uphold the principles of the Communist Left are more necessary than ever.

Fraternally, KT
December 12, 2024