Syria: the tyrant is gone, the bourgeois and imperialist order remains

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The flight of Bashar al-Assad, who has taken refuge in Moscow with his family, was greeted in Syria's main cities by enthusiastic crowds cheering the fall of this bloody figure whose regime is responsible for their suffering and misery.

The Assads, father and son, maintained their so-called “progressive” power with an iron fist, never backing down from the most brutal repression, even before the civil war broke out. The civil war was accompanied by terrible destruction caused by the army, and it claimed almost 600,000 victims in 13 years. Of a population estimated at around 23 million, over 13 million were forced to flee their homes to seek refuge in other regions or abroad - 7 million, including 4 million in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon, 1 million in Europe, etc. - 100 to 200,000 were imprisoned in the regime's infamous jails, where they were subjected to ill-treatment, torture, rape and where summary executions were frequent. It's easy to understand the almost general jubilation, with the exception of the privileged classes, at the fall of such a regime…

On the wave of the “Arab Springs”, large-scale movements for “democratic change” broke out in Syria in 2011. But the peaceful protest against the regime was violently and bloodily repressed by the police and security forces (the sinister Mukhabarats), resulting in over 2,500 deaths in 6 months. Despite the savagery of the repression, the Syrian authorities were unable to defeat an opposition that had reacted by forming armed groups. With the rebels advancing as far as the Damascus suburbs, the regime was in increasing difficulty ; but it was saved by the intervention of the Russian air force, Lebanese Hezbollah militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. For their part, the rebel forces divided into rival “brigades”, often supported and armed by foreign countries (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, USA), while the traditional opposition parties, united in the Syrian National Council, had demonstrated their complete impotence. Among the rebel groups, “jihadist” elements gained increasing prominence, particularly those that would go on to form the “Islamic State” (ISIS.), which by summer 2014 had spread across much of Iraq and Syria. An International Coalition was then set up under the aegis of the United States to combat ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Comprising Arab and European countries, this coalition was joined the following year (2015) by Turkey after its attempts to reach an agreement with the Islamic State failed, while Russia and Iran claimed to be fighting the latter by supporting the Damascus government.

While the Coalition's military actions in Syria consisted mainly of aerial bombardments, nearly 2,000 American soldiers and dozens of French and British commandos were present on the ground to support Kurdish fighting forces (Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF). Under the impact of these combined attacks ISIS gradually retreated until, in October 2017, it lost almost all its last strongholds in northern Syria and in particular its “capital”, Rakka, conquered by the SDF. For their part, the fading rebel brigades agreed to sign a ceasefire with Damascus; but talks organized in Astana (Kazakhstan) by Russia with the participation of Turkey and Iran between the government and 9 rebel organizations failed to produce an agreement, and fighting continued into 2018 (with Western bombing after a chemical attack on the last rebel zone on the outskirts of Damascus). The rebels were now only concentrated in the Idlib region in northwestern Syria. Finally, in December 2018, the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of American troops, with the exception of a contingent of around a thousand soldiers in the oil-producing regions. In 2020, the Syrian army, backed by Russian aircraft, attempted to reconquer Idlib province, causing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants to flee and provoking clashes with Turkish troops before a ceasefire froze the situation. Since then, fighting had virtually ceased in the country, with Damascus controlling around 70% of Syria, the SDF 20%, and the rest being under the domination of Turkish-linked groups and Islamist rebels.

This rapid review of the main stages of the civil war shows the decisive role played by imperialist states, large and small, in the evolution of the Syrian crisis. The presence of an authentically proletarian force, i.e. a genuine revolutionary communist party (unlike the so-called Syrian “communist” party, whose various fractions were subservient to the government), would have made it possible to try to give a class orientation to the revolt by uniting the disinherited masses against not just one man or one clan, but against the capitalist system itself; its absence left the field open to popular and democratic petty-bourgeois orientations corresponding to the inter-class nature of the rebellion; these led to the rallying of religious and reactionary bourgeois forces, inevitably in search of foreign sponsors to resist the regime's violence and carve out a fiefdom for themselves based on “ethnic”, clan or religious divisions.

Foreign intervention did not cease with the rebel blitzkrieg that led to the overthrow of power in Damascus. Syria, which occupies a strategic position in the Middle East, has always been, and still is, at the crossroads of the interests and rivalries of great and not-so-great powers.

The Erdogan government has made no secret of its support for the rebels, which include groups directly linked to the Turkish state grouped under the umbrella of the “Syrian National Army” (SNA). Fighting took place between the SNA and the Kurdish SDF, with the aim of creating a “buffer zone” under the control of the Turkish army; the SDF, supported by the US air force, took advantage of the rebel offensive to seize new territories; Israel did not wait before occupying strategic zones on Syrian territory and unleashing an intense bombing campaign to destroy the installations and equipment of the Syrian army, air force and fleet: the aim was to prevent a future regime in Damascus from having the military means to stand up to it; the Americans likewise announced that they had “massively” struck dozens of targets in the center of the country the day after Assad's fall, officially to prevent the return of ISIS; and finally, the Russians contacted the rebel leaders they had been bombing a few days before, in an attempt to save their bases in Syria, which are of great importance to them, including for their operations in Africa...

The government's rapid and unexpected downfall can be explained by the fact that its Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies were no longer in a position to provide significant support: Russia was occupied by the war in Ukraine, Hezbollah by the war in Lebanon, and Israeli bombardments had seriously weakened the Iranian military presence in Syria. Left to face the rebels alone, the Syrian army was no longer able to provide serious military resistance: poorly fed, poorly paid, demoralized and sometimes forcibly conscripted, the soldiers had no desire to die in defense of the regime.

The main force among the victorious rebels is Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that emerged from the Al-Nusra Front, one of the most powerful jihadist organizations, initially linked to the Islamic State, before fighting it and joining Al-Qaeda (the organization founded by Bin Laden), from which it finally split in 2016. Founded in 2017 by the merger of the Al-Nusra Front with other Islamist organizations, HTS, which had not been invited to the Astana negotiations because it was considered too radical, would become the dominant organization in Idlib province, where it would set up a quasi-state institution, the “Syrian Salvation Government”, responsible for administering the region. The Western press gave the SSG credit for not being as brutal as the Islamic State, nor for committing exactions against minorities like the Syrian National Army: in fact, the SSG behaved like a classic reactionary bourgeois government based on the Islamic religion and not hesitating to repress its opponents.

As soon as he arrived in Damascus, HTS showed that he intended to promote a government of the same type for Syria. He made contact with the Prime Minister of the Bashar al-Assad government, which he had been fighting until now, assured that he did not want to touch the regime's structures (apart from the security bodies) and appointed members of the SSG as prime ministers and ministers of a provisional “transitional government”.

The country's economic situation is catastrophic: according to the World Bank, GDP has fallen by over 80% since 2010, with industrial and agricultural production collapsing (only exports of the locally-produced drug captagon were flourishing, exceeding all legal exports); inflation was, according to official figures, over 120%; unemployment was estimated at over 60%, and even 90% among young people. As a result, 95% of the population was living below the poverty line...

In these conditions, any bourgeois power in Damascus has no other solution to get the economy moving again than to rely on the regime's still standing structures to extort surplus value from the proletarians while imposing fear of authority, and attract foreign investment by demonstrating its ability to maintain order. The media talk a lot about a “peaceful transition”, the establishment of genuine democracy in Syria, etc., but the future will inevitably be one of exploitation, violence and repression.

Proletarians don't need a mendacious democracy that leaves bourgeois domination intact; they need to destroy the dictatorial power structures of the al-Assad clan and the entire bourgeois state from top to bottom, in order to establish their own dictatorship, which is essential if capitalism is to be uprooted. This requires the emergence and development of the class struggle, and the formation of a class, communist and international party to lead this struggle right up to the revolution and after its victory. Unfortunately, such a perspective is not immediate. The fears expressed by imperialism about the “chaos” that the fall of the al-Assad regime in Damascus could bring, or the rallying to the rebels of many government forces, including from the Ba'ath party which has ruled the country for 60 years, testify to the compactness of the counter-revolutionary and anti-proletarian front, despite the armed clashes that have pitted them against each other. Paraphrasing what Marx wrote at the time of the Paris Commune, we can say that all these groups, parties and governments are united against the proletariat; they do not intend to leave any space for the emergence of movements challenging the bourgeois order. The current euphoria cannot hide the reality for long: Syrian proletarians face enemies just as implacable as the Assad clan, and they will have to fight against them, foot to foot, without letting democratic illusions or religious, community or national divisions stop them.

The tyrant has been overthrown, but what remains is the bourgeois and imperialist order, which must be overthrown in union with proletarians of all countries!

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