On November 27, the terrorist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS), with the direct backing of the Turkish army and the Israeli air force, and the indirect backing of US imperialism, launched a military offensive in Syria. It advanced rapidly. By December 8 the HTS had seized power in Syria’s capital Damascus. Syria has for over a decade been under partial occupation by US imperialism, Turkey, and other ultra-reactionary forces in its north, south and east; now even the central region has come under communal fascist rule, with the backing of imperialist powers.
The significance of this grave development is being distorted by all manner of political forces worldwide. As an essential part of that distortion, the significance of what went before this is being distorted or obliterated: namely, that the people of Syria, under the leadership of Bashar al-Assad, put up resistance for 13 years against imperialist intervention, invasion and occupation, and defended a secular, independent Syria. We must not let that history be forgotten, undermined, or denigrated, even if various forces today are eager to normalise the status of the new rulers of Syria.
Every day a new story is circulated. It does not matter that these stories keep getting exposed; they serve their purpose for the days, or even hours, that they are in circulation: Bashar wants to return to his old profession of opthalmology. Asma al-Assad wants to divorce Bashar and return to London. Bashar refused offers of help from the Iranians; even Putin could not save Bashar if he did not want to save himself. Bashar gave Israel the coordinates of Syria’s weapons depots in exchange for safe passage out of the country. “Bashar al-Assad left his country so secretively that some of his aides remained in the palace hours after he had left, waiting for a speech that never came, the insider said.” Bashar has released a capitulationist statement, a sort of resigned farewell, on the Syrian government’s Telegram channel, a full week after his departure. And so on. No doubt many more stories are in the pipeline.
All this while, we have not heard from Bashar himself (there is no proof of the authorship of the Telegram statement; moreover, the statement appears to have been taken down from the channel). The Russians, it is true, have stated that Bashar left of his own accord, and that he is taking refuge in Moscow. However, the Russians’ statements can hardly be taken on faith. In a dramatic about-face, Putin now sees the HTS in a positive light: He claims they have undergone a change of heart and are no longer terrorist. Coincidentally, the Russians are now hopeful of striking a deal with the new regime to retain their naval base in Syria. It would be inconvenient for the Russians today if Bashar were at liberty.
Frankly, we do not know whether Bashar left Syria voluntarily, or was kidnapped by the Russians; whether he is now at liberty or forcibly confined; and whether his family members are at liberty. Commentators who claim to know, but advance no evidence, should be taken with a large dose of salt.
The following article first addresses some of the disinformation being peddled about Syria. It then proceeds to the question: what stand should we take about the developments in Syria?
Disinformation
The standard media account of Syria’s recent history follows a well-established template, used for Milosevic in Serbia, Gaddafi in Libya, and so many leaders whom US imperialism wishes to get out of the way. The ingredients are familiar.
(1) Assad was a brutal dictator guilty of war crimes.
(2) He lived in opulence as his people starved. The Assad family accumulated a vast personal fortune. (Pictures are circulating of what are said to be Assad’s personal palaces and luxury cars.)
(3) The Assad government enjoyed virtually no popular support.
(4) Assad’s brutal treatment of the spontaneous, peaceful protests of 2011 forced the opposition to turn to arms.
(5) Syria’s jails under Assad were horrific dungeons and torture chambers, teeming with hundreds of thousands of innocent dissenters.
(6) The Syrian economy is in a catastrophic state due to its being ‘closed to the world’ and under ‘state control’.
(7) It was largely due to Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah that Assad could hold on to power.
(8) Those who have seized power now in Damascus are ‘Syrian rebels’ or ‘opposition forces’.
(9) Virtually the entire population is celebrating the fall of the Assad regime (the usual pictures are doing the rounds of smashed photos of Bashar al-Assad and decapitated statues of his father Hafez al-Assad); and so on, ad nauseam.
This disinformation is routinely purveyed by CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, and the like. What is significant is that several commentators marketing themselves as alternatives to the corporate media are doing so, too. Their accounts differ from the CNN-BBC-NYT accounts in some respects. For instance, while the CNN-BBC-NYT celebrate the installation of the HTS, those claiming to be ‘alternatives’ to the western media appear critical of the HTS. But all appear united on one point: denigration of Assad and his rule.
Why should this matter? Some commentators declare that the Assad era is a closed chapter; there is no point in discussing it anymore, they are eager to move on. That, however, is politically indefensible, since we can only understand the present with reference to history. Moreover, the imperialists and various reactionaries do not treat the past as a closed chapter. They generate fake history continuously, in order to justify what they are doing in the present. Regarding Syria, what is at stake in the historical verdict on an individual, Bashar al-Assad, is not just the reputation of that individual; and the imperialists are perfectly aware of this.
By discrediting the actually existing alternative to rule by the imperialists and domestic reactionaries, such commentary, in effect, prepares people mentally to submit to the new rulers and imperialism. This submission is sweetened with expressions such as ‘giving the new government time’, ‘holding them to their assurances’, and similar expressions of ideological disarmament.
First, let us dispense with some of the propaganda. There are many who are better qualified than we are to do such exposures, and some have been doing this work heroically over many years. Nevertheless, it is worth reiterating a few points, and making a few additional ones, especially since many materials presenting a view contrary to imperialist propaganda have become more difficult to access on the internet, and are becoming increasingly so.
‘War crimes’
(1.) Regarding Assad’s alleged war crimes, let us take, as an instance, just the one that is most widely propagated: the charge that he used chemical weapons. It was the Syrian government that wrote to the United Nations on March 19, 2013 alleging the use of chemical weapons by terrorist groups against the Syrian army at Khan al Assal earlier the same day. The following day, i.e., on March 20, 2013, it requested the UN to carry out an impartial investigation of the event. It was only after this request that the governments of the UK, France and the US attempted to turn this allegation on its head, and charged the Syrian government with the use of chemical weapons.
The UN mission did find evidence of use of chemical weapons at five places, but, no doubt under intense political pressure, it did not state who had carried out these attacks. However, the evidence points to the terrorist groups having carried out these attacks, since, in the majority of these sites, Syrian army soldiers were victims of the attacks. In the international media, it is virtually impossible to find mention of these two facts, namely, that the Syrian government had first requested the investigation, and that the victims were Syrian soldiers.
It is clear that the terrorist groups possessed chemical weapons. The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1968, the horrors at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and other major stories) reported that US intelligence knew that the Al-Nusra front possessed sarin gas, the nerve agent that the UN mission had concluded was used in the chemical attacks. In a follow-up article, Hersh provided evidence that a chemical attack at Ghouta on August 21, 2013, had been staged by the ‘rebels’ in order to create a case for international military intervention against Assad. But Hersh’s revelations were not reported in the major media outlets.
On April 7, 2018, the ‘rebels’ claimed that the Assad regime had killed 43 people in a chlorine gas attack in Douma, near Damascus. The United States, Britain and France promptly launched airstrikes on Damascus as punishment for the Douma incident. However, the findings of an eight-member team of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which collected samples at the Douma site, contradicted the US claims, implying that the event had been staged by the opposition forces. The top management of the OPCW then suppressed the original report, and produced a doctored version in order to point a finger at the Assad government. When a Newsweek reporter tried to publish the story of the suppressed report, it was blocked by senior editors at the magazine. (The reporter resigned, and published a detailed exposé.)
The extent of manipulation and falsehood with regard to the question of chemical weapons indicates that the western propaganda machinery was unable to produce more reliable evidence of atrocities by the Assad government, beyond the suffering that all wars bring.
Assad’s wealth
(2.) The estimates of the Assad family wealth quoted in the media were made by the US State Department, which has avowedly been trying to overthrow Assad for the last 12 years. The State Department admits the “difficulty” in estimating the Assad family’s net worth, and does not provide the actual calculations in the publicly available main text of the report, but in a ‘classified’ annex to it. Statements such as “NGO reporting and media sources assess that Bashar and Asma Assad exert significant influence over much of Syria’s wealth” are vague in the extreme. It appears that Asma Assad’s charitable and developmental activities too are taken as her exerting “increasing influence over Syria’s economy”, and that they are taken into account in calculating her wealth.
Even if we assume that the pictures of Assad’s residences circulating in the media are authentic, there is no evidence of opulence in any of the photos. Some images of ‘palaces’ displayed in the media are typical of official workspaces, with meeting rooms, desks and documents. Indeed, the New York Times reports that “While Mr. al-Assad had his pick of palaces to use for official business, he lived with his wife and three children in a four-story modernist villa surrounded by palm trees and fountains in the upscale Damascus neighborhood of al-Maliki,” where neighbours report that “Mr. al-Assad and his family were quiet”. And while CNN claims that the Assad family accumulated Lamborghini cars, local people told the western press that the Assad family actually drove ordinary cars. Perhaps, as the Washington Post claims, this was to “cultivate a modest image.” In that he appears to have been very unlike the presidents of most countries, such as those of the US.
Popular support for Assad
(3.) In a single voice, the media portray the Assad government as widely despised by Syrians. Many accounts imply that, since Assad was of the Alawi faith, a small minority in Syria, he would be opposed by Sunnis, who are the overwhelming majority. However, this presumption that people are inherently communal-sectarian is questionable, and it is difficult to find any concrete evidence in support of it. Syria had long been a secular republic, and people clearly wanted it to remain so.
As an indicator of the extent of popular support for the Assad government, let us ignore the large-scale participation of Syrians in elections held by the government, since these are portrayed by the western media as stage-managed.[1] Instead, let us look at information sources which are pro-US or hostile to Assad. Before the war, the US State Department assessment was that “The Asad regime… has held power longer than any other Syrian government since independence; its survival is due partly to a strong desire for stability and the regime’s success in giving groups such as religious minorities and peasant farmers a stake in society.”
A poll conducted by a Qatar foundation in 2012, after the outbreak of ‘insurgency’ in Syria, found that most Syrians were in favour of Assad continuing as president (by that time, Qatar, a close US ally, was already funding the insurgency). A poll of Syrians conducted in 2016 by the University of Maryland for the US Department of Homeland Security, similarly found that, though the respondents did report great hardship as a result of the war, they did not blame Assad for it, but blamed the US, ISIS, and Turkey. The majority polled were Sunnis, but there was no difference between the responses of Sunni and non-Sunni respondents.
In 2022 the European Union commissioned the US firm Gallup to conduct a poll of Syrians to gauge citizens’ opinions of the EU. The poll did not directly ask respondents what they thought of the Assad government. However, we can indirectly ascertain their views, since Russia was at the time supporting Assad, whereas the US and EU were trying to overthrow him. While 52 per cent considered Russia to be the “closest partner” of Syria and the leading donor to Syria, the US and EU were so named by 1 per cent or less. Indeed, the respondents’ view of the EU was overwhelmingly negative, despite the fact that over 1 million Syrian refugees live in the EU. Just 1 per cent of those polled considered the EU’s relation with Syria to be good; 2 per cent believed the EU had given effective aid to Syria. An overwhelming majority of Syrians distrusted the EU, UN, and Arab League (no question was posed regarding their trust in the US). Respondents were acutely dissatisfied with their lives in Syria, but their principal complaint was the economic hardship they faced. Since this hardship was largely due to US-EU sanctions, this fact may have shaped their views regarding the EU; but the poll asked no questions on sanctions.
A 2018 poll carried out by the London-based agency ORB International (set up and headed by a former US State Department employee) found that the opponents of Assad, including the HTS, are acutely unpopular. The ‘net score’ of the HTS was minus 78 per cent, i.e., it ranks behind only ISIS in unpopularity. In comparison with all of the opposing forces, Assad appears to have multiples more support. For reasons that are not stated, ORB divided its sample of 1000 Syrians evenly between regions controlled by Assad and those controlled by various ‘opposition’ forces. It found that support for Assad was high in territory controlled by the government, but low in territory controlled by the opposition. (For instance, in the regions controlled by the government in 2018, which accounted for the bulk of Syria’s population, 68 per cent felt that Assad should be permitted to stand in a general election.) By contrast, opposition forces were evidently unpopular even in the regions they controlled.[2]
Of all sections of the Syrian people, one would expect that Syrian refugees would be most likely to oppose Assad. However, a study based on a large, diverse sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon found that a “large minority” of them supported the government; this included “large numbers of Sunni Arabs”.
We should clarify that we do not place great stock in opinion polls as a method of understanding people’s views. Even if conducted in an impartial manner, they do not capture the reasons and context for people’s views, which can only be understood in actual interaction with the people. Moreover, they do not determine which cause is just; a just cause is just, irrespective of whether it has already won the support of the majority, or is yet to win it. Despite these reservations, we cite the above data to show that even such opinion polls do not provide support for the propaganda against Assad; rather, they indicate widespread support for Assad. And yet these sources are systematically ignored by the media.
The character of the protests of 2011
(4.) It is perhaps excusable for persons with no knowledge of CIA ‘regime change’ operations to be misled regarding the nature of the ‘protest movement’ in Syria. However, it is not excusable for experienced analysts to be so misled, and even less so for them to mislead others.
In the initial round of protest in Syria in March 2011, there would have been genuine protesters with genuine grievances present, but the presence of such elements is an essential requirement of a regime change operation; it provides the operation credibility. From the very outset, armed provocateurs too were present, who attacked the Syrian police. Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who lived in the Syrian city of Homs, wrote that “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.” (Father Frans was later killed by unknown persons.) In March 2011 itself the first killings of Syrian army soldiers took place in Daraa, and this intensified in April 2011 all over Syria, with at least 88 soldiers killed at various places.
The organised, non-spontaneous nature of the entire operation is clear from events at Jisr ash-Shughur, in the Idlib governorate in the north of Syria, bordering Turkey. There demonstrations began on March 18, 2011, and continued through April. In May, anti-Assad forces met in Istanbul. In the same month, armed Islamic militia launched an insurgency against the government of Syria, attacking police stations, capturing guns, and burning offices of the ruling Ba’ath party. By June the Islamic militia had seized control of the city.
Only the very naïve could imagine that a peaceful movement could transform itself into a full-fledged armed insurgency, capable of attacking police stations and capturing cities, in such a short span of time. Such activities require considerable planning, contingents of trained fighters, and flow of weapons, at a minimum. The supplies of fighters, weapons and finance were bolstered in 2012, with the launch of the full-fledged CIA programme codenamed ‘Timber Sycamore’, for the training and arming of forces fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The principal such force was the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al Nusra front (which later changed its name to HTS). Timber Sycamore was a multinational operation, with CIA, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan coordinating their roles. A share of the flood of US weapons, including assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades, found their way to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as ISIL or Daesh). ISIS also captured US military vehicles and tanks without a fight. Like Al-Nusra, ISIS was headed by a former Al Qaeda operative who left a US prison in Iraq to fight in Syria. The emergence of ISIS provided the US the pretext to directly invade Syria. In 2014, the Pentagon launched the Syrian Train and Equip Program, which armed other Syrian forces to fight ISIS, and the US itself set up a military base at Tanf in southern Syria, which continues to date.
Al Tanf houses 2,000 US troops at present. It also hosts the so-called Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA), a US-organised and trained armed group on the US payroll. At the end of November 2024, before the HTS advance, US Special Forces told the RCA: “Everything is about to change. This is your moment.” Additional armed ‘militants’ were brought in to beef up the RCA. Then, as the HTS swept south to Damascus, the RCA advanced northwards out of Al Tanf, and now occupies roughly one-fifth of the country, including pockets of territory in the north of the capital. Taken together with YPG forces under US command in the east of Syria, it is likely that the US directly controls well over a third of the country.
Thus what is presented as a spontaneous protest movement morphing into ‘civil war’ was a regime change operation. It transited very rapidly from engineered provocations to proxy war by imperialism, and thereafter to proxy war combined with direct imperialist invasion and occupation.
Seeing the reactionary and pro-imperialist nature of the forces on the ‘rebel’ side, even sections and political forces in Syria who had genuine grievances and demands for change set those aside for the present, and rallied to the side of the Assad government. There is an objective reason for this rallying, quite apart from anything to do with the personal character of Assad or even the ideology of his party and government. Namely, in the face of imperialist invasion and occupation, Assad and his government objectively represented the national resistance of the Syrian people. This fact was the key to the ability of the government to sustain its resistance over this long period.
Assad’s prisons
(5.) The media claims regarding Syrian prisons are a hoax. Unfortunately for the western media, their manufactures are so inept that they have been repeatedly exposed. A widely-circulated picture of a Syrian prisoner in a tunnel turns out to have been AI-generated; a video of an emaciated, chained man turns out not to have been from Syria, but from a museum exhibit in Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum; star CNN reporter Clarissa Ward’s interview with a Syrian prisoner has been exposed as a poorly-staged fake; claims that children were trapped in underground cells in Saydnaya prison have turned out to be false; videos on the NBC News website claiming to depict “rebels freeing dozens of women and men at the notorious Saydnaya prison in Syria, Dec. 9, 2024” were later replaced with the mysterious notice “We apologize, this video has expired”; indeed a much-hyped search for underground chambers in the Saydnaya prison revealed that there were none. Had there been evidence of vast prison populations and widespread torture, the media could simply have filmed hundreds of thousands of prisoners exiting prisons, and interviewed some of them at the time. There would have been no need to manufacture evidence. We have no doubt that documentation regarding Syria’s prisons will be more carefully manufactured in time, but it will carry no credibility.
This is in stark contrast to the extensive documentation and videos made by members of the US armed forces themselves of atrocities in prisons run by the US as military occupiers, such as at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Two decades later, there has been no redress for the victims, nor of those at the notorious US facility at Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, there is also documentation of torture at the prisons run by the new rulers of Syria, the HTS, since they have long been in power in Idlib province in the north; but no reporters are visiting the jails there.
Of course, like any country, Assad’s Syria had prisons. However, according to news reports, the doors of these prisons were simply flung open by the HTS, and all the inmates were allowed to leave without any legal process at all. We may never get to know the real number of prisoners at the time, nor what they were jailed for. Like in most countries, Syria’s prisons would have housed thousands of criminals: “the fact that the prison doors had simply been flung open had made it harder to trace inmates, and set genuine criminals free alongside political prisoners.” In Syria’s case, the prisons also would have contained ISIS terrorists, guilty of heinous crimes.
The economy under Assad
(6.) The Syrian economy was growing till the outbreak of the US’s proxy war in Syria in 2011. At the time, it had a GDP of $67.5 billion, and its per capita GDP was $2,952. According to the World Bank, “Prior to the conflict, Syria was a fast-growing Lower Middle-Income Country (LMIC).” The value of Syrian trade (imports and exports) reached 76.5 percent of GDP just before the global financial crisis of 2008, higher than the regional average. More than 90 per cent of Syria’s workers worked outside the home, and correspondingly family businesses employed less than 10 per cent of the workers, indicating considerable formalization of employment.
The World Bank notes that “During the decade prior to the conflict’s onset, Syria had made remarkable progress in improving educational outcomes… Compared with other countries at similar levels of development, by 2010, Syria was the best performer in terms of primary and lower secondary education, and among the best performers on tertiary education.” Health indicators had improved during the three decades prior to 2011, with life expectancy rising by 17 years, infant mortality falling 86 per cent, under-five mortality falling 87 per cent, and the maternal mortality ratio falling 89 per cent, all to levels considerably lower than India has at present.[3] At the time, Syria’s public spending on health, as a percentage of its GDP, was three times that of India. By the World Bank’s (admittedly too narrow) measure of ‘extreme poverty’, as measured by the share of the population living below $2.15 (2017 PPP) per capita per day, “extreme poverty was virtually nonexistent prior to the conflict”. Using a higher poverty line of $3.65 per capita per day, poverty was 16 per cent in 2010.
Then, in 2011, the US and its allies engineered a violent uprising and proxy war against the Assad regime. They also placed sanctions on the Syrian economy which are among the harshest in the world. US sanctions also target third parties for dealings with Syria. They are thus a type of warfare which affects the lives of all Syrians. These sanctions were placed on the ground of punishing the Assad regime for human rights violations; in fact they were a horrendous attack on the Syrian people, a type of blackmail, punishing them for supporting the government.
In the period since 2011, Syria’s economy has taken a terrible beating. All four pillars of the economy – agriculture, oil, industry, and tourism – were severely affected. As government revenues fell steeply, subsidised fertiliser and diesel were no longer available, and farmers cut down on inputs. Wheat production in 2024 is estimated at 2 million tonnes, about 47 percent below the pre-crisis average. Syria turned from an exporter of wheat to an importer. Before the war, Syria’s oil accounted for a quarter of government revenues, more than one-fifth of GDP, and a majority of export income. During the war, Syria’s oil-bearing regions came under the control of first ISIS and then the US. US President Trump said in 2019: “We’re keeping [Syria’s] oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.” The Syrian government claimed in June 2024 that its cumulative losses in the oil sector due to the war and occupation amounted to $120 billion.
According to World Bank data, Syria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell 65 per cent between 2011 and 2022, to just $23.6 billion. However, the Bank also uses an alternative method of estimating GDP, using nighttime light (NTL) data, which indicates an even sharper fall, by 84 per cent, between 2010 and 2023. Syria’s goods exports fell from $8.8 billion in 2010 to $1 billion in 2023. The market exchange rate of Syria’s currency fell 300-fold against the US dollar between 2011 and 2023. Inflation rose steeply, and more than two-thirds of households could not meet their basic needs. More than 70 per cent of the population requires ‘humanitarian assistance’ to meet their basic needs.
World Bank, Syria Economic Monitor: Conflict, Crises and the Collapse of Household Economic Welfare, Spring 2024
The proxy war and sanctions have resulted in a dramatic change in the nature of employment in Syria. The share of employment in family businesses has more than quadrupled, for lack of proper jobs. The share of industry in employment halved, and the share of the services sector rose sharply, also indicating desperate attempts to make ends meet.
According to UNICEF, nearly half of Syria’s children of school-going ages are out of school, and one-third of its schools are either damaged, destroyed, or not used as schools at present. All measures of mortality have increased, and life expectancy has plummeted. About 25 per cent of the population suffers ‘extreme poverty’ (<$2.15 per capita per day), according to the World Bank; using the $3.65 cut-off, 69 per cent are poor.
The proxy war and sanctions have also caused one of the largest episodes of international and internal displacement since World War II, with 5.2 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries, an additional 1 million in Europe, and 6.6 million displaced within Syria’s borders. That is, one in three persons living in Syria was internally displaced.
The US and its allies have been funding the proxy war; the CIA alone has been providing $1 billion a year to ‘Syrian opposition forces’, its largest operation worldwide. The US is also the main author of the international sanctions against Syria. Thus US imperialism, not the Assad government, is directly responsible for both aspects of the war on Syria, i.e. military and economic.
Did Assad survive solely through foreign help?
(7.) It is clear that assistance from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah helped the Assad government defend Syria in the proxy war. But a much larger and more powerful coalition, in financial and military terms, was ranged against Assad, consisting not only of domestic reactionaries, but the US, UK, France, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan. As mentioned earlier, the US armed, trained and financed the ‘opposition’ (France and the UK too have done so). In 2017, the Washington Post reported an estimate that the CIA-backed fighters might have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the previous four years. According to World Bank data, Syrian armed forces personnel in 2010 numbered 403,000; the figure for 2020 was 269,000.
The anti-Assad ‘Free Syrian Army’ was created in July 2011 in Turkey, under the supervision of Turkish intelligence. Since 2011, Turkey has invaded and occupied parts of Syria, armed and assisted numerous armed organisations, including ISIS, against Assad. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have carried on large scale operations to arm and fund terrorist organisations; in 2013, the Financial Times reported that Qatar had funded the ‘rebels’ by at least $1 billion and “as much as $3 billion” over the first two years of the war. Israel has made hundreds of air strikes on Syria during the last decade. The US, France and the UK too have carried out air strikes on Syria.
It was on the soil of Syria that the world’s most dreaded and powerful terrorist organisation, ISIS, was set up, with ill-concealed support from the US and Turkey. ISIS’s top leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi, forged his organisation during his detention at the US Army’s Camp Bucca in southern Iraq,[4] which at one time or another housed 100,000 inmates. According to the Washington Post, nine members of ISIS’s top command were housed in Camp Bucca. Two US experts wrote in the New York Times that “The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.” At Camp Bucca, the target of these “radicals” appears to have shifted from the US and its allies to Syria, and the abrupt closure of Camp Bucca and release of its detenues laid the basis for the insurgency in Syria two years later.
The rise of ISIS, amply supplied with weapons from US allies and the US itself, served two purposes: it tied down the forces of Assad and his allies; and it provided an excuse for the US military to directly intervene, in the name of controlling the ISIS threat. The latter pretext was particularly flimsy. The Los Angeles Times noted that the US and its allies “took no action to prevent the extremists’ advance toward the historic town [of Palmyra] — which, until then, had remained in the hands of the sorely overstretched Syrian security forces.” Indeed, when the Syrian army re-took Palmyra, the LA Times noted, it highlighted “a dilemma: Washington has endeavored to portray the battle against Islamic State as a project of the United States and its allies…. [The US] has difficulty publicly lauding advances against Islamic State by Assad and his allies, including the Russians and Iranians, after years of calling for Assad’s fall.”
Given the large-scale imperialist aggression against Syria, the Syrian government had every right to seek foreign assistance to repel the aggression. This cannot be reduced, as some commentators attempt to do, to a proxy fight between ‘powerful regional actors’. That is to obfuscate the real issue. It was a struggle by the Syrian people against imperialist aggression, and in defence of their sovereignty and liberty.
The assistance received by the Assad government from outside quarters cannot explain its survival over 13 years of imperialist military and economic aggression. Open appeals were made from the very outset of the war to soldiers of the Syrian army to defect, with promises of handsome pay, and indeed some did defect. From the start of the war, ‘rebel’ fighters have been paid handsomely – in “crisp $100 bills” – by foreign powers. The Telegraph (UK) reports that US-backed fighters drew a monthly salary of $400; meanwhile, Syrian army soldiers reportedly earned $15-17 a month. And yet the Syrian army held out doggedly. Now, the army’s sudden failure to resist the HTS advance indicates treachery at the top levels of the army and Assad’s government. The full facts have not yet come to light.
The Syrian army, which is drawn from all communities of Syria, could not have resisted the powerful enemy onslaught for so long without the support of the people. The real significance we need to draw from these developments is that, in the face of encirclement and war waged by much more powerful countries, in the face of terrible sanctions amounting to war, which devastated the economy and perhaps took more lives than even the military conflict, a small, militarily and economically weak country could resist the massed might of imperialism and domestic reaction for 13 long years. That speaks of the strength of an oppressed people in the face of imperialism. The celebrations of jackals at the defeat and dismemberment of Syria should not make us forget this fact.
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
The character of the new rulers
(8) We need not expend much energy discussing the character of the ‘Syrian rebels’ or ‘opposition forces’ who have seized power in Damascus. The HTS ran a mini-state in Idlib, a northern province of Syria adjoining Turkey. There a religious council guided by Sharia (Islamic law) oversaw the ‘Syrian Salvation Government’ (SSG). The SSG established a ‘public morality police’ which regulated shops, ensured women wore compliant religious clothing and limited the mixing of sexes in public spaces. Its Ministry of Education mandated an Islamic dress code for female students and the separation of the sexes throughout schooling.
The ‘Syrian rebels’ include Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Bosnians, Albanians, North Macedonians, Kosovars, Uyghurs, and other Central Asian and European militants. AP reported in 2017 that “Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters…” After the outbreak of the insurgency in Syria, hundreds of Albanians flocked to the Al Nusra Front (the earlier name of HTS). ‘Xhemati Alban’, a subgroup of HTS, has in turn set up ‘Albanian Tactical’, which “focuses on specific military skills, including sniper training and explosives, while also providing training for other fighters…. This demonstrates a shift from being just combatants to becoming a strategic force within HTS.”
Under the tutelage of his western mentors, Julani has now undergone a political and even physical makeover, to make him more presentable and internationally acceptable. The political re-branding of Julani includes his vague promises of safety to Syria’s minorities. The physical makeover is striking (see below). Photographs of him in military fatigues recall Ukraine’s Zelensky.
Julani may continue to cultivate a ‘moderate’ image with respect to cultural and religious aspects, even as his lieutenants practice Islamic fundamentalism on the ground. Already there are reports of atrocities taking place against minorities.
Whether or not the new Syrian rulers enforce Islamic law, the record of Idlib indicates that they will crush all democratic expression of the people. What the New York Times charmingly calls the Syrian Salvation Government’s “robust internal security force” enforced a rule of terror in Idlib, including arrests of dissidents, torture (including of women), and summary executions. According to a DW report of May 2024,
On most Fridays, men and women of all ages take to the streets in their dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands in Idlib City, Binnish, Darat Izza, Jisr al-Shughour, Atareb, everywhere in northwestern Syria where the HTS militias hold sway. Teachers, police officers, and engineers have joined the protests to demand their rights…. The people’s resentment is directed squarely against this group, especially its leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani. The protesters have several demands, according to Hamed T.: An end to torture in HTS prisons, the release of prisoners, as well as economic and political reforms. The loudest demand of all is for the resignation of al-Julani.
These protests are part of a movement which began in February 2024 in the HTS-ruled region, when a family learnt of the death of their son due to torture. On September 13, the Idlib Governorate witnessed a wave of protests, held in the city of Idlib, as well as Killi, Binnish, Qurqania, Kafr Takharim and Armanaz in the rural areas. The protests extended to areas in the western countryside of Aleppo. The HTS resorted to assaults on protesters and arrests in order to suppress the movement.
Ideally, the imperialists would like HTS to dispense with certain aspects of Islamic rule, which would improve its international image. However, that is not essential; what is essential is that the HTS maintain control of the country and adhere to the broad strategic requirements of imperialism in the region.
According the UN Security Council Resolution 2254, the HTS remains a terrorist group. The Resolution says that Member States are bound “to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by” the Al-Nusra Front, later renamed HTS. Nevertheless, on December 20, “Senior U.S. diplomats visiting Damascus on Friday met with Syria’s de-facto new ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa [a.k.a. Julani] and held a ‘good’ and ‘very productive’ meeting with him about Syria’s political transition and decided to remove a bounty on his head.”
The immediate response of the Syrian people
(9) After every regime change operation, it is obligatory to assemble a crowd at a central place, and have them smash statues and portraits of the former leader. This helps create an aura of popular consent, and substitutes any attempt by the media to ascertain the actual views of the people. So too in the case of Syria.
These displays have little meaning in themselves. It is obvious that, when a new armed force takes over State power, sections of people who support it may welcome it on the streets, and those who oppose or fear it may stay indoors. Moreover, suddenly deprived of their leadership, people will be disoriented for a period. Their real sentiments will emerge over the course of time. Nevertheless, it is striking that, within weeks of the HTS seizing power in Damascus, demonstrations are taking place against it, some demanding secular rule and women’s rights, some protesting attacks on Alawites and Christians. Retaliations by the new rulers may follow: “In Homs, where the authorities imposed a nighttime curfew, 42-year-old resident Hadi reported ‘a vast deployment of HTS men in areas where there were protests’. ‘There is a lot of fear,” he said.”
Finally, in the western media, opposition in Syria to the new rulers is being reduced to the question of the fears and anxieties of the country’s religious minorities. However, communal fascism, as a method of rule, is not principally aimed at suppressing minorities, although that may be a by-product. Its principal purpose is to exercise hegemony over the majority. As yet, Syria’s communal fascistic forces have not succeeded in this task, and have been able to seize power only through conspiracies and armed force.
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What the Syria developments signify
Having dealt with the disinformation, let us look at the entire development and its significance.
— The situation in Syria must not be judged on the basis of extraneous considerations, but on the basis of an analysis of the objective contradictions in operation. The government of Bashar al-Assad represented the struggle of the Syrian people, an oppressed nation, defending its sovereignty against imperialist aggression. In a world ruled by imperialism, Syria deserved the support and solidarity of the people of the world. (This would have been so even if the various terrorist organisations promoted by the imperialists in Syria had been less reactionary and criminal. Their extreme reactionary and terrorist character merely increases the urgency of such a stand.)
This simple truth has been clouded over with all sorts of claims, some false, some irrelevant. The consequent inadequacy of solidarity worldwide has played a role in facilitating imperialist aggression and the devastation of the people there.
— The imperialist aggression on Syria, the overthrow of its legitimate government, and its replacement with a terrorist junta are only the latest in a long series of events. From the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US has steadfastly pursued its strategy of radically re-moulding the politics of the West Asian region. This was a critical part of trying to re-assert US imperialism’s global hegemony. Spelled out initially in the Project for a New American Century, and later embodied in successive versions of the National Security Strategy for the USA (NSSUSA), this strategy aimed at precluding the emergence of great power rivals to the US. An important objective of this was the prolonging of the hegemony of the US dollar in the world economy.
In the course of implementing this strategy, the US and its allies have carried out invasion and regime change in Iraq and Libya, repeated wars on Lebanon and Yemen, brutal sanctions on Iran, and genocide in Gaza. Well over 2 million have died in these wars (estimates have been made by the Lancet and the UN for Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza, but a full accounting may not be possible in the present circumstances). The 13-year proxy war on Syria is part of this bloody project. Apart from deaths directly caused by the war, the deaths of many more would have been caused by the conditions created by the war.[5]
A relatively recent element in this project is the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC), a proposed transport and logistics corridor running from India to Europe and passing through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Greece. The US, seen as the IMEEC’s main promoter, is not present at any point of the corridor, except as a military force. This corridor would require a network of rail, road and port connections across these countries, much of which is yet to be built. Apart from creating a rival to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the IMEEC is intended to tie together various interests, including the Gulf states and Israel. (These ties already exist, but would be further strengthened economically and politically.) One of the reasons why the Palestinian resistance forces launched the October 7 operation was to pre-empt the Arab states’ impending ‘normalisation’ of Israeli occupation of Palestine. Equally, the genocide in Gaza and the installation of a communal fascist dictatorship in Syria are steps in the re-assertion by imperialism of that objective.
The new rulers of Syria have immediately declared that they do not want conflict with Israel, and called on the US to facilitate better relations with it. This is despite Israel carrying out 480 air strikes on Syria after the fall of Assad, and greatly expanding its illegal seizure of Syrian territory. Taking credit for the regime change in Damascus, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu declared, “we are changing the face of the Middle East.”
— Some commentators nurtured hopes that the emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) grouping, by creating a rival pole in global politics, had created opportunities which could be exploited by the struggles of Third World peoples. Some of them went further, and suggested that a new, non-hegemonic world order was rapidly emerging. Indeed the BRICS grouping contains a large share of the world’s population and GDP, and has recently expanded its membership.
While much would depend on the nature of the forces that emerge to lead the struggles of the Third World, it is difficult to detect any benefits of BRICS for those struggles as yet; certainly none on account of the positive efforts of BRICS itself. The genocide in Gaza has proceeded for over a year unhindered. And Russia has evidently cooperated or collaborated in the overthrow of Assad; whether it has obtained in exchange some concession in Ukraine, or will be able to preserve its military bases in Syria, is of little relevance to the Syrian people, or to the Lebanese resistance fighters whose land route to Iran is now cut off. All of the five original BRICS countries issued near-identical statements in the wake of the seizure of power by HTS.[6]
— Propaganda is an essential part of the military campaign, and in this sphere the western imperialists have constantly innovated to advance their influence. Take, for example, their pioneering use of social media in the Western propaganda effort. With the Syrian operation the US entered a new era of propaganda, for example by forging video atrocities that could be instantly circulated throughout the world. The speed with which this can now be accomplished means that the correction of false claims becomes almost irrelevant. By the time the fraud is exposed it has been replaced by new lurid forgeries.
Indeed, Syria was the subject of perhaps the single largest and most innovative propaganda campaign by US imperialism in this last decade. For this purpose, it created or funded new, supposedly independent, research outfits such as Bellingcat and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose ‘findings’ were lapped up by the media. It set up the supposedly humanitarian force, the White Helmets, which actually operated as an extension of the communal fascists and produced a stream of propaganda. The world was sold the absurd story of a 7-year-old Syrian girl in Aleppo, Bana Alabed, who supposedly tweeted in English every day on her sufferings under Assad’s bombing. Images of another Syrian child were manipulated and circulated, against the family’s wishes, to attack the Assad government.
Significantly, many western ‘Left’ elements have been put to use in this propaganda. The US learned to create and feed propaganda specifically directed at anti-imperialists, in a manner intended to confuse and disarm opposition. Thus supporters of the Palestinian cause were told that Syria was an enemy of the Palestinians. Opponents of neoliberalism were told that Assad was a neoliberal and that opposition to him arose because of his neoliberal reforms. Pacifists were told that, under his civilised exterior, Assad was a bloodthirsty military mass murderer; and so on. Western artists lovingly portrayed the terrorists as revolutionary activists in prize-winning best-sellers. When Kurdish forces, fighting under US command and protection, controlled a region named Rojava in the northeast of Syria, this was projected as a liberated zone, and young American anarchists traveled to it for guerrilla tourism. In this fashion, various elements of what is termed the ‘Left’ have lent their weight, in one way or another, to western imperialism in Syria.
— Finally, there is no denying that the region is facing a very dark situation. The most outstanding leaders of the resistance have been assassinated. The Syrian leadership which had waged a 13-year struggle against imperialist aggression has been suddenly removed from the scene. The genocide in Gaza continues.
However, throughout history, oppression has given birth to resistance. Finally, the people endure; and they are the source of all struggles. The Arab people possess a revolutionary history to rival any other. The struggle of the Palestinians, of the Lebanese, of the Iraqis, and so many others have been crushed, and risen again and again. The masses across the entire region have been observing these developments. When, and in what form, they will rise again in organised and collective action, we cannot say; but the last word has not been spoken.
NOTES:
- The western media did their best to ignore the massive turnout of 73 per cent in Syria’s 2014 direct, multi-party presidential elections. The crowds of voters were so large that the time for polling had to be extended by five hours. Qatar-based Al Jazeera, though hostile to Assad, reported that huge numbers of Syrian refugees in Lebanon turned up at the Syrian embassy to vote: “It was a parade of Syrians celebrating their embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, and expressing support for him in the battle to quell the uprising that erupted three years ago.” “Minutes after results were announced,” said another Al Jazeera report, “people took to the streets in Damascus to celebrate.” ↑
- While not a single actor received a net positive score (scores are arrived at by adding positive and negative assessments), the most unpopular were as follows: ISIS (-94 per cent), HTS/Nusra (-78 per cent), Syrian Democratic Forces (-55 per cent), and YPG/Kurds (-53 per cent). In this grim scene, Assad obtained the least negative score (-16 per cent). The results appear to confirm that the Syrian people value secularism, and most abhor the forces that spread sectarian hatred. ↑
- Mazen Kherallah, Tayeb Alahfez, Zaher Sahloul, Khaldoun Dia Eddin, Ghyath Jamil, “Health care in Syria before and during the crisis”, Avicenna Journal of Medicine, July-September 2012. doi:10.4103/2231-0770.102275 ↑
- Baghdadi was detained in 2004 by the US forces, and released the same year. He was re-admitted to Bucca in 2005, according to a former US commander of the camp, and remained there till 2009, when hundreds of inmates were released, and the camp was abruptly closed down. During his detention, he was made head of the Mujahideen Shura Council, which was renamed Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). In 2013, ISI launched operations in Syria, changing its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), alternatively translated as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the head of HTS, was also earlier housed in Camp Bucca and other US detention camps in Iraq. His release coincided with the ‘Syrian revolution’ in 2011. The New York Times says that in 2011 Julani “abandoned the ideology that his group should concentrate on fomenting a global jihad against the West. Instead, he focused on freeing Syria of the Assads…” ↑
- According to the WHO, life expectancy at birth in Syria rose from 71.1 years in 2000 to 73.8 in 2010; it then plummeted to 59.2 in 2017. By that time the tide of the battle turned, and the Assad government began recovering control over the country. Thereafter life expectancy recovered to 72.4 years in 2021, which is still lower than the figure for 2010. That is, mortality rates soared during the years 2011-17, and then fell in the years of comparative peace thereafter. ↑
- China: “We hope relevant parties will find a political settlement to restore stability and order in Syria for the long-term and fundamental interest of the Syrian people.” Brazil: “Brazil supports the efforts towards a political and negotiated solution to the conflict in Syria which respects the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Russia: “From our perspective, the path to a sustainable normalisation of the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic lies in the initiation of an inclusive intra-Syrian dialogue aimed at securing national consensus and advancing a comprehensive political settlement process in alignment with the fundamental principles outlined in UNSC resolution 2254.” India: “We underline the need for all parties to work towards preserving the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria. We advocate a peaceful and inclusive Syrian-led political process respecting the interests and aspirations of all sections of Syrian society. South Africa: “In this regard, South Africa supports the efforts of the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, through his Special Envoy, Mr Geir O. Pederson, to work towards an ‘orderly transition’…. We hope that the Syrian people will soon begin an inclusive and Syrian-led dialogue that will lead to a peaceful transition and pave the way for a sustainable political solution reflective of the will of the people of Syria.” Contrast the above with the statement of the Ansarallah government of Yemen: “Solidarity with Syria and the Syrian people against the Israeli Zionist aggression”. Similarly, on December 3, the Venezuelan government expressed its solidarity with the Syrian government and Assad, condemned “all hostilities against the people of the Syrian Arab Republic, carried out by terrorists led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham”, and called for “an immediate end to the support provided by major Western powers and the Netanyahu regime” for the forces attacking the Assad government. ↑
