With the international campaign, we sought to support the independent left that was confronting the al-Assad dictatorship, and to take steps to build a revolutionary socialist sector in Syria.
We worked together with various leaders and organisations who, whilst supporting the rebellion against the regime, raised a political position independent of that from the bourgeois opposition’s leadership of the Syrian National Council (SNC), from imperialism, the reactionary Islamic militias and ISIS.
Among them we can highlight, among many others, Yassin al Haj Saleh, a writer, who was in prison for sixteen years (1980-96). He went underground at the beginning of the revolution until he fled the country in 2013. He is no longer a communist but still considers himself a leftist. His partner, Samira Khalil, has been missing since she was abducted in 2013 by a Salafist group in Eastern Ghouta. Salameh Kaileh, a Syrian-Palestinian journalist and Arab Marxist author, died in October 2018. He was imprisoned for eight years (1992-2000) in Syria. After living in Damascus for thirty years, he was imprisoned and deported to Jordan in 2012. Yasser Munif, co-founder of the Global Campaign for Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution. Mansur Attassi, now deceased, of the Democratic Left Party of Syria, an organisation with which we have a fraternal relationship.
All of them were part of the International Conference that took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in July of 2015, which was also convened by the IWU-FI along with other organisations. This was the only global event of the left in support of the Syrian revolution.
