We publish the article written by Cristina Mas and Josep Lluís del Alcázar, from the leadership of Lucha Internacionalista (LI), section of the International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International (IWU-FI) in Spain. This article is a political response and a contribution to the debate on the positions of the Trotskyist Fraction (FT) – an organisation referenced on the website ‘La Izquierda Diario’ – on the class struggle in Syria and the fall of Bashar Al-Assad, according to its statement published on December 14th.
Al Assad, a bloody criminal, ‘a regime hated by the masses of the region’, according to the Trotskyist Fraction (FT) [1], has fallen. Thousands of political prisoners, that overcrowded his prisons of torture and death, are released. Tens of thousands of Syrians take to the streets to celebrate the fall of the dictator in exile,be them from the interior, from the Kurdish northwest to the Druze south, from Hama, Homs and Damascus. The FT writes: ‘We understand their joy at the fall of a hated regime and their hope to return home and enjoy liberation, though unfortunately we cannot share it, given that the forces that have overthrown al-Assad are also deeply reactionary. Their triumph does not bode well for the majority of the Syrian population, decimated and torn apart after 13 years of a terrible civil war and successive imperialist interventions.’
What is the first conclusion if the fall of Assad and the triumph of a combination of rebel forces ‘does not bode well’ to the extent that it prevents a revolutionary force from celebrating the fall of a brutal and bloodthirsty dictator? – is it that Syria was better off with the bloody dictator? How is it possible not to share the joy of the Syrian people at the fall of the tyrant? And the paternalistic and profoundly colonial tone to ‘understand but not share’ is also unbearable. Don’t the Syrian people know or understand what is happening? The Syrian people have taken to the streets, thousands of prisoners have been taken out of jail, thousands have rushed back from exile to regain the lives that the regime and the imperialists have stolen from them.
The youth, the working class, the peasants, the women and the people of Syria face, exhausted, a mountain of difficulties and challenges. There is no doubt that ‘the future of Syria is totally uncertain’. Beginning with Turkey, Israel, the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar… who will try to prop up the new government, so that it regains control. There is a race against the clock, between the new authorities, who are trying to change everything, without changing anything, and the people, who staged the heroic revolution 14 years ago, and were drowned in blood. It would be expected of a revolutionary party to go all out, identifying the workers’ and popular forces that can be the engine of change, its political organisations that from the left fought alongside the revolution for the fall of the regime, and to turn to a campaign of struggle and solidarity.
But such an attitude is impossible in those who do not see in this new situation an opportunity for the masses, who are not ready to go out to celebrate the fall of the brutal regime and the release of thousands of tortured people from the prisons, and who during the 14 years of struggle of the Syrian people – not even in the period that today they recognise as revolutionary – have not been out on the streets to try to organise solidarity with their struggle. With the comrades of the FT, we have a political and methodological difference. They wait to see if their predictions come true, installed as commentators on world geo-strategy. We have been in solidarity with the advances and defeats for 14 years. Today we celebrate and we will fight with them to prevent anyone from robbing them of their legitimate joy.
On the leaderships of the rebel movement
We share the characterisation of the HTS as a bourgeois, Islamist (more precisely sharist), reactionary force. So is Hamas (which immediately greeted the fall of the Syrian regime, and which maintains relations with HTS), and that has not prevented us from coming out with all our might in support of the Palestinian people. The same goes for Hezbollah, which we defend in its confrontation with the Lebanese people against Israel’s invasion, whilst denouncing its criminal role in the repression of the Syrian revolution.
We never judge people by their leadership, but in the case of Syria it is not yet written that HTS is their leadership. These are reactionary Islamist bourgeois Islamist parties but at a historical moment they appear in the eyes of the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian masses as a reference for liberation. Therefore, without giving the slightest confidence in their leadership, we are with the Palestinian or Lebanese resistance to the Israeli occupation, as we were with the struggle of the Syrian people for the overthrow of Al Assad.
We share the characterisation of the HTS as a bourgeois, Islamist (more precisely sharist), reactionary force. So is Hamas (which immediately greeted the fall of the Syrian regime, and which maintains relations with HTS), and that has not prevented us from coming out with all our might in support of the Palestinian people. The same goes for Hezbollah, which we defend in its confrontation with the Lebanese people against Israel’s invasion, whilst denouncing its criminal role in the repression of the Syrian revolution.
We never judge people by their leadership, but in the case of Syria it is not yet written that HTS is their leadership. These are reactionary Islamist bourgeois Islamist parties but at a historical moment they appear in the eyes of the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian masses as a reference for liberation. Therefore, without giving the slightest confidence in their leadership, we are with the Palestinian or Lebanese resistance to the Israeli occupation, as we were with the struggle of the Syrian people for the overthrow of Al Assad.
We share the criticism in the Kurdish leadership and its political dependence on the US strategy. But one nuance: we do not criticise the YPG’s procurement of US weapons at all, but we do criticise its direct collaboration with the US troops deployed in Syria and its political dependence. But this characterisation of the leadership again does not question our support for the Kurdish people in the face of Turkish oppression and the forces it directly controls, the Syrian National Army.
On blocs or camps and the Palestinian struggle
The fall of Al-Assad effectively weakens the weight of Russia, Iran and China. Therefore, FT understands that it favours Turkey, the US and Israel. But where are the Syrian masses, those who take to the streets? The FT gives them no role. That is why, although it claims to criticise campism, it really settles into campism and paralysis.
We can read: ‘some today present the fall of Al-Assad at the hands of jihadist and pro-Turkish militias, with the approval of the US and Israel, as the result of a “triumphant democratic revolution”. ‘Netanyahu sees the fall of Assad as an expression of the weakness of Hezbollah and Iran and therefore as an opportunity to develop their project of creating a ‘Greater Israel’.
In other words, that the fall has Israel’s blessing, in service of its expansion project? If that were so, we would be against the fall of Assad. But this is not the case; the fall of Assad is the delayed result of the 2011 revolution and represents a breakthrough. If Israel attacks Syria, it is not because it is now in a better position for its Greater Israel project, but because the fall of the regime that, for 50 years, secured it’s north-eastern front without any threat, could now fall, with its arsenal, into the hands of its enemies. Israel knew that the military complexes and chemical weapons factories it is attacking today were not a danger in Assad’s hands, against Israel, so it is destroying them now.
The fall of Al-Assad effectively weakens the weight of Russia, Iran and China. Therefore, FT understands that it favours Turkey, the US and Israel. But where are the Syrian masses, those who take to the streets? The FT gives them no role. That is why, although it claims to criticise campism, it really settles into campism and paralysis.
We can read: ‘some today present the fall of Al-Assad at the hands of jihadist and pro-Turkish militias, with the approval of the US and Israel, as the result of a “triumphant democratic revolution”. ‘Netanyahu sees the fall of Assad as an expression of the weakness of Hezbollah and Iran and therefore as an opportunity to develop their project of creating a ‘Greater Israel’.
In other words, that the fall has Israel’s blessing, in service of its expansion project? If that were so, we would be against the fall of Assad. But this is not the case; the fall of Assad is the delayed result of the 2011 revolution and represents a breakthrough. If Israel attacks Syria, it is not because it is now in a better position for its Greater Israel project, but because the fall of the regime that, for 50 years, secured it’s north-eastern front without any threat, could now fall, with its arsenal, into the hands of its enemies. Israel knew that the military complexes and chemical weapons factories it is attacking today were not a danger in Assad’s hands, against Israel, so it is destroying them now.
The fall of the Assad regime has many elements in common with what happened on October 7th. Hamas’s armed action triggered a brutal Israeli offensive, but it is no less certain that it opened up a historic possibility in the struggle of the Palestinian people, with Israel more challenged than ever. The outcome is yet to be written. The same goes for the fall of Al-Assad.
Trapped, if unwillingly, by the logic of blocs or camps, the FT writes of the reactionary Iranian regime: ‘It is a weakened regime, which has become quite unpopular and internally divided’. Quite unpopular? The term is insulting. It is the criminal regime that has repressed, with blood and arms, the Women, Life and Liberty movement. Which, taking advantage of Israel’s threats and provocations, accelerated the summary executions of activists (651 in the first ten months of 2024 alone). We were with the movement of women, of the people, building international solidarity. Continue with your geopolitical chess game, and once again, in this case, forget the people of Iran and their struggle to bring down the theocratic dictatorship.
The same goes for Ukraine. ‘In the face of the war in Ukraine, reformist sectors like Die Linke, and even smaller organisations like LIT or the IWU-FI, aligned themselves with the NATO camp and Zelensky’s army’. ‘The war in Ukraine has exacerbated militarism and clashes between great powers. Western NATO imperialisms have been acting by proxy, propping up the Ukrainian army in its confrontation with Russia, which is supported by Iran, China and North Korea.’ The FT, which wants to get out of the bloc or camp analysis, ends up making one of Putin’s own ‘great arguments’, when, denying the Ukrainian nation, it claims that it is confronting imperialism and NATO. And what do the Ukrainian people, the workers and their organisations. say? Are they not there, do they not have a say, are they only instruments and victims, do they have the right to reject the invasion? We affirm that the Ukrainian people came out to confront the Russian invasion and organised themselves, en masse, in the Territorial Defence, and that this was a decisive factor for the fact that Putin’s attack did not end in three days, with the fall of the government and its replacement by a puppet government of Moscow. That is why we are with the people, and their class organisations, without any confidence in the neo-liberal and Atlanticist Zelensky, and without supporting NATO. Just as we stand with the Kurdish people against Turkish aggression, without aligning ourselves with the camp of… the United States.
About the 2011 revolution
In 2011 a revolution was unleashed, with huge protests, for the fall of the regime and the construction, on the ground, of dozens of dual power bodies, and the coordination committees that fought to oust the regime and decided how to manage daily life. Also in Kurdish territory, in a different form. With them, with the Syrian and Kurdish left that was in the revolution, we debated and supported.
In 2011 a revolution was unleashed, with huge protests, for the fall of the regime and the construction, on the ground, of dozens of dual power bodies, and the coordination committees that fought to oust the regime and decided how to manage daily life. Also in Kurdish territory, in a different form. With them, with the Syrian and Kurdish left that was in the revolution, we debated and supported.
The FT statement affirms that, in 2011, there were ‘massive mobilisations’, a ‘profound popular uprising’ and states: ‘The violent repression by Assad, and the interference of regional powers such as Turkey and various imperialist powers led to the regimentation of the resistance by militarisation. This process undermined the autonomous and mass character, prevented the continuity of the revolutionary process, and empowered reactionary movements and their foreign sponsors. In this way, the Syrian Spring was defeated, giving way to a reactionary civil war on several fronts that proved devastating, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, and millions displaced and refugees.’ The problem was not the militarisation of the revolution. In the face of the regime’s brutal repression, the revolutionary process armed itself, and that was a necessary and legitimate step that did not change its character. But the counter-revolution, combined the brutal repression of the regime, supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, with the emergence of reactionary forces, supported by the USA, Turkey and other Arab states. Each in pursuit of its specific interests, the US to sustain the post occupation government in Iraq threatened by ISIS, the latter in an attempt to destroy the Kurdish YPG bases.
We understand that, today, without direct involvement and an international campaign in support of, the reconstruction of the coordination committees, that gave way to the 2011 revolution, as well as the Syrian left that stood with the revolution, any programme or generic statement about a socialist Syria, as the FT does, is nothing more than propaganda and empty words. For those of us who believe in internationalism and the importance of solidarity, doing nothing is also a form of intervention. It leaves the fighting forces of the left alone. It is the way to make their bad omens come true.
Cristina Mas and Josep Lluís del Alcázar. 2 January 2025. 7 Originally published on 7 January 2025 by Lucha Internacionalista, Spanish section of the ITU-CI.
