Long live the fall of the tyrant! No to Islamist reaction!

With the flight of dictator Bashar al-Assad and the capture of the capital Damascus by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda), a new phase in the political crisis in Syria and the Middle East has begun.

On its side, Israel has bombed militias linked to Iran and deployed its army to take positions on the Golan Heights, a territory of the Syrian state that Israel has annexed.

The collapse of Assad’s regime and his army within a few days—deprived of the military support of Russia and Hezbollah—and the opening of its notorious prisons were celebrated by the Syrian masses.

However, those leading the armed offensive are not revolutionaries but clerical bourgeois forces. HTS is attempting to win over major international media outlets and powerful states. While Assad has found refuge in Moscow, the Islamists have “guaranteed the security” of the two Russian military bases.

Yet, HTS praised the Taliban during their return to power in 2021, considering them a model. On December 8, HTS’s supreme leader, Ahmed Al-Charaa, delivered a speech at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, declaring that “victory was made possible by divine grace.”

The Former Regime: Executioner of Its Own People and the Palestinian People

The absence of revolutionary workers’ parties in the Middle East has led every attempt by the masses to overthrow the yoke of local exploiters and their imperialist backers into dead ends. The primary responsibility for this lies with Stalinism. Since the 1930s, under the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, Communist parties in semi-colonial countries have subordinated the interests of workers to those of the national bourgeoisie under the banner of the “national revolution” or the “anti-imperialist united front,” reducing the working class to an auxiliary force of the local bourgeoisie. The Syrian Communist Party remained subordinate to the bourgeois Ba’ath Party and has participated in the government bloc since 1986. The regime’s socialist rhetoric always concealed policies rooted in an alliance between the state bureaucracy, the military, and loyal entrepreneurs.

In the 1920s, French imperialism separated Syria from Lebanon. Faced with the Arab national uprising, De Gaulle bombed Damascus in 1945. Under pressure from British and American imperialism, French troops evacuated Syria in 1946. What followed was political instability, with nationalist civilian cliques violently vying for power, relying on factions within the military. This military was crushed by the Israeli army in 1948–1949. In 1958, an attempt at unification with Egypt failed. The Ba’ath Party seized control of the country in 1963, relying on the USSR to resist pressure from Israel and the United States.

After another defeat to Israel in 1967 and the loss of the strategic Golan Heights, Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 through an internal coup (the so-called “Corrective Movement”), establishing a police state based on the dominance of the Alawite ethno-religious minority. The Ba’athist regime claimed a vision of Greater Syria, including Palestine and Lebanon. In 1976, Syrian troops entered Lebanon and attacked the PLO. The regime’s repression of the Islamist uprising (led by the Muslim Brotherhood) in Hama in 1982, during which up to 30,000 people were killed, confirmed its repressive nature. In Lebanon, from 1985 to 1987, the Syrian army attacked the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and Bourj el-Barajneh with support from the Islamist Amal militia.

The restoration of capitalism in Russia destabilized the regime. In 1991, during the first Western imperialist intervention (with Turkey’s involvement) against Iraq, Assad allied with Iran to counter the Ba’athist enemy Saddam Hussein. In 2003, during the second imperialist intervention, Syria openly joined the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq.

After the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad took power. In 2004, he violently repressed Kurdish protests.

Syria: Battleground for Opposing Bourgeois Cliques, Antagonistic Regional Powers, and Rival Imperialist Forces

Due to its geographic position, Syria has become a battleground between two imperialist blocs (the United States and Russia) and three regional powers (Israel, Turkey, and Iran).

The civil war began in 2011 with a popular uprising against the authoritarian Ba’ath Party regime. The protests were brutally repressed by the Ba’ath regime and its repressive and torturous apparatus. The movement was quickly hijacked by reactionary Islamist militias, ranging from Daesh (ISIS) jihadists to the Turkish-controlled Free Syrian Army (FSA). The Kurdish nationalist party PKK-PYD took advantage of the situation in 2012 to establish a Kurdish proto-state along the Turkish border (Rojava). In 2014, the Islamist fascists of Daesh declared a vast caliphate (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) spanning Syria and Iraq.

From 2014 onward, the PKK-PYD’s armed wing (YPG) was armed and supported with intelligence by the U.S. military for the offensive against the caliphate, which collapsed in 2017. The YPG subsequently rebranded itself as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The conflict tore the country apart. While Bashar al-Assad’s regime, with the support of Russia and Iran, retained control of the more populous western regions, its opponents seized the rest of the country.

The de facto division of Syria was accompanied by a humanitarian catastrophe. Millions fled the country, and more than 230,000 civilians were reported dead by 2024. This was compounded by economic collapse, caused by militia-imposed taxes, pillaging, and relentless fighting. Syria became a patchwork of narco-states financed by the export of the synthetic drug Captagon.

Since 2011, Turkey has supported Islamist forces while regularly attacking Kurdish areas. Its goals include the repatriation of 3 million Syrian refugees and the liquidation of Rojava’s proto-state. Russian imperialism, heavily engaged in the war in Ukraine, is too preoccupied to attempt another rescue of the Assad regime. Israel has played a significant role in the regime’s defeat by threatening Iran, attacking Lebanon, and weakening Hezbollah. Israel is likely to exploit the changing situation to further undermine Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

This may pave the way for the masses in Iran, inspired by the fall of Syria’s tyrant, to rise and potentially overthrow the Islamist regime.

The fate of Syrian workers and people must no longer be determined by foreign imperialist interests.

What is crucial now is the self-organization of the working class, students, informal sector workers, and poor peasants. They must overcome national and religious divisions, defend their interests, and prevent foreign interference.

Only a revolutionary workers’ party, built through struggle, and capable of guaranteeing the class independence of workers from all reactionary bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and militias, as well as from all imperialist and foreign powers, will be able to bring about true liberation. Such a party can only be constructed with a program for a workers’ and peasants’ government.

This program must immediately advance the defense of democratic and political freedoms (a constituent assembly, the right to organize, strike, and publish freely), the establishment of trade unions and workers’ militias to resist repressive and reactionary forces, gender equality, the right to self-determination for national minorities (Kurds, Armenians, etc.), and secularism (separation of religion and the state, respect for atheists and religious minorities such as Shiites or Christians). It must also call for the expropriation of capitalist groups and large landowners, the dismantling of the regime’s repressive apparatus, and the liquidation of mafia networks.

This program must include internationalist solidarity with all proletarians and oppressed peoples of the region, to finally put an end to the imperialist forces that divide, plunder, and bleed them dry. The international working class must enforce the immediate withdrawal of all military planes, ships, troops, and advisors from the region.

Syria demonstrates that there can be no isolated national solution to the problems of the working masses in the region. Only a socialist Levant, only a socialist federation of the Middle East, can provide a democratic and progressive perspective to the peoples of Syria and the region.

This necessarily presupposes both the destruction of the colonial state of Israel and the overthrow of the reactionary bourgeois Islamic states in the region!