Ex-President of Syria Bashar al-Assad. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / cropped from original / CC BY 4.0
John Rees gives a brief outline of what socialists should say about events in Syria
No tears for the fall of the brutal Assad regime, but those cheering for the establishment of a replacement regime by Al Qaeda descendent HTS won’t be cheering for long. The truth is that the chaos which will now wholly envelop Syria is ultimately the product of western powers policy of suborning the 2011 Syrian revolution for their own ends.
That project failed and the West has created forces it can’t control, as it did with ISIS. Rival imperialisms have torn the country to bits, prolonging the civil war. Russia and Iran, plus Hezbollah, backed Assad. But, weakened by Israel’s Middle East war and by the Ukraine conflict, they can no longer do so. Turkey has played its own game, mainly a war on emerging Kurdish territory in the remnants of Syria.
Having caused catastrophic damage the major powers now want to appear to wash their hands. Trump now says it’s ’not our war’, although it very definitely was in his first presidency. Putin has had to hang Assad out to dry. Israel has weakened Hezbollah but has now created a terror state on its own border.
Pity the nation so destroyed by imperialism. The task of anti-imperialists is to keep their own governments and their proxies off the back of the Syrian people.
John Rees
John Rees is a writer, broadcaster and activist, and is one of the organisers of the People’s Assembly. His books include ‘The Algebra of Revolution’, ‘Imperialism and Resistance’, ‘Timelines, A Political History of the Modern World’, ‘The People Demand, A Short History of the Arab Revolutions’ (with Joseph Daher), ‘A People’s History of London’ (with Lindsey German) and The Leveller Revolution. He is co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition.