The brutal over-half-century-long Assad-dictatorship has fallen in Syria. Thousands and thousands of political prisoners have been able to reunite with their families, many after years during which they were thought dead. Millions more who were internally displaced are rejoicing as they reunite with their families. The grip of fear losing its hold on people has been visible on the streets across Syria and in the diaspora.
As the euphoria dies down, many will worry what the future holds, cautiously hoping that the tragedy of the crushed Syrian revolution is now over. While much is still unclear, history does show that this will take a decisive rebuilding of genuine and politicised workers’ organisations as a mass force armed with the lessons of 2011 and capable of presenting a real alternative to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), all reactionary forces and the imperialist powers: to build a genuinely free, democratic and just society needs the unity of the working and poor masses of Syria to fight against all forms of sectarianism and oppression, and take the revolution to the level of overthrowing also the economic dictatorship of capitalism and its various imperialist representatives.
The hated regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad spectacularly collapsed as the military forces of the coalition led by HTS swept through the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs before entering Damascus, in a lightning offensive that took only eleven days. On the way the regime’s military forces simply seemed to melt into thin air. In Damascus crowds have been chanting “Assad is gone, Homs is free”. However, amid the relief and jubilation, there are also fears and concerns among sections of the Syrian population about what will come next. Already the autonomous areas of Syrian Kurdistan are hammered by Türkiye-backed attacks, and the new rulers’ approach towards Kurdish and women’s rights will be indicative of what lies ahead.
In many places the armed opposition forces seem to have been met with cheering supporters, and faced little if any civil or military resistance. Once they entered Damascus, they liberated the prisoners held in the notorious Sednaya military prison, scene of horrific torture of opposition supporters by Assad’s thugs. The Iranian embassy, seen as a key supporter of the regime was ransacked, while HTS fighters entered the Presidential palace, photographing themselves sitting behind Assad’s desk.
Some of the millions of Syrians who had been forced to flee abroad to escape the brutal regime are reportedly already returning. At the same time rightwing and far-right forces are cynically using the moment to further their racist agenda. Germany, Austria, Greece and Cyprus have already suspended asylum applications from Syria and there are threats to deport refugees already in Germany. This must be opposed, Syrians and all refugees must be guaranteed the voluntary right to return or stay in their new place of residence with full rights and without discrimination.
The Syrian embassies in Istanbul, Athens and even Moscow are flying the opposition flag. Neighboring countries are reinforcing their borders. The Lebanese army has sent military units to ‘protect’ its northern and eastern borders, while the Israeli “Defence” Forces have sent troops and tanks beyond the occupied Golan Heights ‘buffer zone’ , marking Israel’s first entry into formal Syrian territory since 1973. According to the Israeli paper ‘Maariv’, the IDF has been firing at the village of Barika in the buffer zone to keep militants away from the border.
Assad left Damascus on a Russian Ilyushin plane which was later seen flying at a very low level before it disappeared from the radar, apparently a manoeuvre to disguise the escape. Russian regime sources now confirm that Assad and his family are in Moscow and have been granted political asylum.
Power, according to the statement by the commander of HTS al-Julani has been handed over temporarily to the sitting Prime Minister al-Jalali who will supervise all state institutions until the official handover. In the first broadcasts on Syrian TV the opposition gleefully announced that “we won the bet and toppled the criminal Assad regime”. Yet despite all its rhetoric about freeing the country from Assad’s rule, it seems that HTS is already willing to collaborate with an Assad-appointed Prime Minister to ensure an ‘orderly’ transition from the top. This should be a warning that HTS would rather not allow the Syrian people to shape their own future.
Al-Julani is clearly trying hard to project a rebranded image of a civil, West-palatable statesman – in other words he is signalling that he can offer a pair or reliable hands for establishing a new order within the framework of inter-imperialist tensions. His preaching of tolerance for all ethnic and religious groups and “no revenge” would if realised in practice represent a welcome breathing space. But some of the contradictions inherent in manoeuvring and accommodating between imperialist and regional powers are already on display in the Turkish attacks on the autonomous areas of Syrian Kurdistan. And the HTS record in power in Idlib province points to the risk of an oppressive, right wing and fundamentalist regime, unless workers and the poor organise to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Who was Assad?
The Ba’athist Party (the Arab ‘Socialist’ Ba’ath Party) first came to power as a result of the March 8 Revolution in 1963, more akin to a military coup although having popular support. This was a period in which the masses in many countries of the world, whose economies had been exploited by decades of imperialist rule, were striving towards revolution. In the absence of genuinely left mass revolutionary forces, layers of the military, leaning on the USSR for support moved to seize power. The one-party, police regime that resulted used the authoritarian methods of the Soviet bureaucracy to maintain control, but gained a certain authority due to its nationalisation of the economy and development of living standards.
Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who had been an active participant in the 1963 coup, was in 1966 a key instigator of a further coup within the ruling elite, and then a third in 1970 which left him as President. Still leaning on the USSR, he was more ‘pragmatic’ in his relation to private property, undermining the benefits of state planning and introducing sectarian division along religious lines in the state structure. After his death in 2000, his son Bashar succeeded him.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 saw Hafez opening Syria to global capitalism, a process that intensified under Bashar. Privatisation of state property, austerity, mass unemployment and horrific inequality, combined with a rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of the ruling family and a narrow circle of regime-connected elites, fueled mass discontent that contributed to the revolt in Syria in 2011, part of the wave of revolutionary uprisings that spread across North Africa and the Middle East.
While Bashar didn’t enjoy the same degree of personal authority as his father, in 2011, he retained the loyalty of the regime’s core institutions, which were instrumental in orchestrating a brutal crackdown on the uprising. This crackdown took on an increasingly sectarian component, with the use of Alawite-dominated forces against predominantly Sunni opposition areas.
The 2011 revolution didn’t lack heroic commitment or mass support although, because of the regime’s longstanding exploitation of sectarian divisions through fear and patronage networks, that support was not uniform across the different communities. But concluding it victoriously would have required the overthrow of the Assad regime, the dismantling of all its repressive institutions, the expulsion of all imperialist forces from Syria and the replacement of capitalist exploitation with socialist planning, run by democratically elected structures uniting the working class and poor of all ethnic groups, genders and faiths
But no political force, even on a small scale, articulated a program of this kind. The trade unions, for their part, did not play a significant role in the opposition, as they had been either crushed, or absorbed into the state’s apparatus over decades. The Syrian General Federation of Trade Unions (SGFTU), the country’s primary ‘trade union’ body, functioned as an arm of the regime, stifling the potential for the workers’ movement to play an independent role in the uprising.
Instead power remained in the hands of Assad’s corrupt elite. The country sank into civil war, with the intervention of different imperialist (Turkish, US, Russian, Iranian and others) and religious forces that saw the regime use brutal violence against the masses, including the use of chemical weapons. The war left over half a million dead and led to the largest displacement crisis in history, with over 13 million Syrians—more than half of the pre-war population—having been forcibly displaced, either internally or abroad.
Initially the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA) was formed by a section of defecting army officers sympathetic to the opposition. From the start, it lacked a unified command structure, and was more akin to a loose collection of various armed groups than a centralized army. It called for the overthrow of Assad and the transition to a democratic pluralist regime. However its strategy had nothing in common with genuine social revolution, instead it attempted to use guerilla tactics to undermine the regime, relying on western and regional powers’ aid to conduct its campaigns. The west though had its own interests.
The intervention of Iran to use its militants to boost the regime, along with the financial and military support provided to Islamist armed groups by Sunni regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as Türkiye, increased the sectarian divisions within the country as the Free Syrian Army saw its position weaken. Increasingly the civil war degenerated into a multivector conflict between different militias supporting the interests of competing imperialist powers and/or under the control of religious fundamentalists.
The military intervention by Russia beginning in September 2015 was ostensibly to help fight the “Islamic State” (Daesh) but was primarily directed against the forces of the FSA backed by US imperialism, and played the fundamental role of propping up Assad’s regime. Without Russian and Iranian support the Ba’athist regime would have collapsed long ago.
According to an analysis in the publication “Syria direct” the economy has been in freefall since 2011. The Syrian pound has lost 99.64% of its value against the dollar with the collapse escalating in recent years. It now costs more to print a banknote than it is actually worth. Up to 90% of the population are living in poverty, usually relying on remittances sent by relatives working abroad to survive. The inhumane policies of Western governments in relation to refugees from Syria has done nothing to help the population, whilst the effect of western sanctions have only succeeded in helping Assad build a tight network of corrupt cronies around his inner circle.
What explains HTS rapid victory?
The rapid victory of HTS cannot be explained by purely domestic factors. While the world’s eyes have been on Gaza and Ukraine, the effect of these conflicts that has led to the dramatic weakening of Assad’s position have passed almost unnoticed.
Hezbollah, acting in part in its own interests, but also on behalf of the Iranian regime has been instrumental in providing support to the Assad regime, in particular in its conflict with Daesh forces. Now that Hezbollah has been dealt serious military blows by the IDF, decapitating its leadership and losing much of its equipment, it has not been in the position to step up to support Assad as it did in the past.
At the same time the Kremlin has been withdrawing its forces from Syria diverting them to East Ukraine and Kursk as it has been experiencing difficulties there. Assad therefore found himself without the support of two key components of his military might, without which he would have been deposed some years ago. Israel’s repeated airstrikes on Iranian installations within Syria contributed further to diminish Iran’s capacity to bolster Assad’s forces.
While it seems the US was caught off guard by this rapid success, the Turkish regime seized the opportunity offered by the weaknesses of Hezbollah and Russia to push HTS to further its advance. In part it did this with the aim of weakening and pressuring the Syrian regime following the stalling of their normalisation talks, carrying out the forced repatriation of millions of Syrian refugees back into Syria, and probably most importantly, allowing it to take further action against the autonomous regions of Syrian Kurdistan in the north.
At the time of writing, heavy fighting between the Turkish-backed SNA (Syrian National Army, itself consisting of several different factions of which some are very close to the Turkish regime and who have fought for Turkish military interests also “outside of Syria, including in Azerbaijan, Libya and Niger”) and local Kurdish militia is reported from Manbij. According to the Independent Communications Network “Bianet”, the SNA has been backed by “extensive ground shelling by the Turkish Armed Forces”. The renewed and heartbreaking vulnerability of the Kurds, anxiously followed by millions who fear that Kobane will be the next target, underlines yet again the poisoned chalice of relying on manoeuvring between competing imperialist powers.
Also, Assad’s regime turned out to be no more than an empty shell. There are many reports of his army simply laying down arms as HTS advanced, and when it arrived in Damascus the army hierarchy didn’t even try to resist. The Syrian army simply abandoned their equipment – HTS fighters took photographs sitting in the cockpits of fighter aircraft left behind. Elsewhere soldiers are shown walking down the road in civilian clothes with their army uniforms simply left in piles on the ground.
So little support did Assad find among the population, allies and opponents alike, that in the last days he found himself isolated. He appealed to the Russians for help, but they said they had no resources to do so. Despite public pledges of support to Assad’s rule by the Iranian regime, by Friday the latter had started evacuating its military forces from the ground, including senior Quds Force commanders — effectively abandoning Assad to his fate. He apparently indirectly approached Trump for help who turned his back. He offered to negotiate with HTS, but they saw no need. Even in the Alawite city of Qardaha, the home city of the al-Assad family, crowds tore down statues of his father.
Who are Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – Organisation for the liberation of the Levant – is more an umbrella of armed militias. Its leader Abu Mohammed al-Julani was a supporter of Daesh in the period after 2011, tasked with setting up Jabhat al-Nusra to fight for the establishment of an Islamic state in Syria. According to Al-Jazeera al Julani then split with Daesh, pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda only then to reject al-Qaeda in 2017 to form HTS. This was accompanied by a change in aims from fighting to establish a Caliphate to “liberating” Syria from Assad rule and setting up a national Islamic republic.
HTS became a serious force, amongst the strongest militias fighting in Syria, after the 2016 recapture of Aleppo by Assad’s forces supported by Russian airpower. Many opposition fighters fleeing from Aleppo ended up in Idlib, which by 2017 was effectively under the control of HTS with a reported 30,000 fighters. This control provided an economic base for HTS, as much of the country’s oil flows through the region to the main port of Latakia and one of the main border crossings with Türkiye is under HTS control.
It ran the government (the so-called “Syrian Salvation Government”), providing services such as schools and healthcare as well as aid distribution as the Assad regime continued its horrendous bombing campaign. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians had fled to the region in a desperate attempt to reach Turkiye, but found the border closed. They live in refugee camps mostly without electricity in desperate conditions. One resident ironically comments “People are equal here – Everyone shares poverty, lack of food and lack of work.”
HTS however has run the region as an authoritarian, Islamic state. Opposition journalists are arrested and the practice of “missing persons” is widespread. Women are expected to wear the hijab, they are not allowed onto important courses at the university, and schools are segregated according to gender. But the memory of the 2011 uprising remains strong, leading to resistance; as one woman explained “the Syrian revolution broke taboos”. As late as September women in Idlib have been organising demonstrations against the security policies and repression by HTS, and demanding the removal of its leader al-Julani.
Imperialist vultures hovering
Suddenly, despite being caught off-guard by the rapid advance of HTS, which has been depicted as a “terrorist organisation” by the US, UK, EU, Russia, Türkiye and others, governments are reassessing their approach to Syria – not to assist the masses to improve their situation, but to grab what they can. Hypocritically governments such as Britain’s are rushing to rescind the “terrorist” label.
Iran has lost a key strategic partner. Much of its assistance to Hezbollah went through Syria, a key element of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” which it hoped would oppose western imperialism in the region. Russia has lost a key ally in the Middle East, a government which it had essentially protected from collapse in previous years. Tardis, in northern Syria, is Russia’s main overseas naval base, used not just to assist Assad’s air attacks on his opposition, but to challenge NATO influence in the Mediterranean. Its airbase at Hmeymin too was critical as a transport hub to support the operations of Russian (including Wagner) forces in the Sahel and elsewhere in Africa. For days now it has been withdrawing ships and aircraft and even if the Kremlin manages to come to some agreement with the new government, it has suffered a huge blow to its prestige.
While the eyes of the world have been directed at the seizure of Damascus, the US has been calculating how it can exploit what Biden has called a “moment of risk” and “historic opportunity”. It used the weekend to send a fleet of bombers to attack 75 Daesh targets. But while Trump quickly tweeted in capital letters that “This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved”, it is clear that the US finds itself having to sharply reassess its strategy. According to the Atlantic Council, “the US approach to Syria for the past decade—tolerating Assad and his Iranian patrons, hyper-focusing on the Islamic State, providing humanitarian assistance but ceasing political and military aid to the opposition, giving open-ended support to the YPG/PKK—has collapsed. Washington, and Jerusalem, will have to come up with a coherent and constructive approach to the new management in Damascus.”
Israel naturally, having claimed responsibility for assisting Assad’s downfall by destroying Hezbollah’s capacity, has already used the opportunity to expand its presence in Syria. Netanyahu has ordered the IDF to advance further into the occupied Golan heights and the Israeli media has reported the bombing of arms depots in Northern Syria and even Damascus, which according to Israeli Defence Minister Katz will be stepped up to “destroy heavy strategic weapons throughout Syria”.
That the Israeli regime would try to take advantage of the current situation in Syria comes as no surprise. But to contend, like some on the left do, that the fall of Assad, by weakening the so-called ‘axis of resistance’, is a blow to the Palestinians’ struggle for liberation, is to totally overlook the fact that the Assad dictatorship never cared one bit about the Palestinians. Like many other states in the region, it instead cynically weaponized their cause to bolster its own despotic rule. While posturing as an anti-imperialist defender of Palestinian rights, the regime repressed Palestinian political organizations, besieged and bombarded the Yarmouk refugee camp during the war, and has stood idle in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Its decades-long, de facto truce with Israel in securing the quiet on the occupied Golan Heights even once earned the praise from Netanyahu himself, who said in 2018, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime for 40 years”.
As for Türkiye, it has strengthened its hand even in opposition to the interests of the US and its NATO partners. It is clear that despite describing HTS as a terrorist organisation it was helping it to get arms, and reportedly was encouraging its advance. It is now using the opportunity to expand its presence in the North.
This is indeed a warning. HTS and its now allied militias may have defeated Assad and taken Damascus, but they do not have unconditional control over the whole of Syria. At this point, it appears, HTS is not actively seeking to attack the People’s Defence Units (YPG) and Womens’ Protection Units (YPJ) predominantly made up of Kurdish militants. It is attempting to project ‘respectability’ toward international, including Western, governments.
However, the Syrian National Army is more closely aligned with Türkiye’s agenda, which could lead to a ‘division of labor’ between the two armed groups, or potentially spark conflicts between them over their respective strategies. With Türkiye’s complete opposition to Kurdish autonomy, there is a real danger, whatever HTS says today about this being a victory “for all Syrians”, of a new phase of war with Türkiye in the North East to confront the YPG/YPJ, which have been supported by the US as its main asset in the fight against Daesh.
In this dangerous situation, the only reliable ally in the Kurdish people’s defence of their hard won gains of autonomy, democratic, feminist and secular rights, are the working and poor masses all across Syria and the region. An appeal for a real, socialist revolution to oppose all elites ruling by the gun, as imperialist puppets or -occupiers, including the racist, genocidal Israeli state’s aggressions, has the potential to ignite working class uprisings.
Is there a way forward?
Beyond the celebrations over the overthrow of the dictator, the reality of the new regime will begin to set in. Any attempt to establish rule along the lines of an authoritarian Islamic state as HTS has done in Idlib, with major restrictions on the rights of women and gender minorities, is likely to face resistance from a people that is now thirsty for a new future after 54 years of Assads’ dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the major blow Assad’s downfall represents to the interests and prestige of the Iranian regime, while emboldening its imperialist adversaries to some degree, could also reignite the confidence of the working and oppressed people within Iran itself. The recent uptick in protests by teachers, students, and pensioners across the country over the weekend may signal a shift in this direction.
Moreover, the overthrow of the brutal dictatorship, which may have seemed unimaginable for many only ten days ago, could reignite revolutionary aspirations from the working and oppressed masses against their own authoritarian rulers in other countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa and further strengthen the spirit of resistance against colonialism and imperialism expressed in the strong Palestine solidarity movement in the region.
As Oraib al Rantani, director of the Amman-based Al-Quds Centre for Political Studies points out in a Bloomberg article: “The second Arab Spring is coming, no question, all the drivers are still there: poverty, corruption, unemployment, political blockage and tyranny“.
At the same time, the militarized nature of Assad’s overthrow —through an armed group lacking grassroots democratic control, rather than through the mass and active struggle of the working class and the oppressed— could also contribute to a climate of fear and intimidation, and means that any movement from below might have to quickly contend with this group’s military power, and readiness to deploy it. HTS, itself a coalition of different forces, faces future conflicts as different interests arise, other reactionary armed factions vie for control and influence, and as the new regime probably attempts to defeat other forces such as the Kurds. Thrown into that already volatile mix is the greedy intervention of the imperialist forces all pushing their own interests against those of ordinary Syrians.
A new approach to build a genuinely democratic society is needed, one based on working class organisation, the only force which is capable of uniting the population across national and ethnic lines, capable of fighting authoritarianism, oppression, attacks on national rights and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people. Such a force would also confront the horrific economic situation in Syria by taking the natural resources of the country into public ownership. This would also require ousting all imperialist powers from the country and opposing their control and interests such as the US control over large parts of the oil fields. With the wealth of the country under democratic public ownership and control, it would be possible to establish a democratically controlled planned economy, and strive towards a democratic socialist federation of the Middle East. While this might seem far off, so did the fall of Assad only weeks ago. A first step could be continuing the mass outpouring on the streets and squares and turning them into ongoing manifestations for the rebuilding of a Syria free of all oppression.