Assad falls, Islamists take over Syria

The Syrian regime has collapsed. Bashar al-Assad has fled the country. His army has disarmed, and his government has capitulated. The prisons have been overrun, and thousands have been released. Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians have taken to the streets in celebration. 

The power vacuum is being filled by local militias and warlords who have taken hold of different localities throughout the country. Druze militias have taken over Sweida and nearby localities in the south. US-backed militias in Al Tanf are advancing on the center of the country, and Iranian militias have reportedly retreated from Deir Ezzor, handing control to Kurdish SDF fighters. Meanwhile, Russian forces have retreated to the western coastal areas along with remnants of Assad’s forces.

The offensive of HTS from Idlib province took even themselves by surprise as the rotten Assad regime fell in a few days / Image: Rr016

Nevertheless, in spite of all the talk of an inclusive transitional government, it is the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that has undeniably emerged as the dominant force in Syria today. What started ostensibly as a limited military operation in the Aleppo countryside by the group quickly developed into the unraveling of the Syrian army and state altogether. To its own surprise, as well as that of its backers in Ankara, the Islamist onslaught sliced through Syria with ease.

For now, emotions are running high in the Middle East. Many are jubilant over the downfall of Assad, while others despair over the return of Islamist reactionaries and the prospect of further instability to come. Our task as communist revolutionaries, however, to repeat the words of Spinoza, is neither to laugh, nor to weep, but to understand. 

The Islamists who overran the country have been fighting against the regime for fourteen years without any luck. Now they succeeded within ten days. Nobody expected this. This requires explanation. What forces were behind the unraveling of Syria?

Once again on the Syrian ‘rebels’

It is hard not to hold one’s nose when reading the western press on Syria. The same media which regularly denounces the ‘barbarism’ of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and which proudly lauds Israel’s blood-soaked regime as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East,’ still portrays HTS and its allies in the most respectable and even inspiring terms as ‘rebels’.

These ‘rebels’ were once dubbed the ‘moderate rebels’ by the West. We have often asked, ‘moderate in relation to what?’ That question was never answered. What was meant was that these were Islamist jihadi groups that were supposed to be ‘more moderate’ than the Islamic State madmen who ravaged Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019.

In reality, HTS traces its roots back to that same Islamic State (IS) and the international Islamist Al Qaeda network. Its differences with IS are of a mere tactical character, whereas on all principled questions, they share the same reactionary ideology. It rose up in the undergrowth of Islamist groups that were armed and funded by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states during the eight-year civil war which started in 2012.

The West depicts the armed groups now taking over as 'rebels', but they, and their leader, come from the same undergrowth of jihadi groups as Al Qaeda and ISIS / Image: US State Department, Wikimedia Commons

Crushing all real opposition within the Islamist camp, the group and its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani ascended to power over the northwestern province of Idlib, where the movement was isolated by Assad forces and their allies. Here it survived solely due to Turkish military protection and economic support.

But with Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon taking up a huge part of Iranian and Hezbollah resources, and the war in Ukraine diverting Russian attention, it is clear that the Islamists saw their chance to push for more territory. Turkish President Erdogan saw this as a further chance to expand his influence into Syria, for which he has long had grand designs.

Erdogan has always had ambitions of dominating Syria and northern Iraq in the form of a neo-Ottoman revival. He is also hostile to Kurdish PKK-linked forces controlling northeastern Syria, with the support of the US and the collaboration of the Assad regime. At the same time, he is faced with an economic crisis at home and is looking to return millions of Syrian refugees whom the Assad regime would not agree to accept. Thus, seeing the Russians and Iranians distracted elsewhere, he gave the green light to HTS.

Erdogan has long held neo-Ottoman imperialist ambitions, and Turkey will in the first instance emerge stronger after HTS' takeover / Image: Russian Presidential Executive Office

It is however beyond doubt that the CIA and Mossad would also have known about preparations for the offensive and tacitly or actively supported it. “Nobody knows if Iran and the regime would have been weakened without the recent Israeli attacks in Syria, which have allowed us to return and free the lands and the country,” one HTS source told Israeli media. Without the relentless military and economic war on Iran and its allies in the region, none of the events of the past two weeks would have happened.

Imperialist intervention

The Islamists hijacked the incipient Syrian revolution of 2011, a fact which initially saved the regime. Faced with the terror of Islamic fundamentalism, Syrians rallied behind Assad, who was propped up by Iranian-aligned militias and Russia’s air force. Now, the same jihadi forces evoke passivity or are even welcomed among large layers of the population. How can that be?

As we have explained before, Syria was, until recently, among the most advanced societies in the Middle East. Having eradicated capitalism in the 1970s through a peculiar course of events, it achieved high levels of industrialisation and modernisation as well as high levels of culture and welfare that set it apart from most of its neighbors.

It was the introduction of a market economy in the 1990s that sent poverty and unemployment creeping once more into the fabric of society. Along with the external impulse of the general Arab revolution, this was ultimately the socio-economic basis for the Syrian revolution of 2011.

The jihadi insurgency fueled by the West and the ensuing civil war dramatically worsened the situation. More than half a million people were killed, and more than half of the country’s 21 million pre-war population had to flee their homes, either to other regions or to neighboring countries. A whole generation was left broken and adrift.

Meanwhile, industry was decimated, vital infrastructure likewise, and Syria was carved into parts controlled by different imperialist powers, leaving the regime cut off from former agricultural lands and oil fields. Syria’s GDP shrank by more than half between 2010 and 2020. The dislocation of the economy was devastating.

Post-war pressure

Western imperialism, by and large, lost the civil war. The jihadis were isolated in the northwestern corner of the country, surviving only under the protection of Turkish imperialism. America maintained a weak military base in Al Tanf in the south and established patronage over the Kurdish forces in the northeast. But all the major cities and industrial areas remained in Assad’s hands.

The West, however, seeing Syria as a hostile Iranian-backed nation, imposed a series of merciless sanctions on the country aimed at preventing its reconstruction. Apart from arms, the sanctions targeted energy imports, infrastructure development, and financial transactions – fundamental pillars of the economy. As of March 2022, the country was the third most sanctioned regime in the world.

Meanwhile, disaster piled upon disaster in Syria, first in the form of the Lebanese banking crisis – partially due to US sanctions – the COVID-19 pandemic, disastrous droughts, and a devastating earthquake in Aleppo in 2023.

A World Bank report paints a stark picture of the situation:

“Syria’s economic situation continued to worsen in 2023. Economic activity, as proxied by nighttime light emissions, declined by 1.2% year-on-year (yoy), especially along Syria’s western borders, in part due to weakened trade activity. Nighttime gas-flaring data also shows a 5.5% yoy drop in oil production, partly due to earthquake- and conflict-related infrastructure damage. Despite a rebound in agricultural production due to improved weather conditions in 2023 (from the near-historical low in 2022), the conflict has nonetheless severely affected the agricultural sector, with the massive displacement of farmers and extensive damage to infrastructure and irrigation systems leading to a decline in crop yields. Conflict-related disruptions have also severely impacted foreign trade. A collapse in domestic industrial and agricultural output increased Syria’s dependence on imports. Reliance on food imports, although already an issue prior to 2011, has also intensified with the conflict. In 2023, the Syrian pound depreciated substantially by 141% against the U.S. dollar, while consumer price inflation is estimated to have risen by 93%, exacerbated by government subsidy cuts. As the economy slows, fiscal revenues continue to decline. In response, authorities have further reduced spending, with particularly sharp cuts to capital expenditure, and continue to tighten the subsidy programs.”

Behind these figures there exists a society where the basis for civilised life has been eroded in large parts. The proud Syrian people have, to a great extent, been reduced to living a pitiful, destitute existence. More than half of them are unemployed, and over 90 percent live below the poverty line, surviving on less than $2 a day – up from a negligible level in 2009. According to a 2023 survey, around 11 percent of families in the Aleppo area reported that their children were engaged in labour, primarily due to insufficient household income.

The bloody fingerprints of imperialism are all over the country. It has made life insufferable for millions of people in Syria, as it has elsewhere in the region.

The Assad regime and its backers

Syrian capitalism could not provide a way out of this dead end. Rampant corruption and decay infested the Syrian state, which had become a phantom held up only by Iranian and Russian military support. Soldiers were barely paid, officers ruled capriciously with no loyalty to the country or its army, and state functionaries plundered resources unabated. People looked back at the achievements after a decade of civil war and found nothing to celebrate. As our Syrian comrades told me earlier today: “The people were desperate, and no one was prepared to defend Assad.”

The victory of the Islamists has nothing to do with strength on their part, but rather with the extreme rottenness and weakness of the Assad regime. Like a rotten apple it fell at the slightest jolt.

Here lies an example of what happens when the struggle against imperialism remains confined within the bounds of capitalism. The designs of US imperialism to subdue Syria were defeated. But the Syrian capitalist class showed itself entirely unable to solve the country’s problems. On the contrary, it found it more profitable to rob and steal from the masses than to develop society and improve living standards. This failure is not due to the ill will or incompetence of the regime – it is the nature of capitalism in its present epoch.

The Assad regime was propped up by Iran and Russia. His fall shows that, firstly, these nations defend their own interests, not those of the Syrian people, and secondly that resistance to imperialism on the basis of supporting capitalist regimes ends in disaster / Image: kremlin.ru

Russia and Iran, long portraying themselves as anti-imperialists and defenders of a secular Syria, were seen to bail out without a fight. Russian forces retreated to the coast to defend naval bases and military installations. Iranian militias withdrew into Iraq.

This reveals the limitations of Russia as a world power, stretched too thin to fight on two fronts – in Ukraine and Syria. Iran has also clearly taken a hit after a year of conflict with Israel and the West. Moreover, given the hostile anti-government mood, attempting to retain control over Syria by armed force would have risked both nations being seen as occupying powers. They would have been engulfed by a new, more powerful insurgency.

In the end, Lord Palmerston’s old saying was proven true: “Nations have no permanent friends, nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” The interests of Iran and Russia in Syria were those of their respective capitalist classes – not those of the masses of Syria or the broader Middle East. 

The struggle against Imperialism 

Now, a new cynical game has begun for the redivision of Syria and the region as a whole. Israel’s western-backed wars on Gaza and Lebanon have upended the fragile equilibrium that had just emerged in the Middle East. The direction of the forces now in motion is impossible to predict.

Turkey has clearly emerged stronger, while Iran and Russia have been weakened. This will likely embolden anti-Iranian forces in Iraq and Lebanon, both of which remain highly unstable. Flammable material also exists in Jordan, the Gulf, and Egypt, waiting for a spark to set it ablaze. 

It is a testament to the extreme cynicism of imperialists that they would rather drag the region down the path of barbarism than concede their domination over it. Until this reactionary force is eradicated, it will continue to spread its poison throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The lesson for which the Syrian masses will pay dearly in the coming period, is that the masses cannot rely on any capitalist regime to defend their interests in the fight against imperialism. They can only rely on their own power and those of millions of workers and poor in the region and beyond. They all suffer under the crisis of capitalism which has shown to be a total dead end for society. 

The struggle against poverty and misery, and against backwardness and imperialism can only succeed as a struggle against the capitalist class and its system as a whole. The Syrian revolution and the Middle Eastern revolution will triumph as a socialist revolution led by the workers and peasants themselves, or it will not triumph at all.