2013-2014 Syria under fire: a bloodied revolution

591 Pages·2017·7.007 MB·English

by  Carlos Munzer, Abu Muad, Abu Al Baraa

2013 - 2014
SYRIA UNDER FIRE
A BLOODIED REVOLUTION
Carlos Munzer - Abu Muad - Abu Al Baraa
Correspondents from Maghreb
and Middle East
5
Foreword to the English edition
This edition is an English translation of the book "2013-2014: Syria
Under Fire, a bloodied revolution"that was published in late 2014.
This book was presented in Argentina in the National Library of Buenos
Aires in August of 2015. Also, it was published in the Spanish State and
presented there in January of 2017.
In this edition we reproduce, before the first chapter, a review of the
presentation made in Buenos Aires, before a crowded auditorium, eager to
deepen the debate on the Syrian question and lift the veil that had been
laid on the massacre and genocide carried out by Bashar and Putin on ac-
count of imperialism in Syria. At the table of this presentation there were
two of the authors of this work: Carlos Munzer and Abu Muad, surrounded
by representatives of solidarity committees with the Syrian people around
the world.
In this edition in English, we then incorporate the presentation of the
book Syria Under Fire staged in Buenos Aires. There they explained the ar-
guments and fundamental opinions of the authors on the development of
the revolution and the counterrevolution in Syria.
***
In this book, a call is made to break the siege of silence and slanders
mounted on the Syrian revolution, which gave al-Assad a free hand to carry
out the greatest genocide of the 21st century.
By mid-2015, this siege of silence was broken when hundreds of thou-
sands of dispossessed Syrian refugees, desperately reached the shores of Eu-
rope. They left their martyrs and their blood in the Mediterranean Sea. The
image of Aylan Kurdi, a little boy of only three years old, floating lifeless
on the shores of Turkey shook the world from its foundations and unveiled
the hitherto hidden catastrophe suffered by the Syrian masses.
The Syrian refugees marched through Europe and the European work-
6 Syria Under Fire
ing class came out to meet them with great class solidarity. European bor-
ders were opened and the unity of the working class was placed on the order
of the day on either side of the Mediterranean.
That is why imperialism acted quickly. It launched a campaign of Islam-
ophobia, based on the self-inflicted attacks of Paris on November 13th,
2015. Social-imperialist leftist parties played the role of spokesmen for this
sinister campaign, reaffirming that "the enemy is ISIS." They separated the
refugees from the rest of the workers in Europe. And so the European
Union closed the borders again and today the refugees have been locked in
real concentration camps. The siege of the Syrian revolution was again im-
posed.
***
The events that came hastily on after the first edition of this book in
Spanish showed the total validity of this work.
The reader will find that Syria under Fireunveils the counterrevolution-
ary plan of imperialism for Syria. At the Geneva conferences, under
Obama's command, all his agents and lackeys were centralized in the
Maghreb and the Middle East. Thus, Bashar al-Assad, reinforced by Putin,
Iranian Ayatollahs, and Hezbollah, played the role of massacring without
mercy the Syrian masses who had risen in a heroic revolution for bread and
freedom. More than 600,000 dead, entire cities destroyed, most of the pop-
ulation forced to flee their homes and live as IDPs, in tents in the middle
of nowhere, on Syrian borders, or as refugees in other countries, are the re-
sult of such a counterrevolution.
On the other hand, also in the conference of Geneva there was Turkey.
Under Turkish command was the Sunnite bourgeoisie, essentially the one
that commanded the FSA, while critically and to its left was located - and
still is still located - Jabhat al-Nusra, that expresses the commercial bour-
geoisie and the more nationalistic fraction of the dominant elites in Syria.
This Sunnite bourgeoisie dressed as a friend of the revolution to enter like
a Trojan Horse to the zones that the masses had freed of the presence of
Bashar. His goal was to control the revolutionary uprising and end giving
it out from within. This has been more than proven by the fall of Aleppo,
Homs, Daraya, Hama and many other rebel cities.
7
***
At the moment that this edition is being published in English, the sec-
ond volume of this book is in the works that will be titled: "2015-2017:
Syria, Operation Final Massacre". This publication has been delayed be-
cause Abu Al Baraa, one of his coauthors, was assassinated at the hands of
the genocidal forces of fascist al-Assad and the butcher Putin, while he was
defending Aleppo’s Southern Front, on October 24th, 2016.
By mid-to-late-2015, Abu Al Baraa had embarked on a journey to meet
with the editorial team of Rudolph Klement Publishing House (Abu Muad,
Carlos Munzer, among others) to advance the culmination of this second
volume. He spent more than a month in Turkey processing his visa to go
to Argentina and Brazil.
During his stay in Turkey, Abu Al Baraa dedicated himself to writing
for this second volume of the book Syria Under Fire. He told about the ex-
periences of the Syrian refugees in that country. He also wrote about the
reality of the oppressed Kurdish people, who were being brutally persecuted
and massacred by the Erdogan’s government, while in Syria the Stalinist
PKK put them under the command of US imperialism and its operations
in the north of that country. Also, while abroad, he described the suffering
of the masses in his country. Therefore, in this edition in English, we have
included these works of Abu Al Baraa as an annex to this work, which the
reader will find on page 565.
Abu Al Baraa, a writer of this book, who is today dead, murdered by al-
Assad's assassins, understood -like the rest of the authors of this book- that
the victory of the revolution had a fundamental element: breaking the siege
of the Syrian revolution. As the Syrian martyred people who came to Eu-
rope by 2015, international solidarity had to be conquered in order to stop
the imperialist powers that from the beginning had supported al-Assad so
he could do for them the "dirty work" of massacring the revolution.
Abu Al Baraa ended his stay in Turkey in early December 2015 without
getting the visa. The governments of Brazil and Argentina denied it. Islam-
ophobia was growing in the West. The EU was beginning to close its bor-
ders to refugees and to lock them up in concentration camps, as we said
earlier.
8 Syria Under Fire
Abu Al Baraa had then to return to Syria. There he continued his work
as a fighter of the revolution, writer, and journalist; he wrote from the very
place of events. He was a socialist of the Syrian revolution, but deeply in-
ternationalist. Like all the authors of this book, he was convinced that the
Syrian revolution could only succeed as part of the same struggle and revo-
lution together with the workers of the oppressed peoples of the Maghreb
and the Middle East, and fundamentally with the European working class.
For this reason, after giving an account of the presentation of this book,
in this edition, we have included the tribute to Abu Al Baraa by our pub-
lishing house. Also accompanying this homage is the one written by the
authors of the book Syria under Fire, Carlos Munzer, and Abu Muad.
Next, we reproduce the column of the Argentinean newspaper Perfil of
November 19th, 2016, written by Rafael Spregelburd, Argentinean writer,
and playwright, in honor of Abu al-Baraa. This column is entitled "To write
a book. I have in my hands the book of a dead man". It has all the sensitivity
of an intellectual who has captured the drama of the Syrian masses, which
this work concentrates, and of one of its writers who died fighting for bread
and freedom when fighting against al-Assad. Such a wonderful homage!
Thus, before the Presentation of the book (translated from the Spanish
Edition), the tributes to our friend and comrade Abu Al Baraa, are accom-
panying this foreword to the English edition.
***
The present edition in English of this work is published when rebel
Aleppo has already fallen. For months, Aleppo was surrounded by the geno-
cidal forces of Bashar and Putin. No food or any kind of supply could get
into it. There was no way out either, for anyone who tried to leave it was
captured by Bashar’s forces and did not see the light of day again. The be-
sieged city lived incessant bombing, destruction of all its infrastructure, hos-
pitals, schools, houses.
During 2016 we witnessed this brutal massacre, but it was also clear to
all Syrian resistance facing that counterrevolutionary coup that it would
not have been possible if Bashar and Putin had not had the aid of - that is,
the giving out of the resistance by - the Sunnite bourgeois generals who
were in command of all fractions of the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra
9
front.
Survivors of such a massacre, who suffered starvation while resisting
Bashar, reported that in besieged rebel Aleppo the generals of the Free Syr-
ian Army kept their warehouses closed which had enough food to feed the
people for months. They had also grabbed the armament, and meanwhile,
they told everyone who resisted against Bashar that there were neither arms
nor ammunition or any more forces and that they had to back down.
This sector of the Sunnite bourgeoisie had called to abandon the battle
in Aleppo against the dog Bashar. It withdrew forces from that city to sup-
port the Turkish invasion of Syria under the pretext of "confronting ISIS".
Jabhat al-Nusra mobilized its forces and took them in from Idlib; they
announced a multi-phase plan to "break the siege of Aleppo". They did not
advance a millimeter to immediately declare that "the encirclement could
not be broken" and that "there were no conditions." They argued that if
they continued in their attempt, Bashar would continue to massacre civil-
ians at a time when they needed humanitarian aid. Thus they justified their
withdrawal and signed a pact with the UN to enter Aleppo with food, etc.
But it happened that Al Nusra left and Bashar continued to massacre an
isolated and sold out Aleppo, reason why he could finally enter it in De-
cember of 2016.
Thus the plans of the Geneva Conference under the command of US
imperialism were applied. al-Assad, Putin, and Hezbollah massacred with-
out mercy; while Turkey and the Sunnite bourgeoisie guaranteed that the
Resistance was given out from within. Each of these bourgeois forces sought
and even seeks today its share of the spoils of a broken and martyred Syria.
But they all have a limit in this dispute: the danger that the armed masses
will advance to conquer the bread by attacking the interests of usurers,
bankers, millionaire businessmen of the various bourgeois gangs of Syria,
minor partners and subjected to imperialism. The same is ISIS, whose gen-
erals are the guardians of the oil wells and pipelines of northern Syria and
the Sunnite triangle of Iraq.
The fall of Aleppo marked a before and after in the Syrian revolution.
When this book was published in Spanish in late 2014, the battle for Dam-
ascus was open. The fall of Bashar in the capital was raised a thousand and
one times. Imperialism saved him, sending Iranian and Putin’s troops since
his army had melted down. The Kurdish commandos worked together with
10 Syria Under Fire
them for the fall of Aleppo and the key cities of the Resistance. Today we
live the tragedy of seeing the revolution in its last trenches, with a holocaust
on the verge of consummation, after the Sunnite bourgeoisie of the FSA
gave out from within the heroic resistance of the masses of Aleppo.
As the Introduction to this book says on page 59: "Syria: a great revo-
lution drowned in blood and covered with betrayal."It is increasingly clear
that in Syria imperialism concentrated its efforts to chastise the workers
and peoples of the world that dare "rebel" against tyrannies and oppressors
and fight for bread and all their demands, and also imperialism sought "to
contain a chain of revolutions that from Tunisia to Libya to Yemen to Egypt
to Damascus threatened to reach Jerusalem."
US imperialism could not intervene directly with its army since, as
shown in this book, it had already had to flee from Iraq and partly from
Afghanistan, as the American masses were no longer wanting to die for
Bush or for the imperialist oil companies, much less for Wall Street looters.
Thus, in these six years of the Syrian revolution, countless times the masses
were able to assault and regroup for new counteroffensives, all given out
from within by this cruel and cynical Sunnite bourgeoisie.
***
If this treacherous plan of the Geneva conference could be applied, it
was because there was also the whole international left, in its Stalinist, social
democratic and renegades-of-Marxism variants, which ended up dressing
al-Assad as "anti-imperialist" and depicting the heroic resistance of the Syr-
ian people as enemies of the workers of the world.
The tragedy of the Syrian revolution is that the world working class
could not concentrate its forces because the reformist left prevented it, en-
circling the revolution. They said that the enemy was ISIS and not Bashar.
Some openly supported this genocidal dog who acted on behalf of imperi-
alism. Others called for neutrality and to refrain from intervening, so he
could continue to massacre with impunity. Other ones supported the Sun-
nite bourgeoisie that gave out the revolution from within. Finally, others
followed the Kurdish PKK and its pact with Bashar as the soul to the body.
11
All infused Islamophobia to the world working class and separated it from
their class siblings in the Maghreb and the Middle East.
All tendencies of the reformist left and the union bureaucracies left the
Syrian revolution isolated and allowed imperialism to carry out its coun-
terrevolutionary plan with all its agents.
***
At the end of this edition in English, a new meeting of the Astana (cap-
ital of Kazakhstan) conference -a continuation of the Geneva conference-
has just been completed. The reader will find that the present work speaks
of a plan of partition of Syria, which is precisely what they have decided to
impose already in this last meeting. This plan is expressed in Chapter 3 en-
titled "The Plan for the Lebanonization of Syria" and in Chapter 5, entitled
"The objectives of the Geneva II conference".
Since the Astana conference, the implementation in Syria of "safe areas",
which are ghettos - perhaps the size of provinces - where the resistance has
to be completely disarmed and to accept the control of these areas by the
armies of Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The USA, which has already put troops
on the ground and launched some bombs to prove that it is who will dis-
tribute Syria, has openly entered the north of that country.
That is to say, we are entering a critical phase of the Syrian revolution,
where the partition of the nation and the disarmament of the masses are
tried to be imposed, and the massacre consummated. The last trenches of
resistance have not surrendered; but as they are subjected to the bourgeois
gangs and with the Syrian revolution isolated from the world working class,
it is day by day strangled more. We are living a tragedy for all the workers
of the world.
That is to say; if the plan of "safe zones" is imposed completely, it would
mean the defeat of the revolution and the distribution of business in a split
Syria… i.e., the "peace of the graveyards".
Thus we see that the Syrian north and east - the oil zones - are under
the control of the American troops that have put the Kurdish YPG under
their command and now order the gradual withdrawal of ISIS, being careful
that they do not make the masses rise up in this process. Turkey, in turn,
controls a corridor and a northern border crossing, guarding the pipelines
12 Syria Under Fire
and securing the transit of its trade route. The role of gendarmes goes to
Iran and Russia, to support fascist al-Assad. But they are mere hitmen; they
cannot have Syrian territory under their direct control.
If this plan were to be imposed, Syria would end, with areas under Amer-
ican and Turkish control, a possible accession of the UN, also of al-Assad
with mercenary troops (supported from behind by the Russian bayonets)
or the Sunnite bourgeoisie imposing the "safe zones", which mean nothing
more than surrender and disarmament.
***
When this English edition of Syria under Fire is published, we witness
the tragedy of the Kurdish people. The responsibility comes from its lead-
ership, the Stalinist PKK (Workers' Party of Kurdistan), which has main-
tained since 2012 a pact with the dog Bashar and also with US imperialism,
that tied the luck of this people to that of its oppressors. The reader will
find in the present work the denunciation to this pact and the warning of
the terrible consequences that it would bring for the exploited Kurds. Today
we see that not even autonomy has been given to the Kurdish people in
Syria, while the Turkish killer army encircles and chases it, and imprisons,
represses and brutally assassinates it in Turkey.
US troops have landed openly in the so-called "Rojava", the Kurdish
area of Syria. They have installed military bases there. They have taken US
marines, tanks, and planes. They command and lead the actions of the
YPG, who have already become true mercenary troops for US imperialism.
In this book an even more precise definition of ISIS is elaborated: it is
the guardian of the oil wells for imperialism, and it served to control mili-
tarily from within the revolutionary uprisings in eastern Syria and the Sunni
triangle of Iraq. Therefore ISIS continues to guarantee the flow of oil to
the transnationals and where it has stepped and imposed itself, the revolu-
tion has stopped.
In Syria, we see today that after ISIS imposed itself in Raqqa and Deir
ez-Zor, these cities ceased to be bastions of the fight against al-Assad. The
2014 offensive of the Sunnite triangle Iraqi masses was stopped by ISIS at