Days after Zionist forces were beaten back in Lebanon, the Syrian front reignited dramatically, with imperialism and its regional allies deeply involved. The Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad was deposed on 8 December, barely a week into the offensive of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Damascus capitulated and al-Assad was evacuated to Russia, while Zionist bombing of Syrian army facilities enabled the HTS advance. Welcoming the coup were the powers responsible for years of war and sanctions, led by US, British and EU imperialism, and regionally by the Israeli state, Turkey and Arab reactionaries. US imperialism in particular has long used economic and political warfare to destroy the barriers to imperialist exploitation set by the Syrian state, along with its capacity to enable resistance. The forces which have seized Damascus and unleashed a wave of sectarian killings will allow the entrenchment of Israeli, Turkish and imperialist occupations of Syria. This is no revolution.
On 27 November 2024, after a period of stalemate in the Syrian war, HTS militias led an offensive to capture Aleppo and Damascus, and bring down the Ba’athist government. Launched from Idlib and the northwesterly region where HTS had set up the Turkish-funded Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) in November 2017, the operation came through a rapprochement between fundamentalist militias constituting the ‘revolutionary’ opposition. With the fall of Aleppo on 30 November and capture of Hama days later, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) appeared in a slick CNN interview predicting the fall of Damascus and identifying Russia and Iran as the main enemies of the ‘revolution’. Two days later, while Zionist warplanes mercilessly destroyed state defences, al-Sharaa gave a victory speech at the Umayyad Mosque, announcing that Syria would no longer be ‘a playground for Iranian ambitions’. He made no mention of imperialist, Zionist and Turkish interventions.
The coup followed years of proxy and economic warfare since 2011, and the de facto Balkanisation of Syria. With British backing, US imperialism established 21 military sites in Syria, considering eight as permanent bases, overseeing the plunder and destruction of grain stocks and siphoning off 80% of Syrian oil production, according to a 2023 Chinese foreign ministry report. Imperialist sanctions crippled the Syrian economy, preventing the import of medicines, medical supplies, food, energy resources, infrastructure and many other necessities. In over a decade of conflict, a reported 6.2 million Syrians were displaced internationally, along with over 7.2 million internally. The World Food Programme estimated the number of food insecure Syrians at 12.1 million and, by January 2024, imperialist sanctions had left 16.7 million people requiring humanitarian assistance. In the decade to 2024, the economy was reduced by more than half. At least 80% of Syrians now live in poverty, compared to 10% in 2011.
Unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, the March 2011 street movements of the ‘Syrian spring’ did not develop democratic or anti-imperialist characteristics. Petit bourgeois interests attracted European support, while weapons, training and funding to ‘opposition’ groups poured in from Qatar, Turkey and other regional interests, fuelling the rise of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Free Syrian Army and other sectarian currents. Though the Ba’athist government had found popularity at various historic moments, vast swathes of the country now fell outside of its reach. Seeking Russian military support, the Syrian national army destroyed ISIS strongholds and liberated Aleppo in December 2016, enabling the return of over 500,000 refugees. Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah backed Syrian military campaigns, in part explaining the timing of the HTS offensive, days after the Lebanese resistance had forced the Zionist retreat.
The new regime
After the coup, Western and Arab media made headlines exposing the prisons of the Ba’athist government and manipulated stories of repression. Well-documented HTS internment, torture and murder of political opponents in Idlib was ignored, along with the faction’s murderous roots in al-Qaeda, al-Nusrah and ISIS. Having led branches of all of these organisations before becoming de facto coup leader, al-Sharaa is now feted by imperialist media, with puff pieces labelled ‘from jihadist to pragmatist’ (France24) or ‘How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself’ (BBC). The FBI quietly removed its $10m bounty on al-Sharaa, following his December 2024 meeting with Biden government representative Barbara Leaf.
Showing videos of violent ‘arrests’ by fundamentalist fighters on 5 January, the Syria Today broadcaster revealed that 900 young men had been disappeared in Homs. Alawites, Shias and others have been beheaded or had their throats cut in Idlib, Homs, Hama and Lattakia. On 26 January, 35 people were executed by HTS forces in 72 hours, with most of these reportedly former police officers who had presented themselves to new ‘settlement centres.’ Extra-judicial raids in lawless Damascus have ransacked and shut down falafel shops and bakeries, claiming there were weapons inside and hunting down any potential opposition. While al-Sharaa dons suits and shakes hands with imperialist politicians, the fall of the Syrian state has ushered in a sectarian gangland. Amidst declarations by HTS justice minister Shadi al-Waisi that Syria’s ‘era of oppression’ had ended, video evidence from Idlib showed his public execution of two women for supposed adultery, when acting as an al-Nusra ‘judge’ in 2015.
The new regime now demands that all militias fold into a ‘national army,’ recruited clearly on allegiance to HTS and violently opposing secular nationalism or socialism. Making peace with US imperialism and its regional proxies, the Damascus junta already resembles the ‘official’ government in Libya, presiding over a gangland and reliant on the aid of interventionist powers. Signals from the Trump administration suggest that this means the Balkanisation of Syria, rubber stamping Israeli and Turkish zones of colonisation. British Labour government representative Ann Snow met al-Sharaa in Damascus barely a week after the fall of the Ba’athist government. On 12 January foreign secretary David Lammy rushed to Saudi Arabia for a Syria summit, meeting with his coup-appointed counterpart and founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, Assad al-Shaybani. Imperialism and its allies moved quickly to unofficially recognise and build contact with the HTS coup leaders, with Jordan and Qatar particularly keen to officialise their recent histories of intervention in the Syrian war.
What next?
Syria had refused IMF loans since 1984 but an IMF spokesperson said in December that the body was ready to help the ‘rehabilitation of the Syrian economy.’ This would mean privatisation and the destruction of already decimated social provision. In January, acting as oil minister for the new regime, Ghiath Diab told CNBC Arabia that Syria would welcome multinational oil companies back as soon as sanctions were lifted, threatening the reversal of nationalisations made in 1964. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, HTS representative Asaad al-Shibani assured potential investors that the government would ‘open the road for foreign investment.’
Prior to the proxy warfare that led to the coup, the Syrian state represented a block to imperialist expansion, explaining its inclusion on the US ‘axis of evil,’ and the violent hostility of Zionism and Arab monarchies. The Ba’ath Party used socialist phraseology and, while its form of bourgeois rule restricted the participation of the masses, education and health care remained free and accessible, unlike the rest of today’s Arab world. Syria boasted a ‘thriving agricultural sector,’ according to a 2018 UN report, but war and sanctions devastated the economy.
Palestinian revolutionary Wissam Rafeedie points out that the fall of the Ba’athist government reflected, in part, a ‘handover of power’ agreed upon by the Assad government’s allies. Before the launching of the HTS offensive, representatives of Iran, Turkey and Russia met at the Astana summit on 11-12 November and discussed the Syrian situation, before convening again with Qatari rulers in Doha on 7 December. Coming on the eve of the fall of Damascus, they released an unprecedented statement calling for dialogue with ‘legitimate opposition groups.’ The swift coup of HTS forces, writes Rafeedie, reflected not only the internal repercussions of years of economic sanctions and repressive policies of which Palestinian organisers had fallen afoul, it fundamentally reflected, ‘without hesitation, that the hostile trinity [Turkey, US and Israel], through their groups and gangs, had succeeded well in exploiting legitimate popular [grievances] and seizing the right moment.’
On 24 January, thousands protested in Fahl, near Homs, demanding an end to the violent repression that had seen over 50 residents massacred by HTS fighters. A day later, the Syrian Resistance organisation claimed responsibility for the assassination of the HTS police chief in Dara’a. The threat of resistance to imperialist partition and fundamentalist rule in Syria threatens to blow the whole project apart.
Syrian partition and Zionist land grab
The coup in Damascus could never have succeeded without the systematic Zionist bombing of Syria, carried out repeatedly since 2011 and over 220 times in the year after 7 October 2023. As the Israeli occupation of Golan expanded westwards, leading HTS warlords made clear their policy of normalisation with the Zionist state and targeted Palestinian resistance fighters for repression. In less than 48 hours following the coup, Syria was subject to over 400 Israeli airstrikes, targeting everything from ports to police stations. This campaign continued in the weeks to follow, including the massacre of 17 people in an Israeli strike on Adra Industrial City in the Damascus countryside on 29 December. Targeted Israeli destruction of ‘strategic weapons systems’ in Quneitra and Daraa have disabled the means of the Syrian army to reorganise. Taking advantage of the collapse of Syrian air defences in the anarchy following the fall of Damascus, Zionist bombings hit areas renowned for their loyalty to the former government, including Lattakia and Tartous.
Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that the fall of al-Assad was the ‘direct result of blows dealt to Hezbollah and Iran’ by the Zionist state, seeing in the developments ‘new and very important opportunities for Israel.’ Within hours of the HTS takeover, Zionist tanks rolled into the formerly Syrian-controlled side of Mount Hermon, expanding its buffer zone miles beyond its official occupation of the Golan. As Israeli soldiers took over positions previously populated by Syrian army personnel, Netanyahu announced the end of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement which had provided a demilitarised buffer. The ‘Greater Israel’ dreams of extremist Zionists had been halted in Lebanon and Gaza but were alive and well following the Syrian coup. To HTS silence, Zionist troops in Quneitra and Maariya raid and shoot Syrians who oppose their presence.
In early January, HTS ‘mayor’ of Damascus, Maher Marwan affirmed: ‘Our problem is not with Israel… We don’t want to meddle in anything that will threaten Israel’s security.’ Al-Sharaa had told The Times, that ‘We do not want any conflict whether with Israel or anyone else and we will not let Syria be used as a launchpad for attacks [on Israel].’ He and the HTS ‘revolutionaries’ do not call for an end to the occupation of the Golan, but rather that ‘Israel has to pull back to its previous positions.’ On 13 December, HTS warlords gathered representatives of Palestinian resistance factions in Yarmouk refugee camp and told them they must disband. The 17 December announcement that all armed forces should be merged with the security apparatus of the new state was followed immediately by the violent HTS targeting of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command) near the Lebanese border on 18 December.
Whatever the historical problems with Ba’athist rule, Syria for decades provided space for and facilitated the development of resistance movements. Damascus hosted branches of Palestinian factions, offering opportunities for the development of the struggle, including printing presses for newspapers and cultural platforms, and at various moments offering a haven to George Habash, Abu Ali Mustafa, Leila Khaled and other revolutionaries. Described by Ghassan Kanafani as a ‘military petit bourgeois’ regime, Syria differed from the bloody hostility to displaced Palestinians seen in Jordan and the Gulf. This position now faces violent reversal by the coup regime. By attacking forces opposed to an HTS dictatorship, the Zionist occupation acts with the blessing of US imperialism and complicity of Britain and the EU.
Louis Brehony
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February/March 2025
