
Syria: history shapes our organising today
Daire Ní Chnáimh and Pete Cannell •How does the overthrow of Assad fit in the wider context of the Middle East, Israeli aggression and inter-imperialist competition, and how do we centre the Syrian fight for popular freedom in our practical solidarity in Britain?
The overthrow of Bashar al-Assad has led to celebrations across the Middle East and among the Syrian diaspora. It is brilliant to see the prisons opened, the statues pulled down, Assad fleeing the country and people taking to the streets to express their dissent for the first time in more than a decade.
However, predatory forces are taking immediate advantage of the instability caused by the overthrow. The Israeli state bluntly pursues the expansionist logic of its colonial project, digging trenches and fortifying new military outposts to occupy Syrian land around the Golan Heights. It has now successfully seized the buffer zone agreed in 1974. The new de facto government in Damascus has not acted against this occupation so far, although reportedly the village of Abidin in Daraa has independently resisted the incursions of the Israeli military. Turkey, too, is expanding its military presence on the Turkey-Syria border, and attacking Kurdish areas within Syria.
Jubilation for Syrians has arrived alongside heightened danger from all corners. Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the movement that has formed the new government, has its origins as an Al Qaeda affiliate. It was not part of the original revolutionary movement. They are looking to get sanctions lifted and their rule legitimised by the West. The fall of one tyrannical government is no guarantee that it won’t be replaced by another.
However, HTS has made a political transition from a perspective of global Jihad to become a nationalist Islamist group. In interviews since the uprising HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has spoken about the diversity of Syrian society and the need for pluralistic representation. Whether they are sincere or not, they are responding to the reality of the society they seek to rule and the core demands of the 2011 revolution. Whether the embers of the 2011 popular revolution will reignite is uncertain, and efforts to self-organise might be challenged both by HTS and the hawkish imperialism already circling overhead.
In the rest of this article we share some thoughts about how we understand the overthrow of Assad in the wider context of the Middle East, Israeli aggression and genocide and inter-imperialist competition. We conclude with proposals on how to orient our actions for an anti-imperialist and solidaristic response in Britain.
Assad’s Syria – repression and resistance
There is a view on the left that the Assadist dictatorship was anti-imperialist. It wasn’t. When the Ba’ath party seized power in 1963, they stood in solidarity with Palestine and opposed Western interests. However, it was through its military apparatus that it took power, and it repurposed this iron fist not to fight colonialism, but to guarantee its next forty years of rule. Not long after the bitter defeat for Syria in the 1967 war, when Israel first seized the Golan Heights, Hafez al-Assad put brakes on the Ba’ath party’s socialist program. Instead, he instituted a state of emergency to consolidate his own power and prevent future military takeovers. The prison system in Syria was an inheritance from French colonial rule, but under Assad it expanded and became the central tactic to silence dissent and conceal state violence. As early as 1976 under Hafez, Syria invaded Lebanon to support right wing militias who opposed the Palestinians. Later, he supported Amal against the Palestinians in the ‘war of the camps’.
In terms of the onslaught on Palestine from October 2023, Bassam Haddad has pointed out with nuanced detail, that whilst Assad’s Syria indirectly enabled some work of the Axis of Resistance in recent years, ‘the regime’s utility to resistance was increasingly diminishing’ up to Assad’s fall. This is reflected in Bashar al-Assad’s domestic priorities.
When Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, new spaces for political discussion and self-organisation opened across Syria, before Bashar took on the spirit of Assadist presidency and slammed those spaces shut to the sound of clanging prison doors. Like his father before him, Bashar oversaw a regime of repression and torture. After 9/11, he adopted the language of the ‘War on Terror’ to cast any dissidents as terrorists, and suppress internal dissent within Syria. Riyad al-Turk, a Syrian communist leader imprisoned at various points by Hafez and Bashar, called Syria the “Kingdom of Silence” because ‘no criticism of the regime, no matter how mild, was permissible.’ (Munif, 39).
Both Assads were totally inactive in opposition to Israel’s occupation of Syrian territory on the Golan Heights. They also facilitated the US programme of extraordinary renditions – where suspects were transferred from the US to Syrian prisons for interrogation and torture.
The political opening to the US ran parallel with the adoption of neoliberal economic policies. In 2005, the Ba’ath party formally adopted the social market economy – a decision that meant the end of older corporatist policies, privatisation of state farms and a raft of other measures that put the leadership of the economy in the hands of a private sector where most of the owners and entrepreneurs were close to or part of the narrow clique around Assad. Workers and peasants suffered while the wealthy prospered. Wealth accrued to the Assads and their clique. Privatisation and drought forced peasants off the land and into the cities.
In this short article we don’t have scope to chronicle the clandestine resistance from below that carried on despite the regime of silence and the intensification of the carceral state. Nonetheless, due to the cold efficiency of state repression, when the Arab spring flowered across the Middle East and North Africa many – most certainly Assad – felt that his grip on Syria was too strong to be shaken from below. They and he were wrong. In March 2011 Syrians came out onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands. From the outset the Syrian revolution reflected the demographics of Syria, multi-ethnic and across all major religious groupings, including from the Alawite sect to which the Assads belonged.
Despite brutal repression of unarmed demonstrators, Assad lost control of much of the country. There were significant defections from the army to the revolution. Slowly, however, the tide was reversed as the civil war became increasingly militarised and regional powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, funnelled money and arms to far-right militias. As Syria descended into civil war, the land was used as a playground by regional and global imperialist powers. This took the shape of direct military interventions, the sponsoring of proxy armed groups, and the supply of weapons to various favoured militias. The groups who made the revolution were crushed in a vice: on one side, jihadist groups and militias armed and backed by regional and global imperialist powers; on the other, forces of the Assad state backed increasingly by Iran, Hezbollah and Russian airpower.
In the course of the civil war more than half a million Syrians were killed and around 12 million were internally or externally displaced. The majority of those forced to move ended up in Turkey and Lebanon. Revolutionaries were scattered to the winds and forced underground.
As HTS took control of Aleppo at the end of November 2024 no one expected that the Syrian regime was on the verge of collapse. Bereft of support from Hezbollah and Russian air power, Assad’s forces put up little resistance. As city after city fell, the people returned to the streets, reclaiming their public space alongside the news that Assad was falling.
The Middle East and Western imperialism
Imperialist domination of the region remains. The long months since 7 October 2023 demonstrate the gruesome lengths to which the imperialist powers will go to enforce their status quo. In the face of genocide, mass murder, and an Israeli state that sees the whole region as a battlefield, bombing and shelling other countries with impunity, the US, the EU and Britain continue to provide arms and direct military support and political cover. The occupation and genocide in Palestine are part of the US-Israeli bid for total control. It’s unwise to think about the future for Syria, its links to the Palestinian struggle and internationalist solidarity without also thinking about the role of Western imperialism.
The imperialist architecture of the Middle East has changed very little in the century since the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 which divided up the remains of the Ottoman Empire, imposing the boundaries and borders that remain today. The region was then strategically important as a route to the East. But World War I also kickstarted the international oil economy, which led to new greed for the region. The US, now the world’s largest economy and the base for the biggest oil corporations, rapidly sought to dominate Arab states. The social, political and economic structures of fossil capital and imperialist control shaped the development of states where tiny minorities accumulated immense wealth from the oil bonanza. In the 1950s and 60s, this Western hegemony was challenged by Pan-Arab nationalism. But following Israel’s success in the 1967 war, attempts at democratic change were crushed or subverted. The history of this period is brilliantly described by Adam Hanieh in Crude Capitalism. From the late 1940s, and particularly after 1967, the relation of the Arab states to Israel – seen by the US and Britain as their heavily-armed and well-subsidised local gendarme – became critical.
The US has enormous military power but it’s not the case as some commentators suggest that it is always the prime mover or controller of events. For much of the Syrian civil war its actions were unfocused and ineffectual. Its attempt to arm and organise proxy forces failed, and later to push back ISIS it needed its own air power together with Kurdish forces on the ground. Regional powers have their own agendas which don’t always coincide with US interests. Kurdistan is a case in point. Turkey is a fellow NATO member which the US wants to keep onside. They are at odds over Turkey’s war on the Kurds.
The global capitalist economy is a dynamic and evolving system. And just as World War I marked a political transition for the Middle East that reflected the end of one empire and the emergence of a new oil-fueled dominance of Western capitalist interests, we are living through another period of massive change in the world economy. Oil used to run from the Middle East westwards through Europe to the US. Increasingly it runs East to India, China and the other emerging East Asian economies. Western oil interests, and therefore Western imperialism, are desperate to maintain the political and economic infrastructure that has profited them for so long. This is not to take oil from the Middle East, but to retain strategic control over oil going to China. As the relative power of the Chinese economy grows their position weakens.
The whole structure of imperialist domination that underpins the status quo is in flux and under threat – and in these circumstances their response is to double down on support for Israel, seek opportunities for direct and proxy military interventions and ratchet up the production of arms, most of which will be sold to the allies in the region.
Developing an anti-imperialist and solidaristic response
Breaking the chains with which imperialism has bound the Middle East for a hundred years requires us to foreground the agency of workers and the oppressed in the region. Change will not come at the level of local states whose very structure is a product of that history, whatever rhetorical support their leaders may offer to the Palestinian struggle. Indeed the lavish lifestyles of those leaders and the economies over which they preside are deeply intertwined with both US and Israeli capital. If the fall of Assad indeed hindered the resistance to Israel, would we turn a blind eye to mass incarceration, torture, and suppression of political dissent? Our politics centres a resistance to all oppression, and the enemy of our enemy is not our friend if he lords over mega-prisons and normalises torture. The challenge of thinking through developments in Syria, is articulating the necessity of democracy within anti-imperialist movements.
As we work toward a free Palestine and a free Syria, we have three priorities.
First, we need to stop the torrent of arms that flows from Europe and the US to the Middle East – blockading, slowing and stopping production, and disrupting supply chains. The arms trade, fossil capital and imperial brutality are bound tightly together in the political economy of the region. As we make an impact on the global trade in death we build solidarity with Palestine, with Syria and with the workers and oppressed of the region. At the same time we need to underline the hypocrisy of governments that pour fuel on the fire in Syria through the supply of weapons, while insisting that refugees should return.
Second, we need to combat state repression here. The British state has intensified attacks on Kurdish organisations and activists. At a time when Turkey is intensifying its repression of the Kurds inside its borders and waging war on the Kurds in North West Syria it must be a priority to build solidarity and support for legalising Kurdish organisations and stopping state repression and harassment. The treatment of Palestine solidarity activists in Britain’s own expanding carceral regime must also be fought.
Finally, we need to oppose Britain’s border regime. This requires practical solidarity with people on the move from the region, and those who are navigating Britain’s hostile environment as asylum seekers and refugees. The Labour Party has taken on the reactionary politics of Reform and the far right, to suggest that Syrian refugees must now return to Syria. Whilst calling for a free Syria, we need to stay opposed to unwanted deportations from Britain, and speak against anti-migrant rhetoric as it arises in our communities and workplaces.
Demilitarisation, prison abolition and open borders are horizons of internationalist socialism today. Every step towards this future is a chance to strengthen relationships with comrades in the global struggle.
For further reading we recommend:
- Crude Capitalism – Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market by Adam Hanieh
- The Syrian Revolution – Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death by Yasser Munif
- Syria After the Uprisings – The Political Economy of State Resilience by Joseph Daher
- Burning Country – Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami
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