By Daniel Campos- La Marx International

The fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime on December 8, 2024, is one of the most important events in the recent history of the class struggle. If anything characterizes the permanent nature of 21st-century revolutions, it is the importance of democratic tasks in the struggle of the people, as a fundamental driving force and lever for the development of political and social processes. In this sense, the Syrian revolution acts as an epitome—that is, a summary, an extract, or a condensation—of these revolutions and of the importance of the democratic tasks or struggles that were perfectly illustrated in the 15 years of the people's struggle. Without a doubt, the great triumph of the defeat of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship is a February revolution, in the category developed by Nahuel Moreno, which triumphs and frees the world from one of the most horrific and criminal dictatorships in history.

In these 15 years of development, the February Revolution in Syria went through 3 phases or moments:

1) Between 2011 and 2016, the outbreak of the revolution in the heat of the beginning of the "First Arab Spring," a colossal mass mobilization took place throughout Syria, giving rise to the revolutionary Local Committees, true bodies of dual power. The violent repression led to a split within the army and the emergence of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), alongside which the Kurdish state of Rojava emerged in 2014, driving the revolution of women and indigenous peoples in the Middle East. Throughout this period, the self-determination of the masses and the elements of dual power that challenge the bourgeois states of the region, such as the Local Committees, the FSA, or the Rojava cantons, among others, grew.

2) Between 2015 and 2020, a formidable counterrevolutionary front, the RSII Coalition (Russia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq), was formed, intervening militarily in defense of the dictatorship. During this period, the revolution and counterrevolution alternated between coups and countercoups, but the revolution had to face a formidable front composed of the forces of the dictatorship, the troops of Putin's capitalist oligarchy, Hezbollah, the government of the Ayatollahs, and Iraqi mercenaries acting with the acquiescence of imperialism and the UN. During this period, ISIS was defeated in the Battle of Mosul in 2017, but the RSII Coalition achieved decisive victories in Aleppo and Ghouta, forcing the revolutionary forces to take refuge in the demilitarized zone of Idlib.

3) Between 2020 and 2024, the revolution's counteroffensive was launched, culminating in the fall of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. First, with the development of the "Second Arab Spring," the revolutionary processes that hit Islamic fundamentalist forces in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, coupled with the outbreak of the Ukrainian revolution that weakened Putin, a process that weakened the RSII Coalition, which was the dictatorship's mainstay. In parallel, with the outbreak of the Third Palestinian Intifada in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of the occupied West Bank, which pitted Islamic fundamentalism against each other, the civil war broke out in the demilitarized zone of Idlib, where factions that broke with Islamic fundamentalism defeated jihadist currents. And then, when the Levant Liberation Committee (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS) launches the lightning counteroffensive, the dictatorship's army collapses and Bashar al-Assad falls.

The Syrian revolution is, then, a process that has lasted around 15 years. Its development is a stark and real response to the question of revolutions for those feverish opinion-makers and analysts who pose as "Marxists" and adopt an ultimatist stance, demanding that revolutions be brief, lightning-fast, dazzling, and led by "Marxist leaders." Perhaps believing that revolution is like a Netflix or Hollywood movie, these same illiterates in history and Marxism claim that revolutions can only be defined as revolutions if those leading them swear an oath on Volume I of Capital or the 14 Theses of Permanent Revolution. Their perspective, as bourgeois intellectuals and therefore ignorant of Marxism, collides head-on with the overwhelming wall of reality.

The reality of the Syrian Revolution slaps the world's charlatans in the face as it travels a tortuous, difficult, and sacrificial path, costing thousands of lives, with more than 15 years of people's struggle against one of the most horrific dictatorships in human history. And this tortuous path, bathed in blood and suffering, is carried out by the people while 99% of the world's left refuses to support their revolution and supports Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. The Syrian Revolution, and the triumph of a February revolution that has been going on for more than 15 years, is a reaffirmation of the theoretical principles of orthodox Trotskyism and a slap in the face of the revisionist charlatans.

The Syrian Revolution is a process that is part of a larger revolutionary development, the First Arab Spring (2011-2020), and the Second Arab Spring (2021 to today) that encompasses dozens of countries and the entire Middle East region as a whole. As we explained in the text "The American Revolution of the 21st Century" : "... In turn, the Arab Spring is the necessary result of the defeat of US imperialism and NATO in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, after which the Middle East was never again the same region it once was. The withdrawal of NATO and the triumph of the Fourth American Revolution meant for the Middle East the beginning of unprecedented political, social and economic changes, which shook the region to its foundations and transformed it completely. A powerful mass insurrection broke out in the region that did not stop in front of any dictatorship, any army, and any autocracy, it swept away political systems, erased borders, liquidated regimes, dictators and began a sustained and unstoppable process of uprising, a kind of regional Intifada, which changed the destiny of the area forever ... on August 19, 2010, the United States withdrew almost all of its combat troops from Iraq, leaving only 56,000 troops in the country. combat... On August 1, 2010, the Netherlands became the first NATO member country to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan..." (The American Revolution of the 21st Century) If you want to read "The American Revolution of the 21st Century" click here.

The defeat of NATO caused enormous changes in the region to the extent that imperialist troops had to withdraw: " ... As the plan to withdraw troops from Iraq advanced, both that nation and Afghanistan were transformed into devastated, abandoned areas, no man's land, strewn with armies, guerrilla groups, and armed factions, a veritable breeding ground for crises caused by the growing political vacuum that the withdrawal of NATO and the United States caused in the region. This situation triggered all kinds of tendencies, confrontations, and attempts to fill that vacuum, while the process of decomposition of the forces fighting in Iraq gave rise to new forces, currents and movements that tried to fill the political, military and social vacuum that the withdrawal of NATO troops left in the region ... in the period of time that elapsed between the withdrawal of troops in 2010 and 2011, some of the most important political and social events in the history of the region took place. moved me forever..." (The American Revolution of the 21st Century)

The First Arab Spring that developed between 2010 and 2020 began with the revolutionary outbreak in Tunisia: " ... after December 17, 2010 in Tunisia, the Middle East region was never the same again. On that day in the city of Tunis, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was robbed of his wares and set himself on fire in protest, ... thousands of Tunisians rebelled against the poor conditions to which the country was subjected. This outbreak gave rise to the development of the spectacular political and social process known worldwide as the "Arab Spring". The fight against the dictatorship of Ben Ali, who ruled Tunisia for 25 years, known as the "Jasmine Revolution", had been preceded by the uprising in Western Sahara... In Egypt, the protests began on January 25, 2011 and had Tahir Square as their epicenter, ending with Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the country after 30 years... Then the revolution broke out in Libya, which descended into civil war, with arms and popular militias, where the people overthrew Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship after 42 years in power. The revolutionary process spread to Yemen in the so-called "Pink Ribbon Revolution," which ended Ali Saleh's 21-year dictatorship. A process that continues and has developed to this day, transformed into a civil war with the armed intervention of Saudi Arabia and Iran..." (The American Revolution of the 21st Century)

It was in this context that the Syrian Revolution developed, which began two months after the Revolution in Tunisia: "... Then the Syrian revolution broke out against the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad, successor of his father Hafez Al Assad whose dynasty had lasted 50 years. The revolution turned into a civil war, transforming Syria into a decaying state. The revolutionary wave that began between 2010-2011 had an enormous impact on the world situation. Rarely have we witnessed so many revolutions developing simultaneously, a complex of mass mobilizations that covered more than 20 countries on different continents, in addition to Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, it also reached Mauritania, Algeria, Western Sahara, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Lebanon, Kuwait, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Palestine, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Beyond differences and inequalities, there were revolutionary explosions with the fall of regimes, civil wars, processes of Self-organization, dual power, crisis and division in the armed forces, expropriations, council democracy, mass mobilization, general strikes, armed struggles, the emergence of new states and new armies. This entire complex of revolutions produced changes in the countries that are developing to this day, unprecedented in the Arab world..." (The American Revolution of the 21st Century)

The material bases that explain the development of this entire revolutionary process were the poverty and social inequality inherent to capitalism in the Middle East region: " ...Years of poverty, misery, repression, demands for democratic rights, civil liberties, brutal conditions of oppression for sectors such as youth, women, immigrants, racial and religious discrimination, in addition to the ostentatious life of dictators like kings in luxurious palaces ruling over poor people, are the basis of the mass outbreak that led to the uprising of entire peoples who decided to take their destinies into their own hands." (The American Revolution of the 21st Century)

The Syrian revolution began with the massive and radicalized protests of February 2011 against the regime, demanding an end to the schemes of misery, an end to the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Baath Party, the lack of basic democratic freedoms, and an end to the state of emergency. These mobilizations began in March 2011, and the dictatorship responded by brutally repressing these initial popular demonstrations. At least 70 protesters were killed during the protests, many of them in the city of Deraa, southern Syria, which became the capital of the revolt. The first demonstrations in support of the revolution took place in Egypt and Tunisia, and from March 15 onward, the protests raged in Deraa, leading to the burning of the building of the city's ruling Baath Party. The dictatorship's attempts to curb the protests through repression and preventive detention failed to stem the momentum of the protests, forcing the dictatorship to promise, for the umpteenth time, to initiate constitutional reforms.

Bashar al-Assad quickly understood that the uprisings were not a mere passing phenomenon, but rather that they were facing a true revolution. After announcing reforms, the dictatorship proceeded to postpone the reforms and intensify repression, relying on the fact that Syria had been under martial law for more than 40 years. This law stipulated that any gathering of more than five people must be authorized by one of the 15 security services, two weeks in advance. To obtain authorization, they must specify the names of the speakers, along with a copy of each speech and a complete list of participants. This law allowed the Assads to arrest all dissidents and send them to Syrian prisons, notorious for holding thousands of Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian prisoners.

Specifically, as the revolution continued to develop, the democratic task of freeing political prisoners and dissidents of the regime who had been detained over the decades became the order of the day. Protests also began in Lebanon demanding information from the Syrian authorities on the whereabouts of their loved ones. Therefore, under pressure from the revolution, the dictatorship announced some reforms such as the end of martial law, the creation of a multi-party system, citizenship for the Kurds, the release of some political prisoners, and so on. But the reality that these announcements were a maneuver to slow the revolution was quickly revealed as, at the same time as announcing the reforms, the dictatorship resorted to widespread repression to crush the protests. In August 2011, the cities of Hama, Deir el-Zour, and Latakia were literally surrounded by the dictatorship's forces, resulting in the death toll since March of two thousand people, nearly three thousand missing, and more than ten thousand imprisoned. Twelve thousand refugees fled to Türkiye and many more to Lebanon.

When the Syrian revolution broke out, it had been governed by the Ba'ath Party since 1963, the year it imposed a state of emergency. The Ba'ath Party is the same party that ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein, with a nationalist discourse as part of the bourgeois nationalist movement known as Nasserism, based on the government of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein. Nasser ruled Egypt from 1964 to 1970, leading a bourgeois nationalist movement that took anti-imperialist or nationalist measures such as the nationalization of the Suez Canal. But despite using the name of socialism, or Pan-Arabism, Nasserism, whether in Egypt or Iraq, or Syria due to its bourgeois character, maintained those countries as capitalist nations.

Since 1970, the Assad family has held the presidency of Syria. As part of his control of the state, Assad controlled the Presidential Guard, an elite corps, and the Republican Guard, both commanded in March 2011 by Mahir al-Assad, brother of Bashar al-Assad. Thus, according to the Syrian constitution, the Assads simultaneously held the positions of president of the country and president of the Ba'ath Party, which in turn controlled the so-called National Progressive Front, a coalition of six parties authorized by the regime. In both Parliament and the Front, the Ba'ath Party held a minimum of 51% of the seats. But the entire nationalist structure characteristic of the postwar period, which was the fruit of the national liberation and anti-colonial revolutions that shook the world, began to dismantle as capitalism transitioned from the Keynesian capitalist regime of accumulation to the globalization regime of accumulation.

During this transition, the Assad family became the richest in the country. As privatizations and the dismantling of post-war social gains advanced worldwide, the Assad family multiplied its fortune with the economic reforms it implemented through privatizations that served the family's businesses. Its businesses also extend beyond Syria, holding large real estate holdings and stakes in construction companies in France and the United Kingdom. Spanish Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero considered Bashar al-Assad a good friend of Spain when he initiated negotiations to reach an Association Agreement between Syria and the European Union.

The reforms left the country's population in poverty, with 60% living on the poverty line and 25% below it, with unemployment between 20 and 25%. Meanwhile, 50% of the country's wealth is controlled by 5% of the Syrian population, those tied to the family and closest to state leaders. During these years, the banking and insurance industries were opened to private hands, foreign trade and foreign investment in the tourism industry were liberalized. These reforms diluted the state monopoly on the banking system and incentivized private universities and the private real estate market. Among the main beneficiaries was Bashar's cousin, Rami Makhlouf, who became a millionaire with a personal fortune estimated at $6 billion. Thus, as the Assads embarked on the path toward privatization and globalization in Syria, a powerful oligarchy of millionaires emerged that seized control of the country's wealth.

Makhlouf also became the principal owner of Syriatel, one of the two mobile phone companies licensed to operate in Syria. In addition to owning Syriatel, he has businesses in tobacco, oil, real estate, banks, free trade zones along the border with Lebanon, duty-free shops, and luxury department stores. Makhlouf came to control up to 60% of the Syrian economy through his network of companies associated with imperialist capital. Thus, while these oligarchies amassed fortunes, they amassed fortunes associated with large imperialist corporations, dictatorships like Putin's in Russia, Mubarak's in Egypt, or Gaddafi's in Libya, Bashar al-Assad used the rhetoric of a "foreign conspiracy" to describe the protests.

Faced with this situation, imperialism adopted a policy of complicity, limiting its intervention to supporting an "opposition" that operates solely within institutional channels, rather than through interventions in the streets carried out by the "people." The objective of imperialist policy was to prevent the revolutionary process from overflowing the confines of capitalism. The US promoted a meeting of the Syrian opposition, held at the Semiramis Hotel in Damascus on June 27, 2011, at which a document was drafted demanding an investigation into the organizations and individuals responsible for the repression of legitimate protests, and compensation for the families of the victims. The document also proposed a new law on political parties and the formation of a 100-member Transitional National Assembly, to which the Baath Party would appoint 30 members and Bashar al-Assad would appoint another 70, in consultation with opposition representatives.

The US sought to halt the revolution by attempting to negotiate with the dictatorship to channel mass mobilization toward the ballot box, and by using the deceitful mechanisms of the ruling classes, it demanded that Assad oversee a safe and peaceful transition to bourgeois democracy to freeze the revolutionary process. To this end, the US proposed a series of reforms led by the Syrian regime, aimed at a national unity government, to avoid any destabilization in Syria and, consequently, in the entire Middle East. But by July 2011, protests had gathered hundreds of thousands of people, while the city of Hama replaced Daraa as the epicenter of the mobilizations occurring throughout the country.

It was at this time that local coordination committees emerged in each city, an example of popular organization and self-determination, with which the revolution began to develop the Soviet elements of dual power. As the revolution deepened, it became a dividing line between leftist and anti-imperialist activists and organizations. Hezbollah, the main political organization in Lebanon and certainly the most prestigious party among the Arab masses for its struggle against Israel, openly supported Bashar al-Assad, as did Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, repeating the support they had already given to Gaddafi in Libya. The vast majority of leftist organizations, both social democratic, Stalinist, former guerrilla, and old and new ex-Trotskyist, rushed to support Assad because of his supposed opposition to imperialism, claiming that the mobilizations were guided by imperialism, Israel, or even the Lebanese right.

Bashar al-Assad's Plan B was to implement the reforms "suggested" by imperialism as the mobilizations took place nationwide, centered in the cities of Hama and Deir el-Zour, with hundreds of thousands in each city. The only major city without major mobilization was Aleppo, a center of the Alawite community and a stronghold of the Assad regime. The non-sectarian nature of the revolution is fundamental to attracting a growing number of participants from the diverse Christian, Shia, Druze, and Juddish communities, leading to one of the most popular slogans: "One, one, one, the Syrian people are one."

In August 2011, the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship and the Baath Party managed to halt the marches of hundreds of thousands in Hama and Deir el-Zour, but as soon as troops withdrew from the cities, smaller marches resumed. On August 15, the Assad dictatorship bombarded the city of Latakia, one of the centers of resistance and popular mobilization, with warships and tanks. The military operation took place amid a mobilization of more than 20,000 people demanding Assad's resignation. Around 35 people were killed in the attack on the civilian population, including a 2-year-old girl. Thousands more were arrested and taken to a soccer stadium where they remained without food or water. The regime's response toward the people became increasingly violent.

To stop the masses, Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship and the Ba'ath Party intensified their policy of direct confrontation with gunfire, tear gas, poison gas, water cannons, imprisonment, and torture. This turned the revolution into a full-blown civil war, with an estimated 3,500 dead in November 2011, figures acknowledged by the Assad government. According to the opposition, there were more than 5,000 dead, 600 of them children, and 7,000 missing persons, with 100,000 detained. But the people responded by deepening the revolution: On November 16, 2011, the Syrian army's intelligence center in Harasta, a suburb of Damascus, was attacked by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a popular militia group that developed in the heat of the formation of the citizens' committees.

In this way, the FSA incorporated soldiers who had broken with Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship and the Baath Party, and combined with young militants who had joined the revolution. The FSA reported attacking Baath Party headquarters in the north of the country on November 20 and further attacks on the Baath Party headquarters in Damascus. The Free Syrian Army came to be led by Ryiad al-Asaad, following hundreds of defections from the Syrian army that had been occurring since the first months of the Syrian revolution. Thus, the revolution was beginning to produce a fracture in the country's armed forces, one of the greatest concerns of the Arab League and imperialism, as occurred in the revolution in Libya.

The government's repressive actions had made self-defense a priority for the people, so the emergence of the FSA responded to the needs of popular defense and, at the same time, served as a tool for the struggle to overthrow the dictatorship. Defections among troops from the army of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship and the Ba'ath Party reduced the Syrian armed forces to the Fourth Division, comprised primarily of soldiers from the Alawite community and directly commanded by the dictator's brother, Maher al-Assad. The dictatorship carried out massacres in Hama, Deir al-Zour, Lattakia, and other locations, forcing protesters to defend themselves by setting up barricades in the cities.

The real leaders of the protests were the local coordination committees that emerged throughout the country, primarily composed of young activists, who coordinated through alternative media and social networks. Previously, their position was to reject any dialogue with the regime, after which they directly began to demand the end of the regime as long as the repression continued. The trend is that all these coordination committees developed into open, large, and democratic organizations, which created a situation of dual power: On the one hand, the local committees of the Syrian Revolution, the expression of this "duality of power ," became a "de facto" power in many areas of the country, confronting the state power of the Armed Forces of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship and the Baath Party. Dual power bodies emerge during revolutions spontaneously and unconsciously, as a result of the insurgent masses' need for spaces for collective decision-making to carry out their struggle in all aspects: political, military, organizational, administrative—in short, the creation of a new social order.

In her paper " Losing the Syrian Grassroots: Local Governance Structures Urgently Need Support", Lebanese activist and writer Doreen Khoury explained: "...Organization and mobilization were achieved primarily through the formation of "tansiqiyyat", or local coordination committees (LCCs), which began as gatherings of young activists in neighborhoods and towns across the country. Local arrangements for self -organization have evolved from so-called local organizing committees (LOCs), which are centrally involved in media work and protest organizing. They have created sophisticated civil administration structures in the liberated areas of Syria. Today, widespread violence, sectarianism, radicalization, disorganization among rebel forces, and deteriorating living conditions seriously threaten the survival of the LCCs and opposition local councils." ( Losing the Syrian Grassroots: Local Governance Structures Urgently Need Support)

The revolution had generated a duality of power, which in capitalism means the irreconcilable struggle between a bourgeois power and a worker/popular power. The duality of power will always be temporary, never stable or lasting, since, inevitably, one power will prevail over the other, depending on the outcome of the confrontation between the two. The duality of power occurs when the established "legal" power loses legitimacy and the masses unconsciously begin to construct a new one. The councils will be the basis of the new power established after the revolution, should it succeed. The local committees in Syria were the seed of Free Syria because the political, and in some cases, military, decisions regarding the administration of a liberated zone and the continuation of the struggle were made in the local committees.

But as Doreen Khoury explained, one of the Syrian revolution's greatest weaknesses was the lack of centralization among the local committees in coordinating the fight against the regime and implementing unified measures in the liberated zones. Ultimately, they lacked a common program, which gave the dictatorship little chance of recovery, given that in a war, acting with unity and centralization is crucial for victory. Coordination had been extremely limited and focused almost exclusively on matters of military tactics. This turned each liberated zone and each battle front into a "particular war ," where different political sectors (groups, countries, local leaders) influenced the decisions taken, thereby weakening the revolution.

The revolution prevented the bourgeois opposition from realizing its plans. The bourgeois sectors organized around the policies of US imperialism held a conference of 300 people in Antalya, Turkey, on July 2, 3, and 4, 2011. The conference was composed primarily of liberal and nationalist groups and figures. Thus, the opposition to the dictatorship divided into two sectors: the minority sector, formed in Damascus by Syrian figures advocating for regime reform, and the other sector that formed the Syrian National Council (SNC) after meetings in Turkey and Brussels. The SNC has 190 members, 60% of whom are located within Syria. The SNC included the Muslim Brotherhood, liberals, various Kurdish factions, and many of the local Coordination Committees, which called for the mobilizations.

The crisis within the bourgeois opposition combined with the crisis and division within the Armed Forces, which arose because a large number of soldiers and officers refused to obey their superiors' orders to fire on peaceful protesters. The mass demonstrations, coupled with the regime's indiscriminate violence, had led to the collapse of a sector of the army, which joined the revolutionary camp and subsequently took up defense of the protests and took up armed struggle against the dictatorship that was murdering them. Popular brigades and militias then spontaneously formed, using weapons brought by deserters. Consequently, for the first six or eight months after the start of the revolution, the demonstrations were entirely peaceful, with the exception of a few isolated incidents. Only after several months, as a defensive measure, did firearms begin to be used in response to the regime's repression.

Rojava emerged in northern Syria as part of the Kurdish people's revolutionary process in the midst of the revolution against the Assad dictatorship. The Kurds are an indigenous people who, like the Palestinians, were dispossessed of their land and dispersed throughout Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. The Syrian people's struggle against Assad allowed the Kurdish people living in Syria to advance in recovering their rights to self-determination and national liberation, which led to the formation of a Kurdish nation in July and August 2012, when the Kurdish people formed the armed militias People's Protection Units and Women's Protection Units (YPG-YPJ) under the command of the Kurdish Supreme Committee.

These militias captured the city of Kobane, as well as a dozen other towns. There, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC) began a joint administration. Months later, in January 2013, the cantons of Cezire, Kobane, and Efrin declared their autonomy. Thus, the state of Rojava emerged, composed of three small territorial units on the border with Turkey and a population of some two and a half million inhabitants, mostly Kurds, but also Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Turkmen, Armenians, and Chechens, all different ethnic groups living side by side and sharing a common political project in a mosaic of nationalities.

All this development of the revolution in 2012 forced the regime to launch a counteroffensive. The FSA had taken Aleppo and entrenched itself in Damascus, and fighting erupted in the ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo, the country's capital and economic center since July 20, 2012. When the offensive by the army loyal to the dictator began to recapture Aleppo, some 8,000 rebels from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) defended that city, a silent witness to the ancient crusades, positioned among the ruins of buildings destroyed by Assad's artillery and air force. Revolution and counterrevolution faced each other, and the regular army troops, directly commanded by Maher Assad, Bashar's younger brother, deployed a massive operation with nearly 20,000 soldiers around Aleppo.

The ground offensive began early on Wednesday, August 8. The following day, the FSA confirmed it had tactically withdrawn from the Salaheddin neighborhood, the city's most populous and important district. However, the fight for control of the entire city continued, and the FSA moved toward Seif al-Dawla and Machhad, two neighborhoods further east, to open a new front. With the incursion into Aleppo and the fighting in Damascus, the FSA had a clear strategy of forcing the Assad regime to focus on two distant fronts, with the goal of opening and extending a broad front that would force Assad to disperse and divide his troops to crush the countless rebel pockets.

Thus, the dictator was forced to shift military forces and concentrate them in central areas. In less than 20 days in Aleppo, the FSA rebels conquered 60% of the city, displaying heroism, resisting the siege of armored vehicles, and even seizing some 15 tanks and other heavy weapons from Assad's troops. They took over police stations and the Army Infantry School, seizing a large quantity of weapons and ammunition. Almost every night, the rebels attacked the Mannagh military airport, where government helicopters and planes are based, with tanks they captured from the regime. Conquering Aleppo was of strategic, political, and military importance to both sides at that time, and if the rebels took the city, they could create a "liberated zone" just 50 kilometers from the Turkish border, where they could replenish supplies, evacuate wounded, and train troops. With Aleppo in rebel hands, the regime would be practically liquidated.

In June 2012, a report by the UN observer mission estimated that 40% of Syrian territory was under the control of the armed opposition. However, these parts of the country were mostly rural areas, territorially unconnected, hence the importance of gaining positions in the country's key areas. Between Damascus and Aleppo alone, there are nearly 8 million inhabitants, more than a third of Syria's population of 21 million. In Damascus, merchants' strikes have occurred, and the slogans of the "Friday" demonstrations call for unity and solidarity. For example, in several cities, replicas of the Homs Square clock were raised in tribute to the heroic inhabitants of that city besieged for months. During the demonstrations, people chanted slogans in solidarity with the cities under repression.

In a war as unequal as it was heroic, the protagonists were young people with Kalashnikovs, machine guns, and rocket launchers, against tanks, snipers, fighter jets, and helicopter gunships. A war where the population protected the FSA's military operations and demonstrated en masse in the streets, where even the funerals of martyrs became conducive spaces for political rallies against the dictatorship. The FSA's forces grew daily, and at one point in 2012 there were armed militiamen in ten of Syria's fourteen provinces.

At the beginning of June 2012, the number of combatants was estimated at 40,000. On July 17, 2012, an attack on the headquarters of the National Security Office killed four senior officials from the regime's highest military leadership, including the Minister of Defense and Assad's brother-in-law. This blow to the regime's heart was compounded by the recent defection of Syrian Prime Minister Riad Farid Hijab, who declared: "I announce my defection from the regime of terrorism and join the ranks of freedom and dignity. I do so at a critical moment, when the country is experiencing the highest level of crimes against a people who came out to demand a dignified life. Starting today, I am part of the revolution." The rebels hailed the resignation of the "highest-ranking" official and presented it as further proof that the "regime was crumbling from within."

Earlier, Deputy Oil Minister Abdo Houssameddine had fled. Hours before the news of the prime minister's defection broke, a new bomb attack by rebel groups destroyed the state television building, where Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi barely escaped his life. On the military front, the defections ranged from high-ranking officers to fighter pilots and a significant number of rank-and-file soldiers. By July 2012, 31 generals had deserted from Assad's eroded ranks, the most important of them being Manaf Tlass, a Sunni general from the regime's inner circle who fled to Turkey in early July along with 23 other junior officers.

The first senior military commander to defect to the rebel ranks was Colonel Riad al-Assad, who defected to announce the formation of the FSA in Turkey. Since the attack that decapitated the top brass in charge of repression, according to the FSA, more than 2,000 soldiers have defected. These were joined by four deputies, one of them a member of the new parliament that took office in May. This intensification of the revolutionary process pushed the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Ba'ath Party to apply Nazi-fascist methods of annihilation and the intensification of the bloody repression of the armed struggle of the Syrian people, bringing the death toll of those killed by the regime to 21,000. At the same time, the number of displaced people reached 1.5 million, forced to flee their homes to other parts of the country, and more than 275,000 sought refuge in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq.

This worsened the food crisis, with 3 million Syrians suffering from famine in a dramatic situation. On June 18, 2012, at least 14 cities in nine provinces were bombed by the army, and four neighborhoods in Damascus were surrounded and taken under control. During these months, in addition to the bombings, the regime perpetrated atrocious massacres through fascist gangs called shabiha , composed of government-paid criminals. With this deadly trap set for the revolution, the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition body, issued statements stating that it would be willing to accept " a figure from the Assad regime" leading the country during a transitional period.

The FSA operating on the ground flatly rejected any "government formed in an unknown location and lacking national and revolutionary legitimacy unless it enjoyed the support of the FSA leadership." The FSA's transitional plan, according to a statement, was to create a "higher defense council" composed of the military commanders fighting on the ground and the most prominent officers who had deserted the regular army. This council, in turn, would elect a "presidential council" comprised of six political and military figures "to lead the country during the transitional period . " However, the lack of a revolutionary Marxist leadership willing to put an end to capitalism in Syria left the ANC and FSA leaderships as the only option for the revolution, whose bourgeois or petty-bourgeois character made them inconsistent and incapable of carrying the revolution through to its conclusion.

In the early hours of Tuesday, August 20-21, 2012, Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship launched a brutal chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus, in the Ghouta region, killing hundreds of people, including women, the elderly, and especially children. This may have been the deadliest attack launched by Assad against the civilian population. The dictatorship launched the chemical weapons via rockets, hitting the towns of Ain Tarma, Zamalka, and Khobar, which were under the control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). By 2013, almost all of the liberated towns in northern Syria were small, extremely poor, and, in most cases, inhabited by peasants. The vast majority were villages with few inhabitants. Even the city of Minbij, despite its nearly half a million inhabitants, is more like a large town.

Despite the treacherous nature of the leadership, the force of the revolution was felt in the air with the existence of a huge current of activists who, despite their inexperience, were quickly gaining experience, moving from leading demonstrations to leading cities. Many were former students who, thanks to the force of the revolution, left their daily lives to dedicate themselves to a cause. They were joined by the poor and working people of the region who led the revolution through the Revolutionary Council. In other words, from that front that initially organized anti-Assad demonstrations based on mass activism, a leadership evolved that rose to form dual-power organizations that challenged the Assad dictatorship. This comradeship of leaders opened up the possibility of building a revolutionary leadership to impose a workers' and popular government in Syria.

The lack of a Marxist, Trotskyist, revolutionary leadership that embodied this program of abolishing capitalism was the principal shortcoming of the Syrian revolutionary process, a shortcoming that made it difficult for this extraordinary activism to rise to the task of developing a program and policy that would allow it to fully engage in the struggle for power. The underlying reason, the betrayal of the Syrian revolution by all Marxist currents, left inexperienced activists without cover, without politicization, suffering from the absence of a revolutionary leadership that could guide them, was what the counterrevolution exploited to launch a counteroffensive that sought to break the revolution.

As the dictatorship was about to fall, a coalition of counterrevolutionary forces intervened in defense of Bashar al-Assad's regime and the Baath Party. The dictatorship of Iran's capitalist oligarchy, sensing the depth of the revolutionary process, the inability of US imperialism to stop it, and the weakness of the bourgeois opposition to derail it, led the Iranian regime to intervene in defense of the dictatorship. Beginning in late 2012, Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia belonging to the Islamic fundamentalist movement oriented by the Ayatollahs of Iran, entered the scene at the most critical moment for the dictatorship, when the regular army was bleeding to death in desertions and the rebels were knocking on the gates of Damascus.

Hezbollah quickly proved indispensable in completing the regime's latest military advances. At the same time, while Hezbollah fulfilled its role in halting the regime's military defeat, another counterrevolutionary organization emerged in mid-2013 and began to intervene with equal or greater influence: the Islamic State (ISIS). Both ISIS and al-Qaeda, and its Syrian proxy, al-Nusra, are fascist organizations, decomposed elements of Middle Eastern armies, and imperialist-funded mercenaries who took advantage of the power vacuum in Syria to begin seizing swathes of the country's territory. By 2013, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) began vying for control of the liberated regions, where the "black-clad militiamen" acted as the regime's "fifth column . "

ISIS and al-Qaeda dedicated themselves to fighting the FSA rebels and engulfing the territories that the revolution was conquering. For ISIS and al-Nusra, the central battle did not revolve around the fight against the tyrant Assad, but rather the implementation of an Islamic state in the region, starting with the cities of Deir al-Zor, Raqqa, and Menbij, usurped by al-Qaeda from the anti-dictatorial rebels, which caused the dispute over these oil-rich territories to erupt among the " jihadists." Ambition and the fight for the spoils of riches led to furious clashes between ISIS and al-Qaeda that cost the lives of more than four thousand soldiers on both sides.

ISIS eventually consolidated a theocratic dictatorship in these areas and founded an Islamic "Caliphate" in the territories it occupied, where it persecuted and murdered FSA fighters and members of local committees. In areas controlled by ISIS and al-Qaeda, the fascist militias seized oil wells to sell fuel to the Assad regime, providing oxygen for the dictatorship. In these cities controlled by ISIS, they attempted to impose a fanatical vision of Islam, with harsh punishments for those who failed to abide by its rules and the murder of militia members and activists of the Revolution. The kidnapping of foreigners also began, including journalists Javier Espinosa and Ricardo García.

ISIS and al-Qaeda advanced to the point of imposing complete terror on local populations with beheadings, crucifixions, stonings, live burials, female circumcision, and all kinds of torture methods based on an extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia and Islamic law. ISIS leader and self-proclaimed leader of all Muslims, "Caliph Ibrahim," dedicated himself to doing business with the Syrian dictatorship itself, selling crude oil and fuel. But the population led numerous protests against him, and in May 2023, a general strike against the rule of the Islamic State took place in Menbij, Aleppo, with 80% compliance, according to the Menbij Local Coordination Committee.

A central role in the defeat of ISIS was played by the Rojava revolution. Kurdish militias fought the jihadists from their emergence and displaced them from many of their main headquarters, inflicting defeats in the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa, and Hama. While the militants simultaneously confronted the troops of the Assad regime and ISIS, the imperialist governments organized the Geneva Summit, pompously titled the "International Conference on Syria," held in June 2012 in Geneva, seeking a negotiated solution with the dictatorship to halt the revolution. UN officials, the foreign ministers of the five veto-wielding countries, and several countries from the Middle East participated in the summit.

The summit was a complete failure, prompting the convening of the Geneva II summit on January 22, 2014, in Montreux, Switzerland. This summit brought together representatives of the dictatorship, the Syrian opposition, 39 countries, the UN, and the Arab League. The conference saw constant accusations of terrorism between Bashar al-Assad's regime and members of the Syrian opposition, but ultimately, both sides agreed to begin direct negotiations to establish a transitional government based on mutual understanding. The negotiations were mediated by the Algerian UN and Arab League Special Representative, Lakhdar Brahimi. Key issues were the possibility of humanitarian aid entering the country, the political transition, the withdrawal of women and children from the besieged city of Homs, and the release of international humanitarian convoys with food and medical supplies to the area.

But these summits failed due to the strength of the revolution, and clashes between the revolution and the counterrevolution continued due to the importance of the war against ISIS, an element that also concerned the imperialist governments of the world. The dictatorship continued trying to defeat the resistance, employing increasingly atrocious methods of civil war, such as the use of barrels filled with explosives dropped from helicopters. The resistance, and the FSA militants, due to their lack of weapons, began to suffer defenselessness against these types of attacks, having to limit themselves to watching them fly overhead, dropping their deadly payloads. With these attacks, the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Baath Party murdered hundreds of people each week, entire families dying among the rubble and explosions. The besieged areas included the liberated areas of Damascus, which included the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk. The dictatorship blockaded the Palestinian neighborhood, causing an acute situation of deaths due to famine.

The dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Ba'ath Party formalized contracts handing over oil exploitation to Russia for the next 25 years, highlighting the partnership between the capitalist dictatorships of Putin and al-Assad. In March 2014, Abu Amr al-Shishani and ISIS invaded Mimbej, a town in Rojava that the Kurds had captured. They destroyed the revolutionary council, invaded the homes of revolutionaries, burned, murdered, and insulted their families, all for the benefit of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. Abou Maen, the leader of the Revolutionary Council member of the city of Mimbej, launched the following appeal: "All those who can help, either by contacting our comrades, the Kurdish sisters and brothers, asking them to give their support to their revolutionary sisters and brothers and the battalions that confront ISIS, by sending food, ammunition. Those who do not do so will have sold the blood of our heroes for a very low price!"

On June 3, 2014, Assad called elections to legitimize himself and divert attention from the constant bombings and chemical weapons attacks on the population in the liberated areas no longer under his control. The elections took place amid a terrifying backdrop for the population: more than 300,000 dead, as many illegally detained, 18,000 murdered under torture, and two of the country's largest cities, Aleppo and Homs, literally reduced to rubble. Six million Syrians are internally displaced, and three million refugees are surviving scattered in other countries. The UN, for its part, in May estimated the death toll at 520,000 for 2014, including both dead and wounded. In the elections called for by almost half the population, they did not even vote, rejecting a completely fraudulent call for elections held in areas under Assad's control, excluding residents of rebel-held areas. Of the 3.5 million refugees outside Syria's borders, only those legally registered with embassies were eligible to vote. The election was a complete fraud, which the population overwhelmingly rejected, even though Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship was declared the winner.

By August 2014, ISIS was attempting to advance toward the formation of a "Caliphate" in northwestern Iraq, while civil war casualties at that time totaled around 65,000 casualties in Assad's army and 46,000 among the Free Syrian Army militias. Hezbollah, fighting alongside the dictatorship, had lost at least 500 men, and experts estimated the cost of the war could reach $170 billion. The regime achieved a series of partial victories that allowed it to retake the entire western corridor from Kasab, a Syrian town located in the north on the Turkish border, to the south on the Lebanese border. These advances by Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship had been taking place since June 2013 with the capture of Qusayr, followed by the capture of Yabrud, Ma'ullah, and Zabadani. These conquests guaranteed the despot control of the Damascus-Aleppo-Mediterranean coast land route, as well as safe passage to Lebanon, ensuring the supply of weapons and Hezbollah militants.

But, without a doubt, the regime's greatest victory so far came in Homs, Syria's third-largest city, previously considered the "capital of the revolution . " On May 7, 2014, after a terrible siege that lasted almost two years and following a heroic resistance, nearly two thousand rebel soldiers withdrew from that symbolic city after reaching an agreement with the regime. The agreement by which the rebels left Homs stipulated that each fighter could take their personal belongings and a weapon during the retreat, and that each bus could also carry a grenade launcher and a machine gun. It also stipulated the release of 70 prisoners held by the rebels in the city of Aleppo. The recapture of Homs was a very important military victory for the regime, especially due to the moral impact of having defeated a symbolic rebel stronghold.

However, the surrendered rebels regrouped in other areas 20 kilometers north of Homs and quickly retook positions 10 kilometers from the city, indicating that the FSA insurgents, while abandoning an important stronghold, were not "crushed" by the dictatorship. The militants still controlled large areas around Homs, a strategic highway junction between Damascus and Aleppo in the north, and between Damascus and Latakia on the Mediterranean. However, following the intervention of Hezbollah, ISIS, and al-Qaeda, the revolution began to face difficult times. The poorly armed FSA forces had to face two opposing counterrevolutionary fronts: on the one hand, the Assad-Hezbollah-Iran coalition, and on the other, the ISIS coalition and the al-Qaeda Front. To make matters worse, a massive lack of coordination on the ground among the insurgent militias began to develop as a result of the bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, and reformist nature of the leaderships leading the revolution.

This placed limits on the revolutionary offensive by breaking the necessary cohesion among the forces. This was due to the loss of authority among the militia leaders due to their vacillating positions, incapable of meeting the economic and democratic demands of the Syrian people. The so-called National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (NCFORS) and the leadership of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) proved incapable of centralizing the militias to undertake a unified struggle against tyranny. This unity of the counterrevolutionary forces of Bashar al-Assad's troops, Iran-backed Hezbollah, ISIS, and al-Qaeda was an imposing counterrevolutionary bloc established with the aim of demolishing the revolution, which in itself was a striking demonstration of the enormity of the Syrian revolution.

By August 2014, despite their overwhelming military superiority, the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Baath Party had failed to crush the revolution. At the cost of increasing sacrifices and endless hardship, the anti-dictatorship forces continued to control important areas such as parts of Aleppo and Idlib, as well as pockets on the outskirts of Damascus and near Homs. When the dictatorship's regular troops ventured into the liberated areas, they faced urban guerrilla warfare tactics, in which the rebels had become remarkably adept. In this sense, Syrian guerrillas and militiamen were adopting the methods of the Iraqi resistance against NATO troops in the Iraqi National Liberation War of 2003-2010, and in turn, this characteristic of the revolutions in both Iraq and Syria, which adopted the tactic of urban guerrilla warfare, became one of the most important characteristics of the revolutions of the 21st century. The Syrian revolution was fundamental in consolidating these traits in the revolutionary processes that developed subsequently.

The militants created a complex tunnel system to carry out surprise attacks and maintain supplies. The rebel militias began to resist the dictatorship's advance in Aleppo. They also resisted the much better-armed ISIS forces after their offensive in Iraq, which were advancing toward the city center from the northeast. ISIS captured the towns of Akhtarin and Mare from the Islamic Front, but the rebels prepared to receive them: "The various leaders of the rebel brigades have gathered to create a coalition capable of a common front. Thousands are heading here to stop the advance," said opposition leader Abu Ramzi from the outskirts of Aleppo. During 2014, the Syrian resistance continued in Damascus, although there was a decline in the rebel forces compared to the 2011-2012 period.

When the insurgency almost surrounded Damascus, a network of rebel militias still held their positions on the capital's outskirts. In addition to engaging in intense fighting against Assad's elite troops and ISIS, the rebels harassed the dictatorship by attacking daily life in the country's political center with mortar attacks and, occasionally, bomb attacks, many of them carried out through tunnels. From then on, the defense of the capital became the regime's priority, leading Assad, as in Aleppo, to adopt the tactic of tightening the siege around the rebels and bombing them from the air. This allowed them to regain control of the town of Mleha, just two kilometers southeast of Damascus, after 18 months of fighting.

Salim Idris, a former FSA commander, recounted: "...We now have around 100,000 fighters in the FSA. About 50 percent are armed and the rest are not. They share weapons... I have discussed with the front commanders and the countries supporting us to unify all the groups on the ground and give them salaries, about $100 a month for each fighter. I asked them for ammunition and more consistent assistance to distribute among the battalions. But we have received very little, it has not been enough: no salaries, no financial support; there is a serious lack of medical and humanitarian aid, and this remains one of the biggest problems today... So far, we have not received quality weapons or ammunition. Some anti-tank missiles have arrived, but we need MANPADS (surface-to-air missile launchers) because regime fighter jets continue to bomb cities, towns, schools, hospitals daily..." However, the revolution achieved a resounding, dramatic and momentous victory with the action of the Kurdish militias in the Battle of Kobane.

In October 2014, Kobane, one of the largest cities in the newly formed Kurdish state, came under siege by the brutal ISIS hordes, which began attacking it with heavy artillery and armored vehicles from the southwest. The Kurdish militias, called the People's Protection Units (YPG) and affiliated with the Democratic Union Party (PYD), began resisting with small arms. However, in the eastern part of the city, hand-to-hand combat between ISIS and Kurdish militias began, with the militiamen defending the city street by street and corner by corner, just as they had done in the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II, in which the Nazis were defeated by the Red Army. The IS offensive intensified with the aim of opening a passage towards the Turkish border, with which they surrounded the city and placed it on the verge of fall, even in some buildings in the eastern part of the city, ISIS raised its black flag placing itself 50 meters inside the southwest of the city, which forced the Kurdish militias of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that are in Turkey, to cross the border into Syria to defend Kobane.

This represented a step forward in Kurdish unification, in fact, thanks to the combined action of Syrian and Turkish Kurdish militias. On the other hand, the US-led "international coalition" intervened in a limited way against ISIS, carrying out a series of attacks in the vicinity of Kobane, but without succeeding in halting the jihadists' advance. This in some ways meant avoiding using its full military potential, thereby giving imperialism leeway to ISIS against the Syrian revolution. However, the advance of ISIS raised alarm bells in Turkey and among public opinion in Europe and the United States, who watched with horror at the advance of ISIS's fascist troops in the Middle East, demanding that their governments intervene. This prompted the Turkish parliament to pass a resolution authorizing its army to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq, coinciding with the decisions of US President Barack Obama, who urged Turkey to intervene as a member of NATO.

At this point, the Syrian revolution combined the democratic demand against the capitalist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad with the democratic demand for national liberation of oppressed nationalities like the Kurds, with the democratic demand for the defeat of the fascist troops of ISIS and al-Qaeda. In other words, the Syrian revolution combined from the beginning several of the most important characteristics of 21st-century revolutions: the combination of democratic and transitional revolutionary tasks, in addition to the method of urban guerrilla warfare, characteristic of 21st-century revolutions. Precisely, the demand for weapons by the militiamen in the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda makes the need for weapons for the resistance imperative, thus giving rise to the slogan "Weapons for the Kurdish militiamen, weapons for the FSA ," a slogan that acquired importance in all major revolutionary processes, such as the Spanish Revolution and the Irish Revolution.

The bourgeois and reactionary nature of the leaderships of the Syrian movement, as well as the Kurdish movement, made the unity of both revolutionary processes impossible. In the case of the bourgeois leaderships of the Syrian resistance, they refused to recognize the Kurdish people's right to independence, which ultimately weakened the common struggle against the Assad dictatorship and ISIS. On the other hand, the reformist nature of Ocalan's Kurdish leadership made it impossible for the movement to go beyond the limits of capitalism when the dynamics of the revolutionary process tend to exceed its limits and limits, leading it to put a brake on the revolution and capitulate to the capitalist leaderships.

ISIS forces were defeated in the Battle of Kobane after a long and hard battle, in which the Kurds expelled the military forces from the towns and villages in the region. The Kurdish forces' great victory would later have enormous repercussions on all the revolutionary processes that would subsequently develop in the Middle East. In the Battle of Kobane, the Kurdish YPG militias were supported by the Peshmerga, militiamen from Iraqi Kurdistan who provided the few heavy weapons the Kurds had in Kobane. This does not mean that the Kurdish troops were always at a military disadvantage compared to ISIS forces, which had much more modern and heavy weapons.

ISIS had partly seized this weaponry from the Iraqi army and partly purchased it with revenue from oil sales in the areas they controlled. It had deployed many of its best fighters, many highly experienced mercenaries from abroad, to the battle for Kobane. The Kurdish command reported that among the ISIS casualties, they identified men from 27 countries. But this was not the first time in history that militarily superior armies have failed to guarantee victory against a militarily inferior force. This is precisely because a people's destiny is at stake. The determination of the Kurdish people, in their need to free themselves from oppression, discrimination, and repression, was stronger than the military might of the ISIS mercenaries. This led to a level playing field in the military actions, and the Kurds were able to overcome the military might of the ISIS mercenaries.

ISIS forces were coming off a succession of easy victories in Iraq: many of the country's army battalions fled without a fight, leaving large quantities of weapons in the countryside. But in Kobane, they encountered fierce resistance, with a population fighting for survival, contesting control of the city house by house, and striking effectively with guerrilla warfare tactics. Under these conditions, ISIS forces themselves began to demoralize. Thus, the "myth of ISIS's invincibility" collapsed ; even after the defeat, analysts began to observe elements of disintegration due to the number of jihadists abandoning the organization.

To further exacerbate the demoralization of ISIS troops, they were defeated not only by a smaller and less well-armed militia, but also one composed largely of women, which struck a blow to their sexist and reactionary ideology. Faced with the horrific prospect of being converted and transformed into slaves and sexual merchandise, as had already happened to young women in Iraq, the women of Rojava gave their last drop of blood in Kobane. Just as women played an important and decisive role in the Russian and Chinese revolutions, in the revolutions and civil wars in Mexico and Spain, and in the resistance against Nazism during World War II.

The reality is that the struggle of the Kurdish women of Rojava has become a shining light in the Middle East, where various reactionary forces seek to keep women in a backward and oppressed role. The blow of the Battle of Kobane resonated as a severe blow to the political current of Islamic fundamentalism and similar currents that all defend this retrograde, medieval, and oppressive agenda of women. Although the media, commentators, and 99% of the global left attempted to downplay the central importance of the Kurdish militias' fight in this victory in order to exaggerate the impact of the bombings carried out by imperialist aircraft on ISIS bases, reality contradicts these claims because the bombings undoubtedly aided the struggle, but were a secondary factor. The central role was played by the Kurdish militias, the YPG guerrillas.

The defeat of SIS in Kobane-Rojava definitively prevented the consolidation of the "caliphate" given the brutal blow it suffered, resulting in more than 1,200 deaths in Kobane. On the side of the Kurdish militias, they suffered more than 3,000 deaths, including combatants and civilians. After the triumph of the Kurdish militias, the Kurdish people of Kobane-Rojava were faced with the difficult task of reconstruction, considering that more than 50% of Kobane's infrastructure was destroyed in the battle. At the same time, it became necessary to reorganize Kobane's structure for the return of the 200,000 refugees who had fled to Turkey, a challenge that the Kurdish people were able to overcome. The Battle of Kobane is a great triumph for the Kurdish people, a great battle of the entire working class and the people that strengthened the struggle of the indigenous peoples, strengthened the struggle of the Syrian people in the revolution against Bashar al-Assad, and opened up the prospects for the people's struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, the fundamentalist and jihadist currents represented by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and ISIS in a Second Arab Spring destined to deal a severe blow to them following the Syrian revolution.

The Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, located within the Damascus Governorate, had positioned itself against the Assad regime and militantly demonstrated in support of the Syrian revolution. This Palestinian refugee camp, located just 8 km from the center of Damascus, housed the largest number of refugees and occupied a total area of 2.1 km2 with a population of 150,000 people forcibly emigrated from their own land after Israel was recognized as a state in 1948. Yarmouk was also the largest of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps within the country. The dictatorship carried out a criminal siege of Yarmouk, which was compounded by the ISIS attack on the camp, turning it into one of the pivotal battles of the revolution. When the Islamic State attacked Yarmouk, the Palestinian brigades faced the ISIS offensive and the regime's bombings.

It was at this time that the capture of the northern city of Idlib by rebel brigades took place within the framework of an alliance between FSA and al-Nusra Front brigades, a key moment in the Syrian revolution. In April 2015, a group of brigades from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) announced their break with al-Qaeda's branch in Syria with a statement signed by the FSA's First Army, the Swords of Al-Sham Brigades, the Islam Dawn Division, the Yarmouk Brigade, and the 1st Brigade, most of which are active on the Southern Front in the Daraa region on the border with Jordan. The Southern Front had achieved a series of significant military victories over forces loyal to dictator Bashar al-Assad, taking control of the cities of Bosra al-Sham and Nasib, and launching an offensive against a major regime base on the highway to Damascus.

This split reflected a movement of militants who were beginning to adopt positions increasingly distant from Islamic fundamentalism. In this sense, the break with al-Qaeda reflected the processes unleashed after the victory in the Battle of Kobane. Among the leaders who formed part of the Idlib administration was Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who would later lead the final battle that defeated the Assad regime, after which he would publicly present himself under his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Charaa. On April 1, 2015, ISIS launched an offensive on the Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk, and fierce battles with Palestinian militias and brigades began. Despite the siege conditions and lack of food and medicine that Palestinians suffered for months due to the blockade by Bashar al-Assad's regime, the Palestinian resistance fought heroically to defend Yarmouk from jihadist interference.

Although Bashar al-Assad's regime publicly spoke of rejecting the Islamic State, it bombed Palestinian fighters in Yarmouk, thereby weakening the anti-dictatorship forces defending their territory from ISIS. Palestinian militias battled in northern Yarmouk against Bashar al-Assad's army; and in southern Yarmouk against ISIS and Al-Qaeda. The Yarmouk camp carried on its struggle amid a dire humanitarian situation due to the siege imposed by Bashar al-Assad, without food or medicine. The brutal aggression by the jihadists and the dictatorship against the Yarmouk camp lasted for more than three years, transforming it into a prison of despair, subjected to several ISIS offensives that were repelled, although a second ISIS offensive ultimately advanced much further in controlling most of the camp.

The example of what happened to the Yarmouk refugee camp, which suffered massacres, murders, kidnappings, and sniper fire under a continuous siege, is unparalleled by what Israel and the Netanyahu government did to Gaza years later between 2024 and 2025. On the morning of April 1, 2015, the Yarmouk camp suffered a brutal attack by ISIS, which managed to control several areas within the camp until AknafBeit Almaqudes, a group formed by Yarmouk residents, confronted them and forced them to retreat, narrowing their areas of control. ISIS bombarded the camp with random mortar fire, killing activists Abu Jamal Khalifa and Mohammad Rimawi. It also fired mortar rounds at Palestine Hospital, injuring several paramedics and medical personnel.

While a group of armed opposition factions headed to Yarmouk to support its inhabitants' struggle, much of the responsibility for the fate of the Yarmouk camp rested with the Palestinian Authority, whose officials answer to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a Palestinian organization largely represented by Palestinian refugees. It is the PLO's responsibility to defend Palestinians and protect their rights, especially in the case of refugees, but the PLO failed to fulfill even the minimum of its obligations, nor did it even openly condemn the parties to the conflict or the siege imposed by ISIS on the Yarmouk camp. Despite the PA's betrayal, around 8,000 civilians remained in Yarmouk without humanitarian aid. In 2017, it was estimated that more than half of the Palestinian refugees in Syria had returned to neighboring countries, while those who remained in Syria were in a situation of extreme vulnerability. Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime on December 8, 2024, Palestinian refugees began returning to a camp completely devastated by war, thus beginning the arduous process of reconstruction.

Between 2015 and 2020, the second phase of the February Revolution in Syria unfolded, during which a formidable counterrevolutionary front called the RSII Coalition (Russia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq) was formed, intervening militarily in defense of the dictatorship. During this period, the revolution and counterrevolution alternated between coups and countercoups, but the reality is that the revolution had to confront a formidable front composed of the forces of the dictatorship, the troops of Putin's capitalist oligarchy, Hezbollah militias, the government of the Ayatollahs, and Iraqi mercenaries, all of whom acted with the acquiescence of imperialism and the UN. During this period, ISIS was defeated in the Battle of Mosul in 2017, but the RSII Coalition achieved decisive victories in Aleppo and Ghouta, forcing the revolutionary forces to take refuge in the demilitarized zone of Idlib.

Despite the defeat and advance of ISIS in the Palestinian Yarmouk camp, the Syrian revolution continued to advance. Kurdish militias, allied with units of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other Arab brigades such as Liwa al-Tahrir and Burka al-Firat, launched an offensive toward Raqqa, the capital of the self-proclaimed "caliphate," in northwestern Syria. In this offensive, the anti-regime militias achieved a resounding victory at Tel Abiad, an important point on the Syrian-Turkish border because it meant the possibility of "uniting" two of the three Kurdish "cantons" of Syria, the cantons of Kobane and Jazeera. In turn, with this victory, the cantons were able to connect with Kurdish territory in Iraq, which was essential to guarantee a stable supply line. On June 23, 2015, the Kurdish-Arab columns were approximately 50 kilometers from the main ISIS stronghold , which led ISIS to attack Kobane in an attempt to force the YPG to divert forces from the offensive that was underway towards Raqqa.

The Islamic State attack was repelled once again by the brave fighters of Kobane in a new Kurdish-Arab victory, acting together. This not only endangered the dictatorship but also brought to the fore the issue of national liberation for indigenous peoples and oppressed nationalities, an issue that affects many countries in the Middle East. This forced the counterrevolution to intervene to halt the process, establishing a "de facto" agreement between imperialism and the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. The United States began to establish a policy of agreements with Putin, giving him the green light to intervene in the Syrian revolution and do the dirty work of a regional thug to defend Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship.

The counterrevolutionary tripod established by dictator al-Assad, the Islamic State, Iran, and Hezbollah was now joined by a new counterrevolutionary element: Putin's capitalist dictatorship. On September 30, 2015, the Federation Council of Russia unanimously approved Russian President Vladimir Putin's request to intervene in Syria, and that same day, General Sergey Kuralenko, Russia's representative, began coordinating operations. In September 2015, Putin began intervening in Aleppo, the country's second largest city, with intense bombing in the south of the city in an attempt to pave the way for troops loyal to the dictatorship to reach the city center. Putin's intervention was made possible by an agreement signed with the United States in October 2015, in which they reached an agreement to coordinate the use of airspace in Syria and thus avoid unwanted clashes.

In turn, the Wagner Group, a private military company (PMC) of mercenaries financed by the Putin dictatorship, deployed to Syria in 2015 and remained there for six years. The Wagner Group was headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch with close ties to Putin who owned a network of restaurants and catering companies that organized dinners attended by Putin with foreign dignitaries, earning him the nickname "Putin's chef." The mercenaries began perpetrating all kinds of massacres and killings against the civilian population with the aim of crushing the revolution, and were generously rewarded for their "services" with extraordinary profits obtained by not paying taxes or tariffs. In turn, the Wagner Group was in charge of preserving and managing Syria's oil and gas distribution businesses, guaranteeing themselves millions in revenue for fulfilling their role as hired assassins.

Prigozhin also took care to keep the political elites happy. For example, the Assad family was rewarded with contracts from affiliated companies, but generally, due to the protection he enjoyed from Putin's dictatorship, Prigozhin distributed Wagner's profits among his commanders and a small circle of Syrian business partners and the Ministry of Oil and Gas. The initial justification for Wagner's entry into the sector was, obviously, that it played a key role in regaining control of the fields, which legitimized the exceptionally favorable conditions under which Wagner was able to exploit them later.

The Wagner Group was the vanguard for the massacres and torture of the Syrian people, which earned it substantial war booty, which in turn served to finance Wagner's adventures in other places, such as Africa, where it also provided services in support of dictatorships. At the same time, intervention by the troops of Putin's oligarchy was impossible without coordination with the US military. It was US President Barack Obama himself who confirmed that an agreement had been reached to resolve conflicts in the event that Russian and US planes "occupy similar spaces" in Syrian skies. Therefore, to protect the pilots, Moscow and Washington created what was called a direct line of communication, which the United States managed from an operations center in Qatar.

At that center, air traffic controllers were in contact with those from Russia and Syria and coordinated flights to avoid collisions or incidents. In other words, Putin's intervention would have been completely impossible if the US hadn't given him the opportunity to operate in Syrian airspace, coordinating operations from its military facilities in Qatar. A complete agreement on the use of the skies in 2015 between the US and Putin exposes the fallacy of Assad's campaign that the anti-dictatorship struggle was "NATO-promoted" or " instigated by the United States." The reality is that Assad's "rescue ," through Putin's bombing of the anti-dictatorship forces, was only possible thanks to the United States and the coordination obtained in the agreement signed between Putin and the US.

But despite the Al-Assad, Hezbollah, ISIS-Putin bloc with the consent of the US, the forces defending the dictatorship have clashed with the tenacious resistance of the rebel militias that disputed and controlled areas of the city. Thus, in November 2015, the RSII Coalition ( Russia-Syria-Iran-Iraq) was already operating, also known as the 4 + 1 Coalition, due to its four governments and a Lebanese military group, Hezbollah. The Coalition was led by the Iranian military Qasem Soleimani and the Lebanese Hasan Nasrallah, who were in charge of coordinating the Russian Armed Forces, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Syrian Arab Armed Forces, the Iraqi Armed Forces, and Hezbollah troops.

The military objectives of the ISIL Coalition were not limited to eliminating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but also to disintegrating the Syrian opposition and closing the borders of Iraq and Syria due to their use as strategic corridors for the entry and exit of opponents to the regime. But the coincidences between Obama and Putin had a fundamental point: keeping Al-Assad in power. Washington was clear in stating that its main objective was not Assad's ouster but rather to attack ISIS and the positions of the "caliphate." The coordination between the US and Putin paved the way for Putin's air force and navy, which in turn paved the way for dictator Al-Assad's troops in the provinces of Idlib and Hama in the west and in Latakia on the Mediterranean coast. Putin's planes consolidated the fiefdoms of the ruling family where Moscow defended the Tartus naval base.

Protected by Russian fighter jets, the regular Syrian army advanced its lines along with thousands of fighters from the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and hundreds of Iranian "revolutionary guards ." Despite repeated statements by the Russian high command, the attacks by its air force and navy are not being directed against the Islamic State but against positions of anti-dictatorial militias. In this regard, Vladimir Putin bluntly explained the objective of his participation in the Syrian war: "to stabilize the legitimate authorities and create the conditions for a political solution to the conflict." In other words, this means keeping Al-Assad in power. But Putin was not only interested in stopping the revolution in Syria.

The central interest of the oligarchy led by Vladimir Putin was to halt the Arab Spring. The fear of Putin's capitalist dictatorship was that the revolution would spread to the Caucasus through countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan within the Russian Federation, so Putin needed the revolution to be crushed and liquidated within Syria. At the same time, Putin acted in defense of the dictatorial regimes, trying to stem the "chain" effect that had been toppling all the dictatorships. In other words, the RSII's intervention also aimed at mutual support among the dictatorships in the face of the advance of the Arab Spring. If assistance from Hezbollah and Iran was always crucial to Assad, Putin's intervention was qualitative, as he deployed at least 30 of his best Sukhoi 34, 24-M, and 25SM combat aircraft to the Syrian campaign, while his navy fired cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea, more than 1,500 kilometers away from their targets on land. Meanwhile, Russian military specialists, long integrated into the ranks of the Syrian army, were openly operating the new surface-to-surface missiles their country was supplying to Damascus.

Such was the magnitude of the Syrian revolution that it forced Putin's capitalist dictatorship to spare no effort, no means, and no aberrant methods similar to those used by the Assad dictatorship. Putin incorporated the use of cluster bombs, which, by dispersing thousands of small projectiles, wreaked havoc among the civilian population, allowing the forces of the Assad dictatorship to advance much further than in all previous periods. The pro-dictatorship forces seized the strategic town of Kafer Nabuda, on the border between the provinces of Hama and Idlib, which made it possible for them to attack rebel positions along the M5 highway, which crosses the country from the Jordanian border in the south to the disputed Aleppo in the north.

In addition, Assad's troops, along with Hezbollah, recaptured four other towns in Hama province and the city of Jub al-Ahmar in Latakia. In case there were any doubts about the focus of Putin's intervention, other than the supposed "fight" against SIS, during the weeks of Russian bombing, the followers of the "caliphate" not only did not retreat, but actually advanced on Syrian soil. The "militiamen in black" also took advantage of Putin's attacks on rebel militias and the Al-Nusra Front to gain ground in the vicinity of Aleppo. The Arab Spring was a threat to all dictatorial regimes, including the oppressive Nazi state of Israel. For the capitalist oligarchy of Israeli Zionism, therefore, the maintenance of the Syrian dictatorship was a "lesser evil," especially considering that for more than 40 years, Bashar al-Assad's regime did not support any of the intifadas, nor did it actively intervene in support of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, Bashar al-Assad's army was key to maintaining capitalism in the Lebanese revolution, when the Syrian army's armed intervention prevented armed Arab militias from taking power in Lebanon.

Hence the statements by several Israeli politicians and military leaders about the need to arm dictator al-Assad to "save" him , since a possible fall of the Syrian regime would provoke further "destabilization of the region," especially on the Syrian-Israeli border in the Golan Heights. Thus, Putin's intervention was part of a broad counterrevolutionary agreement between the US, Israel, Europe, Putin, and Iran based on the fact that to stabilize the revolutionary situation, Assad's permanence in power was necessary. Since the US bombings began, both Obama and senior US military leaders made it very clear that the "immediate objective" is to defeat SIS, not the fall of Assad. The question of whether the Syrian dictator will remain in power or not thus became, at the very least, secondary for the forces of the global counterrevolution, leaving the Syrian people alone, besieged from multiple quarters.

Federica Mogherini, High Representative for European Foreign Policy, insisted on the need to be "pragmatic" and declared: "The EU supports the UN peace process in Syria, and Staffan de Mistura, the special envoy for that process, is already in talks with the regime. I myself do not rule out holding joint talks with all parties, along with de Mistura." Thus, the Syrian revolution was going through a difficult time because the counterrevolutionary front was acting in an increasingly broad and coordinated manner, joined by the global left, which largely continues to support the Syrian dictator. It was never true that Israeli and US policy was to "overthrow" Bashar al-Assad; on the contrary, the fear that the Syrian revolution provoked in the highest imperialist circles was so great that, in order to guarantee a certain "stability," imperialism and Zionism preferred a thousand times to support al-Assad. By then, the Syrian revolution had produced more than 12 million internally displaced persons, 4 million external refugees, and 400,000 deaths.

A separate analysis deserves the shameful policies of the global left, the social democrats, Stalinists, Maoists, Castro-Chavists, ex-guerrillas and ex- "Trotskyists" who supported Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. The political campaign of all these organizations was based on all kinds of lies, claiming that Bashar al-Assad's regime was "anti-imperialist," that it opposed US imperialism, and that it could embody an alternative regime to US and EU imperialist capitalism. At the same time, 99% of the global left was lying when it said that the rebel militias were trained and " financed" by imperialism. The same lies they told about the rebels who overthrew Gaddafi, or about the Ukrainian partisans fighting against the invasion of Putin's dictatorship and labeled as "Nazis ."

Thus, capitalist governments headed by Stalinism, such as Xi Xinping in China, Díaz Canel in Cuba, or bourgeois governments classified as "leftist", such as Chávez in Venezuela or Ortega in Nicaragua, publicly spoke out in favor of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. It could be argued that the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad was attacked during the imperialist government of George Bush, after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, when the "Global War on Terror" campaign was launched between 2001 and 2007, imperialism criminalized Syria and placed it on the list of countries that were part of the "Axis of Evil" along with Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, and Cuba.

Imperialism's reactionary plan, known as the "Project for a New American Century," included the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and a political regime change within the United States, seeking to install an anti-democratic regime, as close to a military one as possible. This plan was defeated by the Iraqi people's National Liberation War, so that by the time the Syrian revolution began, the list of Syria as an "axis of evil" country no longer existed. Furthermore, the role of Bashar al-Assad's regime in the Middle East was always far from being considered "leftist" or "anti-imperialist."The al-Assad family governed in defense of capitalism and became the richest family in the country, spearheading the privatization process and dismantling of postwar Syria's social gains.

The dictatorship left a trail of poverty and misery in its wake, while the Assad family dictatorship was key to sustaining the entire structure of capitalism in the Middle East. This key role played by the dictatorship was firstly by betraying the Palestinian people, never coming to their aid amidst the countless massacres, repression, and attacks that Palestinians suffered at the hands of Israel for decades. Secondly, when the Palestinian, Druze, and Arab militias were on the verge of seizing power in Lebanon in 1981, the Syrian army intervened to stabilize the political situation and prevent the revolution from succeeding, to cite a few examples.

Thus, there were never any real grounds on which to base the idea that the Assad regime was "leftist" or "anti-imperialist." Quite the contrary, it was rather an oligarchic dictatorial regime, a defender of capitalism and counterrevolutionary. There is no basis for social democrats, Stalinists, ex-guerrillas, or ex-Trotskyists to classify the Assad regime as " anti-imperialist."Thus, the supposed "anti-imperialist" character of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship is nothing more than a lie by the global reformist left to justify its policy of supporting the dictatorship and, by doing so, its betrayal of the Syrian people and of Marxism.

For its part, European imperialism, pressured by the thousands of Syrian refugees—580,000 people—also rushed to "stabilize" the situation in Syria. European social democratic governments expressed their "concern" about the situation in Syria, without lifting a finger in the face of the brutal genocide the people were suffering. The same policy was adopted by "anti-capitalist" movements such as Syriza, Podemos, Die Linke, or the Left Bloc in Portugal, as well as movements like Jeremy Corbyn's in the British Labour Party. Stalinism and Castroism sided with the dictatorship, repeating the campaign of lies propagated by the Assad dictatorship, while movements like Chavismo also sided with Assad.

In this way, the 99% of the global left positioned itself against the Syrian people, betraying the most basic principles of supporting revolutions and the struggle for democratic freedoms. The global left betrayed the Syrian people in two ways: 1) By stirring up the dictatorship's counterrevolutionary campaigns claiming that the resistance and revolutionary forces were financed by the US; 2) By refusing to support the Syrian revolution, and thereby undermining the forces of support so that the Syrian people could triumph in their struggle against tyranny. The traitorous, counterrevolutionary policy of the 99% of the left during the Syrian Revolution was a constant, refusing to support the revolutions that took place throughout most of the 21st century.

In August 2016, the battle for Aleppo became the center of the Syrian revolution. After nearly a month of fierce fighting, a coalition of rebel militias announced that they had managed to break the siege imposed on the city by the regular Syrian army. The Syrian National Coalition, which claims to represent the "opposition" in exile, confirmed the news. The decisive event for this military feat was the rebels' entry into the Ramusa neighborhood, previously controlled by the Assad dictatorship, located on the outskirts of the city. From this position, the network of opposition militias was able to link up with rebel neighborhoods in the east of the so-called "capital of the revolution."

This was a crucial event for the course of the civil war and the Syrian revolution itself, which had been unevenly confronting the troops of the Assad dictatorship for more than five years. The latter, in addition to being superior in terms of weapons, were being supported politically and militarily by the RSII Coalition. But this rebel victory represented a tremendous blow to the regime and its RSII Coalition allies in a city divided into two areas since 2012: in the east, control fell to the rebels; in the west, to the regime. The rebel force that broke the siege was heterogeneous and included a series of brigades that arrived in Aleppo from all over Syria, totaling approximately 10,000 fighters in the Conquest Front, which includes the Fateh al-Sham Front or the Levant Conquest Front. It also included a significant presence of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

While the Syrian rebels awaited the RSII Coalition's counteroffensive, they made further progress in southwest Aleppo, with fighting focused on the factories and public buildings of Ramusa, where they took control of the Artillery Battalion headquarters and the Aviation Technical School, having seized the Weapons Academy the day before. Thus, the first food convoys arrived in Aleppo after breaking through Assad's siege, demonstrating that despite the large counterrevolutionary front mounted to defeat the revolution, it continued to resist. At the same time, one could not help but observe the dire conditions in which the fighting was being waged against a Syrian resistance that lacked the heavy weapons necessary to turn the tide of the war.

That is to say, to launch a general offensive and defeat both the Islamic State and the Islamic State, revolutionary measures were necessary, which the leaderships of the FSA, the Al-Nusra Front, and others were unwilling to take. Even so, the conquest of Aleppo by the counterrevolutionary bloc was possible with a scorched-earth policy and mass murder, and by November 15, 2016, pro-Assad forces launched more than 2,000 airstrikes and 7,000 artillery shells on the eastern part of the city, hitting schools and hospitals and destroying entire neighborhoods. This entire policy of systematic destruction of the civilian population was a replication of what Putin had done in Grozny, Chechen Republic, 16 years earlier, and very similar to what Netanyahu, with the support of US imperialism, did in Gaza, occupied Palestine, eight years later. Now it was a massacre carried out by Putin's army with its sophisticated weaponry and the Syrian army with its canister bombs, supported by Iranian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Afghan militias, supported by Russian and Syrian air forces, which continued to bomb not only Aleppo but also Idlib.

Tens of thousands of civilians fled the city, but 100,000 remained trapped inside the besieged districts. Some families refused to leave the city while resisting around 8,000 armed combatants, and activists and journalists reported summary executions by the dictatorship's army. The executions sought to liquidate members or sympathizers of rebel groups, clearly demonstrating that the only possible policy to defeat the revolution was a counteroffensive using fascist methods, which Assad, Putin, the Ayatollahs, and Hezbollah sought to achieve by seeking total capitulation and the unconditional surrender of the revolution. The counterrevolutionary bloc decided to go all the way in its "Assad or we burn the country" policy , at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths and incalculable destruction, a policy that Assad had already implemented when he crushed the Hama rebellion in 1982 using chemical gases, which cost the lives of more than 20,000 people.

Global imperialism was complicit in the fascist counteroffensive in Syria by acting hypocritically alongside the United Nations (UN), allowing the Assad regime to continue bombing and killing the Syrian people without taking any action. The UN merely made empty pronouncements in forums about "finding a peaceful solution," while the dictatorship dropped barrels of chemical gases on the civilian population. Regarding Aleppo, John Kerry, Barack Obama's Secretary of State, simply begged the dictatorship for mercy while advising the rebels to abandon the city. European imperialism was only concerned with halting the flow of immigrants, for which it considered it essential that Erdogan's Turkish government act to stem the migration of desperate Syrians fleeing the widespread massacres to Turkey. The shipment of weapons to the Syrian rebels never took place so that they could defend themselves and the civilian population in the areas where they were located.

The recapture of eastern Aleppo by the dictatorship's army forces, as well as Homs, parts of Damascus, and other areas previously held by the rebels, was only possible because of the total political isolation imposed on opposition groups, who never received support from imperialism, the Arab bourgeoisie, or the global left. Added to this was the arms boycott, which created a terrible inequality between the dictatorship, which used all kinds of weapons and bombs, while the rebels defended themselves with old, short-range weapons. Even the Islamic State took advantage of Assad's Russian-backed offensive against Aleppo to recapture the city of Palmyra, which they had lost control of.

Finally, on December 15, 2016, Aleppo fell, and buses began to leave, transporting civilians who passed through the checkpoints until they reached Sarmada, in rural Idlib, where they were received with joy and respect by the population. Many fighters fled to the northern rural areas in the hope of being able to return through an exit from the city agreed upon between officials of the dictatorship and the resistance leaders. A series of pacts between the dictatorship and the resistance resulted in the surrender of the city and the forced departure of its people, who had endured a war of attrition, under siege, without weapons or food. However, just when it seemed that the revolution had suffered a final blow, the battle for Mosul opened up a new situation in Syria.

As we explained at the beginning of this work, the Arab Spring was the revolutionary process within which the Syrian Revolution was framed, a process that impacted the entire Middle East region as a whole. It originated after the withdrawal of NATO armies following the triumph of the national liberation revolution of the Iraqi people and the peoples of the Middle East. We had also seen that the withdrawal of NATO troops left a military-political-economic vacuum in the Middle East, and especially in Iraq, from which new political and military forces began to emerge, vying to fill that vacuum.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq had already changed its name several times and was based in Fallujah and Ramadi, from where they launched an anti-government uprising against then-Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. However, they were surrounded by the US-armed and US-trained Iraqi army, which seemed to lead to the group's defeat. However, in a confusing and controversial episode, the Iraqi army that had surrounded them for six months abandoned the battlefield, leaving behind state-of-the-art weapons, including heavy artillery, Humvees, H-60 helicopters, and a whole arsenal of front-line weapons that fell into the hands of the jihadist militias. Thus was born ISIS, the Islamic State, with the consent of the Pentagon and Iraqi army troops answering to the United States.

The Iraqi army of northern Kurdistan, the "peshmerga," under Barzani's leadership, also failed to intervene, and in January 2014, Mosul, Iraq's oil capital, fell to ISIS. The surprising capture of Mosul by ISIS in June 2014 marked the peak of ISIS's power and its strength. By 2014, it ruled the territories in Iraq and Syria along the strategic valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, with a population of 3.7 million. This group of mercenaries and criminals developed important oil fields and other economic activities, and found themselves with hundreds of millions of dollars in the city's banks, providing them with sufficient capital and weapons to expand in an unstoppable advance that led the group to invade the Syrian territories engulfed in revolution. This led al-Qaeda in Iraq to adopt the world-famous name "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIS).

Under the leadership of its supreme commander and self-proclaimed caliph, Al-Baghdadi, ISIS announced the creation of a provisional government, calling itself the " Caliphate," which rapidly expanded into Syria, following the course of the Euphrates River and extending as far as Raqqa. From there, ISIS attracted mercenaries from around the world, former combatants from all NATO military forces, criminals, and thugs released from prison. In this way, ISIS began to structure a fascist organization based on the recruitment of hired killers, experts in killing, torture, and various cruelties such as the sale of women, children, organs, drugs, and all kinds of criminal activities. They filmed and uploaded them to social media to intimidate their enemies, showing the executions and the torment they subjected their victims to.

ISIS grew through its crimes, its criminal activities, and because both global and regional powers, including NATO and petromonarchies, shamelessly funded it. The Pentagon needed ISIS to halt the "Arab Spring" and prevent the revolutionary processes sweeping the region from giving rise to new forces and states that would drive that revolutionary process. For this reason, throughout ISIS's expansion, the Pentagon failed to intervene and allowed ISIS to continue its campaign of conquest and massacres. This continued to develop until public pressure became too intense, forcing President Obama to order the bombing of some ISIS positions. But the bombings were purely symbolic, cosmetic actions that did not halt their operations.

The blow to ISIS that began its demise was not dealt by NATO, the Pentagon, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Russia. The final blow was delivered by a mass popular guerrilla army led by brave young women as part of Syria's revolutionary process, the Kurdish revolution that gave rise to the state of Rojava and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. It was the Battle of Kobane, mentioned earlier, in which ISIS militias were defeated after four months of fighting, from September 2014 to January 2015. From then on, a process of defeats and setbacks began for ISIS, a dynamic crisis that ISIS suffered as a consequence of the defeat in the Battle of Kobane, which lasted four months, from September 2014 to January 2015.

The succession of defeats suffered by ISIS led them to lose 20% of the territory they controlled in Iraq and 45% of that in Syria. They were expelled from 56 of the 126 locations they controlled, including five of the ten largest cities: Abu Ghraib, Baquba, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Tal Afar, and Mosul in Iraq, as well as Deir al-Zour, Manbij, and Raqqa in Syria, until they were finally crushed in Raqqa in 2017. During this path of defeats, ISIS carried out attacks in Europe, such as the one in Paris, and others that put pressure on G7 governments and the Middle East, where the demand to put an end to ISIS grew as a clamor among the population. At the same time, the attacks expressed the despair of the leadership of this group of fascist criminals, who were on their way to final defeat, which occurred in the Battle of Mosul.

The end of ISIS was sealed with the Battle of Mosul, which involved a military operation of nearly 50,000 fighters from the Iraqi army, the armed forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government known as the "peshmerga ," which represents the interests of the Kurdish bourgeoisie that controls the second largest area of oil exploitation in Iraq, in addition to the Popular Mobilization Units called "Al-Hashid Al-Shaab" in Arabic. These militias were made up of Iraqi Shiites, linked to different sectors of the Shiite bourgeoisie, and with solid ties to the Iranian government. On the other hand, nearly 4,000 NATO soldiers and officers joined , all supported by the US Air Force, with secondary participation from the British and French air forces.

ISIS was defending its control of its territory, where it enjoyed millions of dollars in income from the three largest oil fields in Syria: Omas, Tanak, and Al-Taim, which produced thousands of barrels per day. ISIS boasted weapons sourced primarily from Syrian and Iraqi state military bases, such as the Ayyash weapons depot in Syria, from which it seized 100 anti-tank missiles (TOWs), 9,000 grenades, and two million rounds of ammunition. The stakes in Mosul, the main Iraqi city under ISIS control, involved the elimination of the areas under ISIS control in Iraq, which constituted the base for ISIS from which it spread into Syria. The blow to ISIS in Iraq meant the final seal and definitive defeat of ISIS after the series of setbacks suffered in Syria. Therefore, the defeat of ISIS was very important because it meant a major boost to the Syrian revolution.

The battle began on October 16, 2016, with faster advances than expected, and within 10 days Kurdish troops managed to reach the city of Mosul alongside Iraqi troops. From then on, they achieved rapid advances, and ISIS troops began to lose positions, which led to both the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmerga recapturing 5,700 km² and 369 settlements from ISIS on December 3, 2016. By January 29, 2017, the Iraqi Army already had control of all of eastern Mosul, already holding more than 50%, preparing to capture the rest of the urban area, and on February 23, 2017, the Iraqi Army occupied Mosul airport, to launch the offensive on the western half of the city. On February 26, the entry into the city from the south through the districts of al-Tayran and Wadi Hajar was announced, forcing ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi to order his fighters to leave Mosul on March 1 from the underground bunker on the outskirts of Mosul where they were located.

By March 10, 2017, al-Baghdadi fled Mosul and Tal Afar, leaving command to his military leaders and instructing them on how to continue and confront the threats of the Iraqi offensive. On June 21, 2017, in the face of the advancing Iraqi Army, ISIS destroyed the 11th-century Great Mosque of Al-Nuri, where the caliphate was declared in 2014 and which was to be used as a symbol of liberation. Although ISIS recaptured some already liberated neighborhoods on June 26, 2017, on June 29, Iraqi forces almost completely captured Mosul, recapturing the Al-Nuri Mosque, forcing ISIS to move its capital to the city of Tal Afar within Iraq.

After eight months of fighting, with more than 80,000 dead and wounded, and the displacement of nearly 900,000 people, Mosul was finally completely liberated from ISIS and recaptured on July 9, 2017. The fall of Mosul and the final defeat of ISIS opened a new chapter in the Middle East: The fall of ISIS will begin the transition process between the First Arab Spring and the Second Arab Spring, which ushered in the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism. Unlike the First Arab Spring, the Second saw the development of trends toward a break with Islamic fundamentalist organizations throughout the region. This was the result of an enormous revolutionary triumph that led to the destruction of ISIS, a process that unfolded as an inextricable part of the Syrian revolution.

Goutha: Offensive on the remnants of the resistance

In March 2018, the RSII Coalition's offensive targeted Eastern Ghouta, a town that had been a major focus of protests against Bashar al-Assad's government and where the remnants of the resistance and the last refuges of the armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad were sheltering. The counterrevolutionary attacks caused the deaths of more than 600 people, of whom more than 98% were civilians, and among the dead, more than 100 were children. This was a true genocide committed without shame by Assad and Putin, which in turn was broadcast live to the entire world amidst the boundless hypocrisy of the United Nations and the governments of the imperialist countries that had signed a ceasefire resolution approved by the Security Council, allowing war criminals to continue their attacks, massacres, and the destruction of the civilian population.

All the imperialist governments of Germany, France, the United States, etc., made speeches condemning the attacks, but they did not implement any concrete measures to pressure the governments of Putin or Al-Assad to stop the massacre. The Syrian regime bombed Ghouta under the pretext of exercising its "legitimate right of defense" against attacks by "terrorist forces." However, in Ghouta, the armed opposition knew the area well and operated through an extensive network of tunnels, with well-trained fighters and access to supplies that allowed them to live in hiding for months. The Local Coordination Committee continued to operate despite its headquarters having recently been bombed. Therefore, the regime's objective was to cause as much destruction as possible to force an evacuation of the population to the Idlib area in the north of the country, where millions of people from different parts of the country, such as Aleppo, Daraya, and other cities, were regrouping.

Eastern Ghouta is located a few kilometers from the center of the Syrian capital and the presidential palace. It is located on the outskirts of Damascus and, along with other neighborhoods such as Kabun, Barzeh, and Jobar, was from the beginning one of the epicenters of the Syrian revolution. Working-class families lived there, and continue to live there, ordinary people who woke up in the morning to go to work and returned home at night, seeking nothing more than the tranquility of home and the company of their families. In Western Ghouta, working-class families experienced demographic growth as tens of thousands of people from different social classes and different parts of the country migrated to the capital in search of work and better living conditions. It was precisely in this western area that the battle took place from December 11, 2017, to January 2, 2018.

In this area located in the Damascus Countryside Governorate, Bashar al-Assad's forces and the RSII Coalition faced an alliance of opposition resistance to the government called the Mount Hermon Forces Union, which brought together opposition movements such as Tahrir al-Sham, the Free Syrian Army, and Ahrar al-Sham. Fighting also raged in the Dar'a area, in the Golan Heights and the southern Syrian Desert, but constant friction between the leaderships of the rebel forces acted as an obstacle to their attempts to defeat Bashar al-Assad's government troops. For example, the Islamic Union of Ajnad al-Sham organization, which allied with the rebel side, maintained its autonomy, which hampered coordination in the fight against the government attack.

Heavy fighting erupted in the town of Maghar al-Mir, triggering bombardments from both sides. The battle for control of the highest hill, Tal al-Baid, then began. There, the Assad army managed to overwhelm the rebels in the village of Tal al-Baid. The areas occupied by the dictatorship's army served as a base for the offensive, which succeeded in imposing complete control over Tal al-Ahmar. From there, the dictatorship launched a powerful artillery attack in the Golan Heights region and captured the hills of Tal al-Muntar and al-Zaiyat southwest of Maghar al-Mir. On December 25, negotiations began for the rebels to surrender and leave for Idlib Governorate, which has been controlled by the insurgents since the beginning of the civil war. This process began on December 29, 2017, when the insurgents surrendered and agreed to travel to Idlib Governorate on buses that arrived the following day.

When the rebels withdrew from the Beit Jinn area, the dictatorship's army seized all the territories on January 2, 2018, thus assuming full control of the western Goutha area, ending its offensive. From then on, the siege of eastern Goutha began, and although some rebel sectors tried to launch a desperate final attack south of the pocket to escape to Jobar, they finally surrendered on May 12, 2018, the same in Barze and Jobar. On May 13, 2018, the dictatorship and the RSII Coalition announced the total capture of Qaboun and Barze, with which the last rebel contingents left Qaboun for Idlib, on May 15, 2018.

On May 30, 2018, the dictatorship's forces released 39 captured soldiers, and a prisoner exchange took place in Idlib. These victories by the dictatorship's army were possible because the RSII Coalition carried out more than 400 airstrikes in the area, hitting markets, schools, and homes, using banned cluster munitions. Thousands of people were left underground, 1,005 were killed, and 4,829 were wounded. This succession of defeats imposed on the revolution forced the insurgents to regroup starting in 2018 around the "Idlib demilitarized zone ," as the dictatorship called it. But even though the RSII Coalition, with the acquiescence of US imperialism, managed to inflict enormous defeats and losses on the revolution, it failed to completely erase it, as evidenced by the regrouping of the revolutionaries in the Idlib region.

Idlib: The revolution regroups

The reality is that, despite the dictatorship's military triumphs, the majority of the Syrian people continued to hate Bashar al-Assad's regime. The regime remained completely isolated, with no mass sectors to support it, although, as in all revolutions, there were pockets in Syria where there were still groups that supported the regime, but they were a complete minority relative to the population as a whole. Thus, the dictatorship's sole support was the RSII Coalition. That is, without the intervention of Hezbollah, the Iranians, the Iraqi mercenaries, or Putin's mercenary troops led by the Wagner Group, the dictatorship could no longer govern Syria. All of this made the dictatorship completely dependent on the RSII Coalition.

These political limitations of the dictatorship's triumphs forced the counterrevolutionary front to seek a way out that would decompress the revolutionary process and give the regime a breather. Although the revolution had suffered defeats inflicted by the RSII Coalition, the resistance had not disappeared. On the contrary, the arrival of fighters from various parts of Syria turned Idlib into the largest rebel stronghold in the entire country. At the same time, within Idlib, the arrival of fighters led to the continuous emergence and disappearance of new armed organizations that would group together the various combatants in one way or another. The solution the counterrevolutionary coalition powers found to this problem was to find a relocation zone for the rebel guerrilla groups where they could establish themselves, and in fact, to recognize an area under their control.

Given the serious weakness of the dictatorship and the regime's total dependence on the foreign troops that sustained it, the presidents of Russia and Turkey held an emergency meeting in the Russian city of Sochi on September 16, 2018, where they agreed to create a zone of between 10 and 20 kilometers guarded by the Russian and Turkish military police. The Idlib Demilitarized Zone emerged from the Sochi Agreement between Vladimir Putin's capitalist oligarchy and Recep Erdogan's regime in Turkey. This security zone existed from 2018 to 2024, separating the Syrian opposition areas spread across Idlib, Latakia, Aleppo, and Hama from the Syrian territories of Bashar al-Assad's government, where approximately 2.9 million people lived, including one million children.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan intervened out of particular concern for trying to stem the spread of the Kurdish revolution, which threatened to spread to Kurdish-populated territories within Turkey. He also feared a stampede of Syrian migration, with more than a million people crowding into the Idlib refugee camps located on the Turkish border, who could join the more than 4 million Syrian refugees already located within Turkish territory. While Erdogan feared the Syrian revolution would spread within Turkey, Putin needed to stem the spread of the Arab Spring to the Caucasus. Both, given the anti-dictatorial nature of both the Syrian and Arab Spring revolutions, came out in defense of the dictatorships in the region threatened by the revolution.

The Sochi agreement also implied that the governments of Turkey and Russia agreed to monitor the rebel troops based within the demilitarized zone, which came into operation on October 15 , 2018. All the militias that confronted the dictatorship were integrated there , on the one hand the most important of all: The Committee for the Liberation of the Levant called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS by its acronym in Arabic, a coalition of militias led by Abu Mohammed al Golani whose real name is Ahmad Al-Sharaa. Al-Sharaa had been a combatant in the Iraqi National Liberation War in the Arab militias that defeated imperialism, where Al-Sharaa and his team had linked up with jihadist groups and Al Qaeda. But in the midst of the Syrian revolution, Al-Sharaa broke away from Al-Nusra, which was Al-Qaeda's branch in Syria, and founded HTS on January 28, 2017, along with the leadership team that accompanied it.

By the time the Idlib demilitarized zone was established, HTS controlled key points such as the Bab al-Hawa border crossing into Turkey and was considered a terrorist organization by the UN, the Pentagon, the United States government, and the imperialist governments of the European Union. To confront HTS's power, the Turkish government promoted the Syrian National Army (SNA), which became the second-largest armed force in the demilitarized zone, integrated with Islamist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and the Nour al-Din al-Zinki brigades. On the other hand, there was Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda's representative, which was the third coalition in Idlib.

In this way, three forces were regrouping in the demilitarized zone of Idlib: On the one hand, HTS, the strongest of all and independent of all sectors, the SNA supported by Turkey and Al Nusra, the representation of Al Qaeda. Al-Sharaa, the leader of HTS, did not accept to join either of the two previous coalitions, remaining independent of both the armed coalition supported by Turkey and the armed coalition supported by Al Qaeda, which is why US imperialism offered HTS a deal for money and supplies, trying to reach a negotiation and integrate it into its policy.

But Al-Sharaa rejected the agreements offered by imperialism, which earned it the respect of sectors of the population who welcomed the existence of a militia independent of all intervening powers. Still, despite its independent nature, the methods of the guerrillas commanded by Al-Sharaa were brutal, continuing the sexist, racist, and sectarian agenda that characterized jihadist militias, which also earned it the rejection of many sectors of the population within the demilitarized zone. At that time, HTS was composed of some 30,000 well-organized and battle-hardened fighters who managed to control almost 60% of Idlib province. As the strongest group, it established a civil administration that collected customs duties on the border with Turkey and imposed taxes on merchants.

The group had authority over the flow of trade in and out of Idlib, which helped finance it. HTS was systematically excluded from negotiated ceasefires, while still fighting ISIS sleeper cells. But despite attempts by imperialism, the RSII Coalition, and Turkey to wipe HTS off the map, all these attempts failed and only strengthened it amid a series of inter-militia clashes that occurred in January 2019 between the SNA and HTS, culminating in HTS's victory. From then on, HTS controlled most of Idlib and began to wield significant influence in the "National Salvation Government" ( NSG) that was formed thereafter. HTS's military defeat of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and the SNA in 2019 began to highlight the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism and express the Second Arab Spring. Following its victory, HTS immediately violated the ceasefire negotiated by Turkey and Russia, positioned combat units in the demilitarized zone along the border between Idlib and the Syrian government, and attacked Assad's army camps.

In March 2020, a ceasefire sponsored by Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdoğan was imposed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but by March 1, 2021, HTS was reported to have once again defeated Al-Qaeda in Idlib. In October 2022, HTS launched an offensive on the city of Afrin, near the Turkish border, against Turkish-backed SNA groups. In the following years, HTS strengthened, including founding a military academy in 2022 and beginning to specialize in the use of drones, which were first used by Houthi guerrillas.

But two elements decisively impacted the Syrian revolution: on the one hand, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which led to an armed uprising of the entire Ukrainian people, and the mass mobilization in Europe and around the world in support of Ukraine. From then on, the intervention of Putin's capitalist dictatorship of the oligarchy was concentrated in Ukraine and weakened at other points of intervention, thus weakening Putin's intervention in Syria qualitatively. At the same time, Putin became militarily bogged down in Ukraine by an extraordinary and courageous Ukrainian resistance that inflicted more than a million casualties on the Russian army. The most devastating and significant blow for the Syrian people was the blow dealt to the Wagner Group, which suffered more than 30,000 casualties in the Battle of Bakhmut.

The near-destruction of the Wagner Group in Bakhmut culminated in the uprising against Putin and the subsequent death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, likely assassinated by Putin. The crisis of the Russian army and the fall of the Wagner Group, which had played such an important role in the attack on the Syrian revolution, were a severe blow to the RSII Coalition. The weakening of the RSII Coalition unleashed forces and tendencies among the people of the Syrian Revolution and, in turn, linked the Ukrainian revolution with the Syrian revolution, to the extent that Ukrainian militiamen and partisans began advising and assisting HTS militants, who began receiving military advice on the use of drones from the Ukrainians. In other words, HTS evolved from being a group of al-Qaeda cadres to breaking away from ISIS and moving closer to agreements with Ukrainian militias. They didn't do it for intellectual reasons: They did it because the Islamic fundamentalist militias were trying to shoot and destroy them, so the HTS leaders had to evolve in self-defense.

But there was a second element that impacted the Syrian revolution, and that was the outbreak of open civil war in Gaza with the invasion of Israel by Palestinian militias on October 7, 2023. This chapter of the civil war was a severe blow to Israel, which suffered more than 80,000 casualties at the hands of Palestinian militias in the Third Intifada, amid a horrific genocide committed against the Palestinian people by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). But it was not only a severe blow to Israel, but also to Islamic fundamentalist leaders like Hezbollah, who, due to their bourgeois and traitorous nature, are inconsistent when it comes to carrying out a struggle in defense of the rights of the oppressed, such as the Palestinians.

For this reason, Hezbollah signed a peace agreement with Israel in 2024, which betrayed the Palestinian people and also represented another severe blow to the RSII Coalition, as it weakened Hezbollah's involvement in the fight against the Syrian Revolution. The militants of the Syrian revolutionary forces suddenly saw the weakening of two fundamental pillars of the RSII Coalition: Russia and Hezbollah. The weakening of the RSII Coalition, which was the fundamental support of Bashar al-Assad's regime, opened the door once again to a revolutionary offensive.

2024: The dictatorship falls

HTS was waiting for the precise moment to launch an attack on the troops of the Assad dictatorship, and the moment arrived on November 27, 2024, the day after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, the Syrian government's main military supporter. HTS took advantage of Hezbollah's paralysis and the crisis with Putin bogged down in the Ukrainian revolution. It also took advantage of the Iraqi army's refusal to intervene in defense of Assad, another element that expressed the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism. HTS was able to launch the offensive that surprised the world precisely because of the weakening, not the strength, of Islamic fundamentalism, in a process that ratifies and strengthens the Second Arab Spring as part of the global political revolution.

Assad's army collapsed in 12 days due to a lack of popular support. He was socially isolated and mired in hatred by the overwhelming majority of the population in the face of the unstoppable advance of a coalition of militias led by the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS). Without the support of Iran's Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship and the dictatorship of war criminal Vladimir Putin, dictator Bashar al-Assad had to flee like a rat into the arms of the war criminal who had given him asylum in Moscow. However, it is impossible to understand the fall of the dictatorship except as part of the combination of two revolutionary processes: the Ukrainian revolution, the vanguard of the European revolution, and the Third Palestinian Intifada. Both processes were the framework within which the Syrian revolution and the Rojava revolution developed, the vanguard of the Second Arab Spring. Without the combination of these two revolutionary processes, the fall of Bashar al-Assad would have been impossible. In this way, the Syrian revolution demonstrates the unity of the global revolutionary process with sister revolutions that have enabled one of the most resounding revolutionary victories, which we Marxists hail with pride.

The militias began their offensive against the dictatorship on November 27, launching an attack from Idlib province toward the city of Aleppo, the country's second largest city. The regime responded with airstrikes. The following day, on November 28, the militias cut off the strategic highway connecting Damascus to Aleppo and seized three towns in Aleppo and Idlib provinces. The clashes left more than 200 dead, and among the casualties was a general in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, a key ally of al-Assad. On November 29, the rebels entered Aleppo after capturing more than 50 towns in the north of the country. The dispute over Aleppo began, in which al-Assad's troops and his ally Putin responded with intense airstrikes in and around Idlib.

Anti-regime militias occupied positions in New Aleppo, on the outskirts of Aleppo, and on November 30, 2024, captured most of Aleppo, including the airport, government buildings, and prisons. They also took the strategic town of Saraqeb while enduring bombing by Putin's air force. However, by December 1, 2024, the militias consolidated their full control over Aleppo, which was no longer under regime control. Dictator Al-Assad, in a defiant speech, asserted that "terrorism only understands the language of force." Amid the militias' advances, Putin and the Ayatollah dictatorship reiterated their unconditional support for the dictatorship, while Al-Assad's and Putin's planes bombed anti-dictatorship militias in the northwest of the country.

On December 5, 2024, the militias took the city of Hama, the fourth largest in the country, and the people toppled a statue of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad's father. And on December 7, 2024, the militias captured Homs, the third largest city, and freed more than 3,500 prisoners, as they approached Damascus, just 20 kilometers from the capital. As they took over the cities, the rebels opened prisons and freed thousands of political prisoners, avoiding reprisals against the Christian, Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish minorities. In the cities, they sought to restore the supply of bread and electricity, attempting to establish some form of government, which allowed them to gain considerable popularity.

The population of Deraa, in the south of the country, where the Syrian revolution began in 2011, rose up in arms, resulting in Damascus being surrounded by militia forces from Homs in the north and from Deraa in the south. In Deraa, there was no such group as HTS, so the people resumed self-organization, took over police stations and checkpoints, and marched toward Damascus, liberating Deraa, Suweida, and Quneitra until reaching Daraya, south of the capital. The Druze community defeated Syrian regime forces in Suweida, while simultaneously, troops from the armed militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SFD), the Kurdish people's militia fighting for their national liberation, advanced to take control of the city of Deir Zour, on the left bank of the Euphrates River.

On the night of December 7-8, the militias entered Damascus, took over Saydnayah prison, and proceeded to free all the prisoners, while Bashar al-Assad fled Syria by plane, marking the end of his horrific dictatorship. The lightning offensive, in 12 days, achieved the triumph of the 13-year-old revolution, a triumph that strengthens all the peoples of the world in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East and globally.

The fall of Assad strengthens the Second

Arab Spring

The Syrian revolution, with the fall of al-Assad, reaffirms the content of the Second Arab Spring because it confronts a capitalist dictatorship, but at the same time it goes against Hezbollah, which is backed by the Islamic dictatorship of the Ayatollahs in Iran; it goes against pro-Iranian militias; it goes against al-Qaeda; and it goes against ISIS. The Second Arab Spring is the expression of the process of political revolution sweeping the world, through which people are breaking with all their old directions on a global scale: social democracy, Stalinism, former guerrillas, bourgeois nationalism, etc. The expression of this process in the Middle East is the crisis of the Islamic fundamentalist current, which has been the most important political movement in the region for 45 years, but is now showing fractures, crises, and public and manifest fissures.

An expression of the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism is Hamas's public support for the Syrian revolution and the fall of Bashar al-Assad, with the following statement, which you can read here : "Hamas congratulates the brotherly Syrian people on their success in achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice, and we call on all members of the Syrian people to join their ranks." Hamas's public statement is a clear fracture of Islamic fundamentalism, as Hamas places itself on the opposite side of Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, despite the fact that they operate together on the same military side in the Third Intifada.

Hamas had already publicly supported the 2011 Arab Spring against the Assad government and abandoned its headquarters in Damascus in 2012, a move that enraged Iran. Another example is the evolution of the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS), the group that led the entire revolution. HTS is a religious armed group considered "terrorist" by the US and NATO, which emerged in Idlib. The founders of this group are a group of leaders led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani who broke with Al-Qaeda when it made an agreement with ISIS to promote an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Abu Mohammed al-Golani, whose real name is Ahmad al-Shareh, broke away from al-Qaeda, which in Syria was called al-Nusra, and founded the Levant Liberation Committee (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS) on January 28, 2017, along with his team of leaders.

The Syrian revolution is a February revolution, that is, a revolution that destroys the regime and institutions of the bourgeois state, but it is not led by a revolutionary Marxist party. So this revolution, like the February revolution in Russia, opens the stage of the October revolution, that is, an interregnum whose duration we cannot currently estimate, during which the bourgeoisie will attempt to rebuild the institutions of the bourgeois state and its political regime on the one hand, while on the other hand, the revolution will counter its plans to destroy bourgeois institutions once again. This poses the challenge of having a revolutionary organization at its head to put an end to capitalism.

In the revolution that overthrew Al Assad, the coalition of militias entered Damascus in a 12-day raid that electrified the world. In every liberated city, demonstrations and celebrations erupted. The mobilizations demonstrated the joy and excitement of the people who took to the streets to express their happiness at the end of the Assad dictatorship, while the mobilizations and celebrations became global. The Syrian people came out to celebrate in every capital city—New York, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, etc.—and their demonstrations garnered sympathy from people around the world. At the same time, the hatred of the population has spread from the Assad dictatorship to the Putin dictatorship and the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs, who have committed horrific massacres against the Syrian people.

The thirst for revenge gave rise to activism willing to take up arms to destroy Assad, Putin, and the Ayatollahs, which explains the participation of hundreds of young people eager to oust the dictatorship and foreign militias. When the militias seized the Al Rawda presidential palace in Damascus, they found an impressive collection of high-end vehicles inside, among other disgusting displays of the dictator's ostentatious wealth. Bashar al-Assad lived in a majestic stone and marble fortress on a hill with panoramic views of the city, in the midst of a town with 80% poverty.

But as happens every time a dictatorship falls, horror followed the celebrations: After the rebels opened the doors of Bashar al-Assad's regime's prisons, the families of the disappeared desperately searched for their long-detained relatives in the filthy cells of the dreaded Saydnayah prison. Bodies began to appear, and horrific scenes showed cells where mass executions had taken place, crematoriums for hanged prisoners, prisoners living under torture, shaved, skeletal, barely able to give their names, living in horrific conditions of solitary confinement amidst mud and excrement. Those searching the prison rummaged through buildings looking for routes to other floors, while others tore down walls or drilled into the ground looking for hidden cells, or those built underground. The Syrian people must now face the task of bringing to trial and punishing the dictatorship's officials responsible for the thousands of deaths and disappearances during the Assad regime.

Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad, HTS seeks to form a bourgeois, capitalist government of "national unity and reconstruction ." It appointed Mohamed al-Bashir as transitional prime minister. He is seeking an 18-month transition until elections are called, attempting to establish a state apparatus after the regime's collapse, thereby ensuring governability and avoiding widespread anarchy. Once in office , al-Bashir assured the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that he "will guarantee the rights of all people and sects in Syria ." He stressed that "the incorrect behavior of some Islamist groups has led many people, especially in the West, to associate Muslims with terrorism and Islam with extremism... we will guarantee the rights of all people and all sects in Syria..."— a discourse that seeks to present a " moderate" government far removed from Islamic fundamentalism.

In turn, HTS leader Al Golani announced that he will dissolve the former regime's security forces and close its prisons. He agreed with former Assad regime Prime Minister Mohammed al Jalali to preserve these institutions and return 400,000 employees to their jobs. HTS seeks a transfer of power and relies on its own government apparatus, but it has governed Idlib province, and it is not possible for this small apparatus to govern all of Syria. Therefore, on December 9, HTS announced a general amnesty for all Syrian regime military personnel whom the regime recruited under compulsory service, emphasizing that these individuals' lives "are safe" and that "no assault on them is permitted." However, HTS announced that it will not pardon all those involved in the torture and murder of detainees in Syrian prisons.

Meanwhile, four million Syrian refugees in Turkey are seeking to return to their communities, flooding Syria's borders with Turkey with thousands of families embarking on their return journey. HTS announced on December 9 that it is "strictly prohibited" to interfere with women's clothing choices or require them to dress modestly, further departing from the Islamic fundamentalism that compels women to wear the burqa and Islamic clothing. In the past, when HTS had recently broken away from Islamic fundamentalism, it still brutally repressed women in Idlib, and HTS's "morality police ," called Markaz al-Falah, arrested women for dressing "inappropriately."

It's possible that HTS is seeking change in an attempt to impose a bourgeois democratic regime, in order to transform itself into an organization "reliable" by imperialism, capable of managing capitalist Syria. The combination of militias and popular uprisings with elements of self-organization imposed democratic freedoms, the release of political prisoners, the return of refugees, guarantees for minorities—in other words, a whole set of mobilization processes that hinder dictatorial, repressive, or Bonapartist attempts by HTS.

All imperialist organizations are acting in this direction. For example, UN Secretary-General Guterres said that "the United Nations is fully committed to a smooth transition of power in Syria." US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is moving in the same direction , traveling to Jordan and Turkey for talks on Syria, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan traveled urgently to Israel, quickly seeking agreements to establish a "peace" that would halt the revolutionary process in Syria.

The entire global counterrevolutionary front now wants to negotiate with HTS. Putin has already sounded out HTS to negotiate the continuation of its military bases—the Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean and the Hmeimim military airport—and Iran is also seeking to negotiate the withdrawal of the "Revolutionary Guards" and their military and logistical elements. Regardless of the course of events, we Marxists do not support HTS's transitional government or any of its measures. We believe that the Syrian people will sooner or later confront this government, or its successors, when they discover that Syrian capitalism has nothing to offer them. The triumph of the Syrian revolution implies the possibility of developing a project to finally end capitalism in the country and the Middle East.

So many years of horrific dictatorship explain why it has been difficult for activists to carry out activism in Syria, but that doesn't answer a question that is surely on the minds of millions around the world: Why have so many young activists and militants been attracted to Islamic and religious groups in Syria? Why haven't they sought out leftist groups, the Communist Party, or the Socialist Party? And the explanation is very simple: Because Stalinism and the social democrats have always supported Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship. Even Assad's own Ba'ath Party claimed to be socialist, which means that the Syrian people saw these so-called "socialists" torture and kill people, something similar to what happens in Venezuela, North Korea, China, or Cuba, where a dictatorship that calls itself "socialist" represses the people and defends capitalism.

Dictator Hafez al-Assad promoted the "National Progressive Front," led by the Baath Party, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Khalid Bakdash, agreed to join the Popular Front created by al-Assad. The CP then split into two wings: one led by Khaled Bakdash and the other by Youssef Faisal. However, both, and even Kadri Jamil's Popular Will Party, have always supported the Syrian dictatorship, guaranteeing themselves ministerial positions in the government and slandering the forces of the revolution. So, if a young activist, a women's rights activist, or an anti-dictatorial leader sought to confront al-Assad's dictatorship, all they found were religious groups, whether jihadist, Islamist, Salafi, or otherwise. They couldn't find the left, because leftist groups were always defending a horrific dictatorship. This explains why thousands of young people, in order to organize politically against the dictatorship in Syria, had no choice but to join or affiliate with religious groups. They were the only ones standing up to the dictatorship.

It's not that there haven't been attempts to build Marxist organizations throughout Syria's history. We have the example of comrades like Munif Mulhem, who was imprisoned in horrific conditions for 17 years, from 1981 to 1997. Munif led a Trotskyist wing of the Communist Party of Labor and himself promoted the Syrian Communist Action Party, which was aligned with Mandelism. We also have other examples, such as the late Palestinian revolutionary Salameh Keilah, who suffered imprisonment and torture for eight years while forming the Syrian Left Coalition, or Workers' Democracy of Argentina, which sent comrades to fight in Syria for the revolution. These organizations were unable to survive the dictatorship's repression, but even beyond their political differences, they were important efforts to provide an alternative to the Baath Party and Stalinism.

But now the victory of the Syrian revolution opens the door for Marxists in the Middle East. Thousands of activists are beginning a new experience as the revolution unfolds. It has entered a new stage; the revolution will now confront future governments that defend capitalism and will allow thousands of new activists access to Marxism. We at Marx International salute the Syrian revolution and turn to those thousands of activists who have achieved the enormous revolutionary effort of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship to build a revolutionary organization, regrouping revolutionaries to further develop the Second Arab Spring on the path to global socialism.