The overthrow of the 50-year bloody dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and his father is a consequence of the world-shaking impact of the resistance to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Jewish pogrom in Israel and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Like those two watersheds in world politics, the fall of the Tehran- and Moscow-backed Assad regime is accelerating the crisis of the U.S.-led “world order” and the shifts in alliances and rivalries among competing bourgeois forces in the region. It’s also drawing millions of working people into politics and opening possibilities to put their stamp on the road ahead.
Syria was a key part of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” and the main route for weapons it sent to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Despite this latest blow, the Iranian regime continues to drive ahead on developing nuclear weapons and looking to advance its reactionary influence in the Middle East.
Thousands of people poured into the streets of Damascus after Assad fled Dec. 8, to celebrate his overthrow. While many working people are wary of the Islamist groups, they are glad to finally have Assad’s boot off their necks.
Assad had held on to power after working people joined mass protests in 2011 and armed bourgeois opponents then took over large swaths of Syria, challenging his rule. He was only able to survive and regain control of much of the country with Moscow’s airpower, billions of dollars in military aid, advisers from Tehran and thousands of Hezbollah thugs.
But hatred for the regime and opposition kept growing, even among the Alawite minority in Syria, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, to which Assad and most of the army officers belonged. When the uprising began in Aleppo, Assad’s army came apart.
Working people paid high price
Working people in Syria paid a high cost for the civil war, with over 306,000 civilians killed and 12 million “internally displaced” or as refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and other countries. Thousands have already begun heading home.
The bulk of Assad’s armed opponents withdrew to Idlib province in the northwest near Turkey, where they set up their own government. They developed relations with the Turkish-created Syrian National Army.
But over the last two years Moscow pulled out many of its troops, planes and much of its military equipment from Syria to replace massive losses from its war against Ukraine. The Putin regime still hopes that the rebels will allow it to keep its airfield in Latakia province and its naval base in Tartus, the only Russian naval facility on the Mediterranean.
Most decisively, Assad’s fall was the “direct result of the heavy blows we landed on Hamas, on Hezbollah, and on Iran,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Dec. 9. “We are transforming the face of the Middle East.”
Opening Assad’s prison doors
Assad’s bestial and rotted-out regime collapsed within days of the start of the Turkish-endorsed rebel offensive.
As the rebels advanced they busted open the doors to prisons in city after city. At the notorious Sednaya prison alone, just north of Damascus, thousands of gaunt and pale prisoners of all political stripes streamed out — men, women and even children. As many as 13,000 opponents of the regime were murdered there between 2011 and 2015. Thousands more were viciously tortured.
“One man told me he didn’t know where to go,” one rebel fighter told the Financial Times. “The prison has been his home for 30 years and he doesn’t remember where his family lives.”
The largest of the mostly Sunni Islamist-based groups in the coalition of bourgeois factions that toppled Assad is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Its leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, was born in Saudi Arabia to Syrian-parents and raised in Damascus.
He broke with al-Qaeda in 2016 and has painted his organization as nonsectarian. That remains to be seen. He says he doesn’t want a conflict with Washington.
“Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions,” al-Sharaa told CNN.
Tahrir al-Sham announced that soldiers drafted into the Syrian army would be given amnesty, but not the officer corps or those responsible for murder and torture.
As the Tahrir al-Sham-led forces advanced, they tried to assuage the fears of Druze, Alawite and Christian minorities. A longtime Assad opponent in the region of Latakia told the Financial Times that the rebels “know all the Alawite sheikhs, and they talked to all of them.”
Turkish forces attack Kurds
While the rebel forces consolidated their gains, the Syrian National Army — backed by the Turkish rulers’ airstrikes — attacked and took over Manbij, which had been under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces since 2016, when it defeated Islamic State there.
Some 30 million Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey make up the world’s largest nation without their own country. The Turkish government fears that any advances for Kurds in Syria will fuel struggles by Kurds in Turkey fighting for their national rights.
The Kurdish forces, which had taken advantage of the earlier war against Assad to form an autonomous region in the north, played a key role in alliance with Washington in defeating Islamic State. There are still some 900 U.S. troops based in the Kurdish region and the border areas near Iraq where most of the country’s oil is produced.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed that “America and the Zionist regime” were the masterminds of Assad’s fall, while also complaining about the role of Tehran’s erstwhile ally Ankara. In reality, Tehran, like Hezbollah, is widely hated by Syrians for its backing of the Assad dictatorship.
After Assad fled, angry Syrians trashed the Iranian Embassy. According to Al Jazeera, Tehran evacuated 4,000 Iranian citizens from Syria.
Nonetheless, Khamenei said, “Iran and Syria have a long history, and we expect our friendly relationship to continue.”
Iran’s “axis of resistance” is greatly weakened. But the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran now has enough fissile material to make more than a dozen nuclear weapons if it decides to do so. Netanyahu has said that Israel will do everything in its power to prevent that.
Israel defends its borders
The Israeli government moved immediately to defend Israel’s borders.
Even though Damascus was the only other government that was part of Tehran’s “axis of resistance,” Assad was careful not to directly attack Israel. During his rule the Syrian and Israeli governments honored a 1974 agreement to maintain a 50-mile-long “buffer zone” between the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights and Syria.
While Tahrir al-Sham has said little about its intentions toward Israel and the Jews, the Israeli government is taking no chances given the Jew-hating origins of many of the Islamist currents in its coalition.
Israeli troops crossed into the border zone and took over the Syrian outposts after Assad’s troops fled as the regime collapsed.
“We have no intention of interfering in Syria’s internal affairs, but we clearly intend to do what is necessary to ensure our security,” Netanyahu said. “We want relations with the regime,” but won’t tolerate a return to Tehran using Syria to transfer weapons to Hezbollah or attack Israel.
As Israeli troops moved into the buffer zone, the Israeli air force hit more than 320 targets of the former regime’s army throughout Syria, including aircraft, underground bases, chemical weapons sites, weapons depots and production facilities, missile sites, radars and tanks. It demolished the Syrian navy.
Washington reacts
The U.S. government sought to make clear that U.S. imperialism is still a force to be reckoned with, ordering B-52 bombers and other aircraft to strike more than 75 Islamic State targets in central Syria Dec. 8. Washington reportedly convinced the Turkish government to agree to a ceasefire while the Kurdish forces withdrew from Manbij.
The blows to Tehran, Hezbollah and Assad are also strengthening Israel’s hand in Gaza. Hamas has reportedly retreated from its demands that Israel withdraw all its troops from Gaza before agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of more of the hostages taken Oct. 7.
In a Dec. 8 interview with NBC, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated that he wants to see an end to the war in Gaza. “I want [Netanyahu] to end it,” he said. “But you have to have a victory.”
Trump also responded to criticism of Israel by liberal Democrats and some forces who deny the reality of the pogrom that happened Oct. 7.
“You know, you have Holocaust deniers. Now you have Oct. 7 deniers,” he said. “No, Oct. 7 happened. What happened is horrible.”
The bourgeois news media has focused its attention on the rivalries and shifting alliances. But they largely miss the most important development, the rising confidence of working people, who are taking advantage of space that is opening up to fight for their interests, opening possibilities for common struggles and down the road the construction of revolutionary working-class parties.
That could be seen in the celebrations throughout Syria following Assad’s fall and in the thousands of people going to the prisons looking for some sign that relatives or friends were still alive.
Similar forces are at work in Iran, where thousands of oil workers have been threatening to go on strike if their demands for better wages and working conditions in the face of rising prices are not met, and truck drivers are planning a nationwide strike Dec. 16.
At a protest by retired workers in Kermanshah Dec. 8, one of the slogans was, “We don’t want war or slaughter; we want lasting welfare.”