By Jeremy Dewar
Three months after the fall of Assad, the new Syrian regime, led by interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is facing its stiffest test: a test that goes to the core of the HTS’ sectarian and anti-democratic politics. While part of the threat originates from former forces of the Assad dictatorship, recent killings in the Alawite district in the northwest of the country cast doubt on whether Sharaa is sincere in his inclusive declarations or, if so, has control over hardline sectarians in his coalition.
Pro-Assad remnants
The flashpoint for these fears came on 6 March, when pro-Assad militias launched synchronised attacks on several government checkpoints in Jableh and other coastal towns in the northwest, killing a dozen or so soldiers and police officers. The Damascus government immediately called on all forces allied to it to go to the region to regain control, but what followed was a series of sectarian pogroms, since many of these militia fighters were determined to wage a sectarian war against all Alawis.
The pro-Assad militia was responsible for some of these, killing up to 200 civilians according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). But according to another trusted source, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (17 March), 2,089 Syrians have been killed, of which over 1,500 were civilians. Several thousand Alawis have sought refuge in the Russian air base in Khmeimim, too frightened to return to their burned out villages.
This marked a serious escalation from ongoing skirmishes between Iranian-backed Assad loyalists and HTS government troops in Alawite villages in a region that was once closely associated with the Assad regime. Undoubtedly it showed forces loyal to Sharaa were guilty of indiscriminate massacres.
However, the SNHR has also found that the vast majority of the killings were the work of the Abu Amsha and Hamzat divisions, formerly associated with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. The SNA has a horrific record of sectarian killings, notably in the ethnic cleansing of Kurds from Afrin and Serekaniye. They and other similarly minded militia used the attacks on Sunni civilians as a pretext for a sectarian rampage.
In a positive response, spontaneous demonstrations took place, not only in the affected provinces of Latakia, Tartus, Hama and Homs, but also in Damascus and the other large cities, demanding that Sharaa immediately seek out and punish those responsible, even if they come from his newly amalgamated armed forces or the HTS itself. One placard read, ‘All Syrian blood spills as one’. This democratic urge, reminiscent of the revolutionary days of 2011, has re-emerged onto the streets.
Character of the interim government
There are many forces in the west, certainly in the US administration but even on the left, who believe that the HTS and its leadership are still effectively the same as the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra from which it evolved, or even ISIS. Indeed, Sharaa ordered a massacre of Alawis in revenge for Assad’s indiscriminate chemical attack on Sunnis in 2015; he also confiscated Christian properties in Idlib in 2018.
Thus, there is certainly no reason to prettify Sharaa, or his record during the civil war, or that of his administration, via the Syrian Salvation Government, in Idlib province, though here w there was a degree of reach out to Christian and other religious communities. But to reduce all Islamists the ISIS or al-Qaida model would seriously disorient socialist or democratic forces in Syria and internationally.
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) emerged from a tradition of fundamentalist Sunni Islamism, known as Salafism, in which sectarianism towards Shiite Muslims and other religious minorities is a central plank. Before the formation of HTS out of five Islamist groups in 2017, Sharaa led Jabhat al-Nusra, which only broke from al-Qaida in 2016. Although he had been a commander in the Islamic State in Iraq, on entering Syria he declined the invitation to join forces with ISIS.
Both Al-Qaida and ISIS have a long history of sectarian attacks, seeing Alawites and Shiites as heretics. But Sharaa broke with them, for both pragmatic (in order to secure arms and a trading border with Turkey) and strategic (in order to hold power in a diverse country like Syria, without the US or Russia bombing it) reasons. He aimed to focus on building power nationally in Syria, rather than on waging a global Jihad.
He has since aimed to transform HTS’s public image, both to build support in Syria from the various ethnic/religious communities and seek a relationship with regional powers, Qatar, Turkiye and Saudi Arabia, and with Western imperialism. His government is also motivated by a desperate need to lift western sanctions since more than 90% of the population lives below the poverty line – that’s less than $2.15 a day. Nevertheless, the Islamist ideology of HTS and others in its coalition remains sectarian.
However, since December’s revolution and in the short term at least, Sharaa has sought to placate fears of sectarian violence. For instance, HTS forces made a show of escorting Alawi women back to their villages in Latakia in armed convoys. Sharaa has set up an independent investigation into the violence, saying:
‘We fought to defend the oppressed, and we won’t accept that any blood be shed unjustly, or goes without punishment or accountability, even among those closest to us.’
Whilst the proof of this can only be seen in the government’s actions, Sharaa recently claimed in a television interview to have broken with any project of establishing a regime like the Taliban’s in Afghanistan or even Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s in Saudi Arabia.
However al-Sharaa’s government not an embodiment let alone the leader of a democratic Syrian revolution, beyond the role its military offensive played in Assad’s downfall. The newly integrated Syrian army certainly contains unreconstructed jihadists units and, in the context of continued Assadist resistance and provocations, this makes an inherently unstable situation even more dangerous.
Nevertheless, It is positive that demonstrations against the attacks on Alawis rapidly broke out in towns and cities across the country. The pogroms show the need for democratic and working class forces to create genuine popular self-defence units, with support from across the various communities, to prevent such sectarian outrages from whichever side they come.
The HTS ‘makeover’ is not to say that as Islamists, like the Sunni Hamas or Shia Hezbollah, they would not try to impose some form of Sharia law and a (capitalist) Islamist regime, if the democratic forces suffer defeat. The recent interim constitution, that the HTS has drawn up, points precisely in this direction. It stipulates that:
In short what Sharra wants to install is a presidential Bonapartism, where the state power rises above the contending classes in the interests of a capitalist elite and renders powerless the representative bodies or any independent and secular legal system, and breaks the power of workers’ organisations.
Underpinning all these is the provisional government’s staunch defence of the rights of private property in all dealings. Measures beloved of neoliberals abound. State employees, i.e. most of those still in work, are being sacked en masse; state subsidies of basic foods and fuel are being abolished; wages are being eaten up by rampant inflation. Democratic rights – to assemble, to go on strike, to speak freely or dress how you like – have to be fought for daily. Given the appalling economic hardship, rather than adding to the numbers of the unemployed, it is vital that all who can work should do so under an emergency reconstruction plan under workers control.
But the initial gains of the revolution which toppled Assad have not yet been overturned, so workers, women and youth must utilise them in order to fight for a future under their own control and to prevent the return of dictatorship under a different family name. They need to mobilise to build or extend the power of local committees, of trade unions in the workplace, of unemployed workers’ and mass woman’s movements, and in the process lay the basis for a revolutionary workers’ party.
Internationally the workers movement must demand the immediate and total lifting of all imperialist sanctions, and the sending of food, medical aid and material for reconstruction with no strings.
Dangers and opportunities
In the immediate future, al-Sharaa may well attempt to stabilise his rule by crushing attempts to reignite sectarian divisions, by incorporating old enemies into the regime, and by keeping external forces at bay. This is necessary so he can begin to reconstruct the Syrian economy on a sound capitalist basis for foreign investment, but this will be . at the expense of the working class and its allies in the oppressed ethnicities and faith groups.
The working class must not stand aside from all these issues but intervene at every point in this process. Central to this task must be the struggle for the most thoroughgoing democracy. Syrian workers must demand full democratic rights now, for themselves, their parties and trade unions but equally all communities, at the local and regional levels: for the Alawis in the northwest; for the Druze and Christian communities in the Jaramana suburb of Damascus, the northwest and Suweyda; and especially for the Kurds in Rojava.
The Assad loyal militia thrives on the slightest oppression of the Alawis as proof that only a return of the old regime can save them. By strengthening the rights of Alawi communities, revolutionary democrats can pull the rug from under the reactionaries’ feet – while at the same time establishing strongholds against Al-Sharaa’s regime.
Likewise, Israel, which has sent at least 40 sorties into Syria in the past week, is attempting to utilise the Druze minority as a weapon against a united Syria, allowing their clergy to visit holy sites in the Golan Heights (after 50 years of occupation!) and threatening to ‘defend’ Jaramana from ‘Islamist terror’.
These are transparent ploys with no chance of success in the short term. But only by progressive and above all working class forces fighting for full equality for the Druze, Christian and other minority communities can Israel be denied a foothold and the IDF driven out of Syria. In the same way the rights of Shia must be defended in order to drive out the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, who are still collaborating with the pro-Assad militia in the northwest.
Last but not least, revolutionary democrats and communists must demand not just a ‘democratic, pluralistic, decentralised’ state, as promised in the agreement between the Syrian Democratic Council (i.e. the Democratic Union Party – PYD) and the HTS, but the right to self-determination for the Kurds of Rojava, including the right to secede if they so wish. Though limited, their democratic councils introduced more thoroughgoing reforms than in any other part of Syria; Kurdish women have fought bravely, often with guns in hand, for their democratic rights. Now their councils will be ‘incorporated’ into the Syrian state.
However, this agreement could turn into a serious defeat for the Kurds who for over half a century have been denied Syrian citizenship and many thousands of whom have died at the hands of Islamist and Turkish militia over the past 14 years. This could occur if the elements of democracy and woman’s rights created in Rojava are not maintained, and indeed extended to the whole of Syria.
In the wider regional context, this deal is a side product of Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK’s capitulation to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as the Democratic Union Party, the PYD’s reliance on US imperialism, whose air support was important but, like Biden’s aid to Ukraine, always tactical and dispensable, and now under Donald Trump is about to vanish.
No imperialist power can be relied on to defend the rights of oppressed nations – neither in Kurdistan nor in Ukraine, let alone Palestine. Only the class conscious working class, which in the words of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg has no fatherland except the International, can support their rights to the end. It is in the interests of all Syrian workers right now to stand up for equal rights for the Kurds – just as they did at the beginning of the revolution in 2011 – but also defend their national rights and democratic gains.
These are the kind of democratic struggles that Syrian workers must fight for in the months and years ahead. Already they have shown their bravery and tenacity in forming independent workers unions and councils, in standing up against job cuts and closures. Now they must show equal fortitude in the battle for democratic rights.
A key focus must be the call for early elections to a fully sovereign constituent assembly that includes delegates of the urban and rural workers, and which also includes the various nationalities and communities which compose Syria. The workers and democratic revolutionary forces must play a decisive role in convening these elections and protecting them against coercion from either the forces acting for the government or the former regime. Delegates to a constituent assembly must be recallable and replaceable by their constituents.
Revolutionaries should fight for it to adopt the key planks of socialist programme in a programme of permanent revolution for Syria and the entire region. Syria, which has a history of socialist and communist organisation going back to the 1920s, but which was terribly distorted by Stalinism and crushed under the Assad dynasty, needs the building of a revolutionary workers party to lead this struggle.
