Abu Al Baraa (1992-2016)

Abu Al Baraa (1992-2016)

En el cuartel de las milicias revolucionarias de Siria bombardeado
At the Syrian revolutionary militias barracks bombed
por Putin y Al Assad
by Putin and al-Assad.
 We dedicate this work to Abu al Baraa’s family, to his “zawja”
Hanadi, who was part of his life and struggle; to his daughters
Nur and Samia, who lost her father in the struggle against al-As-
sad and for a better free equalitarian society based on the revo-
lutionary power of workers and peasants. They will grow fighting
for justice together with millions of children, who, sooner than
later will take the fight of the fallen in this cruel genocide in their
hands and take it to victory.
Abu Muad and Carlos Munzer
 The present work was finished on October 24, 2017. Exactly one year
ago, on this same date, Abu Al Baraa, 24 years old, socialist writer, found-
er of the newspaper Haqeqa Al Maqhoureen (The Truth of the Oppressed)
and co-author of the book 2013-2014 Syria Under Fire fell murdered by
the tyrant al-Assad during the defense of Aleppo.

Abu Al Baraa was killed on October 24, 2016 struggling to break the
siege of Aleppo. This city, which had turned into the capital of the re-
sistance, fell two months later, in mid-December 2016, at the hands of
Bashar al-Assad. This meant a very hard defeat for the Syrian revolution,
which was cornered to its last trenches, as it can be seen today.
In Aleppo, like yesterday in Homs, Daraya, Qsair... the most heroic and
advanced sector of the masses of the Syrian revolution, fought, resisted and
died.
The city of Aleppo was bombed, surrounded and besieged for months
by al-Assad, Putin, the YPG, ISIS and the Iranian Republican Guard.
It ended up being surrendered from within by the generals of the Sunni
bourgeoisie of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). From outside, other fractions
of the FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra refused to concentrate forces to break the
siege of Aleppo. In that city, the Leon Sedov Brigade, the revolutionary
socialist fraction of the rebel militias of Syria, was forged and tested in
combat and political struggle.
It was in these tumultuous events and from Aleppo that, under the
lead of Abu Al Baraa and its editorial board, the first issue of the Syrian
newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed was issued, of which we reproduce
the editorial in this book.
Abu Al Baraa was my friend and companion. I could share with him
an enormous mass revolution and a heroic resistance of the exploited of
Syria, today drowned in blood.
This fight and his fight will not be in vain.
There will be no forgetting or forgiving!

Abu Muad
 PROLOGUE

Diary of a Syrian writer

 This is the title of Chapter 1 of this work. It is made of a set of Abu
Al Baraa’s writings, elaborated between November and December 2015,
when he left Syria in order to meet the co-authors of the book Syria Un-
der Fire to prepare together its volumes II and III, as well as to help break
the siege and isolation to which the Syrian revolution had been subjected.
This chapter begins with an account of Abu Al Baraa’s trip from Syria
to Turkey, where he spent nearly two months as a visa-free journalist.
Waiting for his visa there was in vain, since both the embassy of Brazil
and Argentina, countries he hoped to arrive to, did not accept his entry.
Abu Al Baraa had been invited by the Brazilian CSP-Conlutas trade
union center to hold a seminar in November 2015 on “Arab Springs and
the refugee crisis”. All the visa application documents required to be able
to participate in the event were officially sent by this union center that
groups around 300 unions and influences more than two million Brazil-
ian workers.
But the Brazilian government of Dilma-Temer, which already in 2012
was preparing to offer political asylum for al-Assad -when he was about
to fall-, denied Abu Al Baraa a visa. In the same way acted the then Ar-
gentine government of Cristina Kirchner, next to the services of intel-
ligence of al-Assad that worked coordinately in both the Consulates of
Argentina and Brazil in Istanbul. Abu Al Baraa was treated in the same
way as thousands of refugees who left bombed and massacred Syria to-
wards Europe, by crossing the Mediterranean, or those who are in the
concentration camps in the Syrian borders.
 During his stay in Turkey, Abu Al Baraa wrote articles that we now
reproduce in the first chapter. They talk about the crucial moments of the
Syrian resistance in 2015, as well as others that deal with the tragedy of
the Kurdish people in Turkey and with the refugees. Besides, there are two
articles that are of great interest, since they give an account of what was
the real command organized by the counterrevolution and the conspir-
acy against the Syrian revolution: the Geneva and Vienna Conferences.
These conferences, since their beginning in 2013, have met to ensure that
al-Assad does not fall in Damascus and for the Sunni bourgeoisie of the
FSA to give in the rebellious cities from within the revolution itself.
As Abu Al Baraa said: “the Geneva and Vienna Conferences are writ-
ten with “D” of Death and their only objective is to guarantee that al-As-
sad stays in Damascus so that all the resistance that fights against him is
crushed and destroyed until the last rebel city.” His claim was verified by
the cruel developments of these last years.

That perverse counterrevolutionary pact acted in the fall of Aleppo as

it does today when the forces of counterrevolution attack the last trench-
es of the revolution and advance in the partition of Syria. No observer,
either intellectual or politician, whether socialist or not, who tries to be
serious can continue to hide or silence what we say here.
This counterrevolutionary pact is evident. As we said, today it acts
from Astana. The same way it did in Alepo and Daraya yesterday, nowa-
days it covers up the siege on Ghouta. This city is suffering from famine,
cholera and daily airstrikes with missiles and barrel bombs. Its houses are
demolished, while the Army of Islam -a fraction of the FSA supported by
Saudi Arabia – sells out this city from within and assassinates the rebel
forces that want to move forward to break the siege.

The same pact of Astana also acted in the fall of Raqqa, occurred just
days before this book is printed. Seeing what happened there, we can un-
derstand that in these conferences the policy of “open skies” and “cleared
routes” is coordinated so that imperialism and its lackeys in Syria can
divide it and complete their goal of chastising and massacring the masses
and control the oil producing northern Syria directly. This time it was
US turn to bomb that city in northern Syria, while ISIS was taken off in
air-conditioned buses and the Kurdish forces of the YPG, supported by
those of al-Assad, seized the city.
We see the same counterrevolutionary policy acting in the fall of Deir-
ez-Zor. There is also a race to see who takes the city first. That is, to see
what bourgeois gang gets that area that has the highest concentration of
oil deposits in Syria. There, the Iranian Republican Guard, the Shiite bri-
gades from southern Iraq, the so-called “Democratic Forces of Syria” (the
YPG along with FSA brigades under the US imperialist command) and
the forces of al-Assad dispute the city like hyenas… while ISIS massacres
on the road the desperate masses fleeing from that city towards Iraq.

***
Also, this first chapter includes an article of remarkable depth, where
the socialist writer exposes the true conditions that pushed the masses to
the revolutionary combats in 2011-2012 and today.
Abu Al Baraa defines in this work about what is the true engine of the
revolution, not only in Syria but in the whole Maghreb and Middle East,
which was none other than the conditions of hunger, extreme misery,
wage slavery and plundering that the exploited masses suffer in the whole
region by imperialism and its servants, the native bourgeoisies.
What nobody says and everyone keeps silence about is the high cost
of living and starvation. This pushed the Syrian people to the streets in
2011 and to clash against the counterrevolutionary regime of Bashar.
These miserable conditions are today worsened by the counterrevolu-
tionary victories of al-Assad and Putin under imperialist command. A
kilo of bread in besieged areas can cost 5 dollars while the average wage is
around 90 dollars a month, if there is work. The ones that don’t fall due to
al-Assad bullets are dying due to starvation, especially children.

Our young writer was part of the revolutionary youth that stood up
for the revolution. Abu Al Baraa was a militiaman, construction worker,
rebel, journalist, writer, revolutionary and socialist. Let this volume, in
which he has participated decisively, go in his honor. Its first chapter, Di-
ary of a Syrian Writer, shows him as he was: spokesman and leader of the
revolutionary wing of the rebel forces of Syria.
***
In chapter 2 of this work we present the last interview with Abu Al
Baraa together with the other co-authors of the book Syria Under Fire,
carried out by the Socialist Editorial Rudolph Klement in August 2015,
giving an account of the imperialist offensive and its counterrevolution-
ary refraction in Syria.
In that interview, the great debates that were developed worldwide
within the left currents arose. In them, our current, defending the Syr-
ian revolution, unmasked at every step the perfidious politics of most
reformist currents and the Stalinist and pseudo-Trotskyist left, which
supported al-Assad and also supported -masked as “friend of the peo-
ple”- the murderer Putin.
The question of ISIS as “the perfect enemy”; the Kurdish question and
the role of the YPG and PKK breaking the front of the revolution and
agreeing with al-Assad, the imperialist policy of partition and Lebanon-
ization of Syria, are developed in this interview. 
During the year 2015 they began to plan and draw the route of the
counterrevolution and to prepare the conditions for crushing the Syrian
revolution completely with the Final Operation Massacre.
Already at the end of 2014 new actors appeared to take this plan for-
ward. ISIS had been sent in 2014 to the provinces of Raqqa and Deirez-Zor
to control those rebel provinces. The former generals of Saddam Hussein
of Iraq, as well as sectors of the Sunni bourgeoisie freed by al-Assad from
his prisons, were the forces on which ISIS was founded to play the role
of imposing, with the method of terror, control of the insurgent masses
wherever the FSA could no longer do and where the troops of Bashar
could not enter. That is why the first thing ISIS did when they settled in
these areas was imprisoning the leaders of the revolution. That is what the
ISIS is about and the role of its perfidious counterrevolutionary actions.

Other important actors that emerged -together with the deci-

sive turn of Russia in the counterrevolutionary actions-, were as we
have said the Kurdish YPG and PKK, which came to sign a mutu-
al support agreement with al-Assad, breaking the military front of the
revolution, which the Kurdish masses had been part of since 2011. 
The interview made to the authors of the book Syria Under Fire accounts
for these two new counterrevolutionary agents of the Syrian revolution.

***
2015: Final operation massacre starts

The year 2015 was a turning point in the situation; as said in the
aforementioned interview and developed in  chapter 3  of this volume,
whose title is “2015: A key year of the revolution and counterrevolution
in Syria. Final operation massacre starts.”
In the middle of that year, after terrible massacres at the hands of
Bashar and Putin, hundreds of thousands of refugees crossed the Medi-
terranean and arrived, by any means they could, to the coasts of Europe.
Many left their lives on the road. This wave of refugees, reflected before
the eyes of millions of workers in the world in the image of the Syrian boy
Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on the shores of Turkey, aroused the solidarity
of the working class in the imperialist countries towards the Syrian peo-
ple. Thus the Syrian people could enter Europe and tell their truth about
al-Assad genocide. With this, they began to break the siege of lies and
silence imposed by the European and world left that openly supported
the regime of the Assadist counterrevolution, like Castroism, the whole
Stalinism and also sectors of the renegades of Trotskyism did. They had
been hiding for four years the massacres against the masses, who already
were counting their dead by hundreds of thousands.
When this siege was broken, the Syrian exploited became stronger in
their battles. They came to break the limits set by the counterrevolution
in Syria and surrounded Bashar al-Assad in his government palace. It was
a huge mass counter-offensive that came to fight at the gates of Damas-
cus. They struggled in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk; from
Daraya, the siege was broken and the Syrian capital advanced inwards;
and the Damascus working-class neighborhoods of Qaboun and Jobar
up surged. This counter-offensive occurred after the regime alongside the
Hezbollah forces and the Iranian Republican Guard had taken Homs and
Qsair.
At that time, Abu Al Baraa used to say “to defeat ISIS, Hezbollah and
the Iranian Guard that are invading Syria together with Putin, we need to
cut the head off the snake, and it is in Damascus”. This is precisely what
none of the Sunnite bourgeoisie at the lead of FSA and Al Nusra wanted,
as has been shown.
It was in 2015 that the US, as a response to that mass offensive, freed
the skies for Putin’s genocidal forces to enter directly to massacre the Syr-
ian masses, to save Bashar preventing him from falling down. This was
part of the counterrevolutionary response of imperialism, which once
again centralized all its agents to start the Final operation massacre.
This operation was developed with Russia placed by imperialism as
a counterrevolutionary gendarme of the peoples of Eurasia and Mid-
dle East, bombing the Syrian people and placing checkpoints with their
state-of-the-art weaponry, but under the commitment of not occupying
territory. Imperialism gave Putin a role of being a mere hitman. At the
end of this chapter, the reader may find a section dedicated to address
and define precisely the role of the new oligarchy of Moscow in the map
of international counterrevolution.

A key piece of the Final operation massacre was to use ISIS as the “per-
fect enemy and excuse”. With the flags of struggle “against terrorism” the
murder and genocide of more than 600,000 Syrians was concealed and 15
million thrown out of their cities and to the borders.
So it was that the so-called “anti-terrorist front”, headed by the US,
all the European imperialist powers, Russia, Turkey, the union bureau-
cracies and all the parties of the world reformist left, stood up, claiming
that “the greatest enemy of the whole world is ISIS” and that there was an
alleged “terrorist plan to end with Western civilization”. Today, it is clear
that imperialism in the Europe of Maastricht leads to multiple attacks
allegedly attributed to ISIS. Interestingly, ISIS never appears; it does not
leave any fallen man, or signs of life. Only passports appear that serve for
it to be indicted.
This antiterrorist campaign is also good for the left agents of imperial-
ism to support Putin in his mass attack on the Syrian revolution. 
 On the verge of this true political scam, an Islamophobic campaign is
developing from the European capitals and the US, which only strength-
ens imperialism to unleash more direct counterrevolutionary actions not
only in Syria and the entire Middle East but also to reinforce an attack
on the American and European workers in particular. With the excuse of
ISIS, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Catalonia, were militarized.
After so much “anti-ISIS” campaign, what happened was the Ku Klux
Klan and the white supremacists marching in the USA against immi-
grants and the black movement. In France, the bandits of the imperial-
ist Fifth Republic launched the attack on the French workers with labor
flexibilization and removing from them the gain of having 35 working
hours a week. In the Spanish State, after the “attack of ISIS in Barcelona”,
the direct and repressive large-scale intervention began of the monarchy
against independent Catalonia.

***
In the year 2015, imperialism concentrated its counterrevolutionary
forces to crush the Syrian and Ukrainian revolution, two of the most ad-
vanced centers of a revolutionary ascent that threatened to spread to the
entire planet. This mass offensive threatened to burn not only the Middle
East, but also Europe and the US, at a time when an explosion of the cap-
italist world economy was taking place starting with the crash of 2008.
The siege to and massacre of these revolutionary foci was not posible
just because of the strength of the counterrevolutionary troops that at-
tacked them, but because of the betrayal of the reformist left, which de-
picted the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchy in Ukraine and al-Assad in
Syria and the murderer Putin in both, as allies of the world working
class, whereas they are actually their greatest enemies. In these condi-
tions imperialism could advance in a counter-offensive that led to the
Final operation massacre that we are witnessing today.
But this did not end here. The massacre in Syria had the goal of chas-
tising all the workers of the world.

***
 In Chapter 3, it is noted that in 2013 and 2015, the World Social Fo-
rum held its two meetings in Tunisia. The entire world’s left participated
there: Stalinists, pseudo-Trotskyists, native bourgeoisies servile to impe-
rialism transvestite of “anti-imperialists”, and, as they could not miss the
appointment, the smoke-vendor leftists of Syriza in Greece, and Podem-
os, the left of the monarchy of the Spanish State. Castroism participated,
which today has handed over Cuba to imperialism and the Colombian
resistance to the regime of the USA imperialist bases of that country.
Chavezism also participated in it, which has become a new executioner
of the Venezuelan working class and a serial repayer of the external debt
scam to the IMF.
In those years, the Syrian revolution was still on the offensive. The
World Social Forum meeting in 2015 was the platform for imperialism to
launch the final massacre in Syria. As they have done in 2013, thousands
of organizations of the world defined that “ISIS was the enemy” and not
al-Assad that was killing the masses. It was a true smoke screen that left
the Syrian masses isolated and exposed to counterrevolutionary attacks.

That of Syria was the cruelest of the treasons made by the reformist
left to the masses of the world. But it was not the single one. In the other
focus of revolution, in Ukraine, Stalinist cadres as remnants of KGB went
from the Spanish State to murder from the back every leader of Donbass
brigade who didn’t accept surrendering to Obama and Putin’s Minsk pact,
which meant not to advance to Kyiv, the capital city. Imperialism wanted
to put down the Donbass masses cry in 2014: “Let the USSR return”.
The sellout of Cuba to imperialism and FARC surrender in Colombia
are landmarks in this counterrevolutionary policy.
Thanks to a thousand and one treasons of the trade union bureaucra-
cies and socialimperialist parties to the workers and subjugated people of
the world, imperialism moved onto the offensive. With the fascist forces
of Kyiv they attacked Donbass. USA invaded the north of Syria and left
the skies open for al-Assad and Putin (with which they coordinate) to
bomb the rebel cities And now it is aiming its cannons to North Korea,
just to provide a few examples.
 ***
As we have seen, the revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East
were a watershed event in the 21st century, since they were the most
advanced processes of revolution and counterrevolution in a huge and
highly convulsive crisis period of capitalism, opened since the 2008 eco-
nomic crackdown.
These revolutions threatened to penetrate in the imperialist countries.
In 2008, the workers of USA and Europe were marching against the war
in Iraq, forcing the imperialist powers to withdraw their troops.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary processes were de-synch. That was the
main role of the World Social Forum of Chavez, Castro, Lula, Syriza, Po-
demos, Stalinism, imperialism-funded NGO’s and renegades of Trotsky-
ism. Ultimately, that was what the latest meetings in Tunisia in 2013 and
2015 were about.
After surrendering all the revolutionary processes, not only in the
Middle East, but also in Latin America and worldwide, the WSF with-
drew from the arena of the class struggle. Then emerged the self-styled
“New Left”, led by Syriza and Podemos, which already in 2015 in Tunisia,
had led the scam of the “anti-ISIS struggle”.
This world New Left, which took over from the old WSF, proved itself
to be the mouthpiece of Kurdish Stalinism, the PKK, in order to continue
justifying its support for the murderer Al Assad. To this end, they sup-
ported the YPG and their pact with the dog Bashar. They went so far as
to argue that the only progressive thing in Syria was that the YPG would
win: they did win, but as ground troops and gurkas of NATO, of the US
imperialism, of Russia, of Al Assad…
Even anarchist currents raised the banners of the YPG and became
fervent defenders of the Kurdish Communist Party. All of them wanted
to disguise Rojava as “socialist communes” or “self-managed cantons”,
which is a falsification that can only be credible because of the absolute
ignorance of the majority of the masses of the world’s masses of what
happens there: there is a YPG barracks in each “commune” of Rojava
right in front of an Al Assad barracks, all supplied from the 11 US mili-
tary bases in the northern Syria.
After seeing the YPG, under U.S. command, attack in Raqa and Deir
Ez Zor together with Putin and Al Assad’s troops, or attack Mosul togeth-
er with the forces of the U.S. protectorate in Iraq, there are enough words
to unmask such infamy and treason against the Syrian revolution and
even against the Kurdish people, oppressed in Erdogan’s Turkey.

In editing this second volume of Syria Under Fire, we can see that
imperialism is not kind to its lackeys. The Kurdish bourgeoisie expected
its prize after having placed its armed guard (the Peshmerga) as a shock
force in Mosul: an independence in northern Iraq to administer the enor-
mous number of oil wells there. But the Kurdish nation cannot get out of
the historical law that “any people that oppresses another cannot liberate
itself ”. Thus, imperialism, after using the YPG, the PKK and the Pesh-
merga to even govern occupied Iraq, far from giving it Kurdish inde-
pendence in the north of that country, sent its Iraqi gurka army and the
Iranian Shiite militias to enter the Kurdish cities in blood and fire and put
its lackeys in order.
The Kurdish bourgeoisie and Stalinism have long since sold out the
struggle for self-determination of the punished Kurdish people, since
they submitted it to the US imperialism and NATO, whose head and mil-
itary command in the Middle East is in Turkey.
Breaking the siege of the Syrian revolution also means defeating this
falsification that sullies the revolution and makes the friends of the work-
ers of the world -who are the millions of refugees and fighters of the Syri-
an revolution- look like its enemies; and its real enemies -Al Assad, Putin
and Stalinism, all hanging on the coat tails of imperialism- look like its
allies.

***
Chapter III “2015: The final operation massacre starts” was the last
work that the authors of the book Syria Under Fire wrote together with
our comrade Abu Al Baraa. After two years, this writing has a huge va-
lidity today. The facts were yet developed in a crueler and faster way for
the Syrian masses.
The imperialist pirates of the Democratic Party organized the map of
the counterrevolution very well as soon as the revolutions of the Maghreb
and the Middle East had began. The workers and the people of imperi-
alist USA and Europe, which forced their governments to withdraw the
troops from Iraq, didn’t let them to do new military actions.
Imperialism, under Obama’s command, was the real organizer in the
back room of a mass murder, from the conferences of Geneva, Vien-
na and Astana today. There’s the true counterrevolutionary regime that
crushes the Syrian masses. It is the operation room where different bour-
geois gangs and imperialism are behind, sharing among themselves the
loot of the massacred Syria.
Today, all the opportunist left currents want to wash the murder-
er Obama’s dirty clothes. Under his command al-Assad was supported,
Putin was ordered to sustain him and massacre. Under his command a
re-grouping of 9 armies led by Saudi Arabia was organized for the in-
vasion and massacre in Yemen where the bread revolution had unified
the Shiite and Sunni masses of the north and south who came to take
the capital by defeating the Hadi government. The counterrevolutionary
coup in Egypt was also organized; the massacre in Bahrain; and Zionism
was supported as ever to continue occupying Palestinian land.

US imperialism was forced to act like this, i.e., on the backstage, be-
cause USA was the centre of the 2008 world crash and the American
working class and people, with their anti-war struggle, didn’t allow them
new direct military interventions. This forced USA to control the planet
through counterrevolutionary and trading agreements. These agreements
were to burden their crisis onto the world, while with counterrevolution-
ary pacts of defensive-offensive character they concentrated their forces
and agents to isolate, asphyxiate, besiege and crush the focuses of the
revolution and destroy the most advanced conquers of the world working
class.

Under these conditions in 2015, imperialism launched its counterof-

fensive, that is to say, the final massacre operation in Syria.

***
Under Trump’s command, they intend to crush the Syrian revolution… but it
resists in the last trenches

This second volume is published in times when Trump is the new

president of the USA, we are facing a new administration of the busi-
ness of the US imperialist pirates that starts from and consolidates this
counterrevolutionary policy of its predecessor Obama. The USA regime
has not yet achieved a social base for superior military offensives on the
planet, to be the one which has direct firepower against the workers and
the oppressed peoples of the world. This is what Trump is attempting to
achieve: a social base in the US for new military adventures, a question
that is still far from accomplishing.
This means that he has not been able to resolve in a single act the final
crushing of the revolution and has had to make pacts and agreements
with his agents, where each one (like Russia, Turkey or al-Assad him-
self) also disputes its own interests. The more al-Assad was reinforced,
the more the revolution was drowned in a bloodbath, the more the US
imperialist pirates got black their firepower and even the ability to dis-
cipline all the agents that are disputing the partitioned Syria as hyenas.
So much for the “anti-imperialist” victory of the genocidal al-Assad and
Putin, which only strengthens the US and its return to military invasions
to the Middle East!
The advances of the counterrevolution and the defeats of the mass of-
fensives in the Middle East have already created the conditions for the
commanders-in-chief of the operational tables of Geneva, Vienna and
Astana to appear directly on the battlefield. The US imperialist generals
and their flags are already being installed, with their massive bombings,
throughout northern Syria.
US imperialist plan, ultimately, is to transform its tactical weakness
into strategic strength. That is, while al-Assad and Putin massacre the
masses, it is the USA who wins the war and enjoys the victory of crush-
ing the revolution. By taking the north of Syria, the USA will impose all
the conditions on Damascus and prohibit Putin to occupy even a single
millimeter of Syrian territory, except for the military base of Tartus, from
where Russia is installed as a gendarme of the peoples of the East.
 Marxists know very well what imperialism is capable of doing with
Iran and Hezbollah, after using them as shock forces. Trump is already
denouncing that both would return to the “axis of evil.”

***
The operation massacre of 2015 in Syria, the siege and the defeat of the
Ukrainian revolution, besides the disorganization and de-synch that the
treacherous leaderships imposed on the struggle of the masses, opened a
hugely reactionary situation and one of a brutal imperialist counteroffen-
sive. The turning point for the opening of the new world situation was the
defeat and genocide on the Syrian revolution.

With the masses under control or out of the scene, and with the revo-
lutions crushed, the imperialist butchers have the hands free to go to new
disputes of the control of the planet.
The imperialist powers have started to dispute a world market that has
shrank and is sustained by enormous debts of the states and the banks.
The crisis, the crash and the aforementioned shrinkage of the world mar-
ket, as we have said, have already led to an open trade war that raises
the following question: if the US is doing well, the imperialist Maastricht
Europe will do badly, and vice versa.
Trump’s government has broken the pacts, such as the Atlantic and the
Pacific pacts, with which USA with Obama tried to keep the supremacy
in the world economy and policy. The US pirates voted “USA first” and
broke the trade agreements with Germany and Maastricht’s European
Union. They announced they will take to a commission of the parliament
whatever companies that trade with USA by doing dumping1 in order to
impose sanctions on them.
The “USA first” policy also means that, in order to maintain its su-
premacy, the USA must lock itself and at the same time kick open the
customs barriers of the world and its competitors. “USA first” means that
the US doubles its military budget and multiplies the production of de-
structive forces by a thousand.

1. Selling below cost to eliminate competition, relying on government subsidy.

 While the world economic crisis keeps deepening, hitting on BRICS
today, imperialism, far from surviving itself, is preparing new wars which,
as Lenin would say, are the most important economic factor of the epoch
of capitalist bankruptcy.
As Trump said, no empire dominates the world without winning wars.
For this reason, the US regime and government must take the masses out
of the scene. The streets of the US, as in Paris, Barcelona or Hamburg, in
the fights of the workers and oppressed of the imperialist powers, is the
arena where it is and will be defined, in large, if the transnational com-
panies would be able to generalize the conditions of the Syrian masses to
the world working class.
Trump threatens to unleash his military power on North Korea. He
has reached the Pacific with his troops and navy, announcing that who-
ever rises or doesn’t obey his trading offensives, will have the fate of the
devastated Syria, with their cities demolished. Kim of North Korea was
transformed into the “Pacific ISIS”. They are forcing China to remove the
support to their neighbor. This means that China has to put an embar-
go and shut down the companies that Kim has in its land. China has to
surrender North Korea on account of USA. Meanwhile, USA deploys his
Pacific fleet atomic aircraft carriers ant tens of anti-missile boats to show
who is the true owner of that area of the planet.

This is the situation in the world after the massacre in Syria. In there,
the revolution is resisting in its last foxholes, with a nation heading on
the way to becoming an enslaved colony, if the government of al-Assad
is definitively imposed; for now, with the help of the Russian and US im-
perialism bayonets.
When the last sigh of the Syrian revolution is over, it will not be the
servants of the US, al-Assad and Putin, who define the destiny of that
nation. The imperialist oil companies, the true orchestrator of so much
bloody counterrevolution, will have the final word.
In chapters 2 and 3, the reader will be able to see how precise and cor-
rect was what was written by Abu Al Baraa and the authors of the book
Syria Under Fire in 2015.
 ***

Homages

The  fourth chapter  of this work is dedicated to the  Homages paid

to Abu Al Baraa on the occasion of his murder. For the authors of the
book Syria Under Fire it is a great responsibility to present this second
volume, and above all to have been able to arrive on time to do so on the
first anniversary of the death of Abu Al Baraa. But this is also an obliga-
tion and a commitment to all the heroic martyrs of the Syrian revolution
and to the socialist militants who irrigated the Syrian revolution with
their blood.
We know that the flags of the Fourth International came clean to the
revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and Syria in particular.
Abu Al Baraa was a faithful representative of this program and this fight
within the revolution itself. The program of Trotskyism and the Fourth
International is already written in Arabic. This program is followed by all
the young people and workers who fight for the victory of the revolution
within Syria, the Middle East and the world.
The proximity of the edition of the fourth issue of the Arabic newspa-
per The Truth of the Oppressed, whose director was Abu Al Baraa, is a
fact in itself that shows that his struggle has not been in vain.

For this reason, we publish here a compilation of tributes paid a year

ago, when the fall of Abu Al Baraa. We include the tribute that the young
Greek anarchists, political prisoners in the D wing of Korydallos prison,
who were in solidarity with the revolutionary fight of the Leon Sedov
Brigade and took in their hands the struggle for the Syrian revolution
at international level. We also publish the tribute by the revolutionary
Marxists of the Pacific of the JRCL, by the Front of the Levante of Aleppo,
the one realized from Radio Free Syria, plus that paid by the authors of
this book, among others. We could not, due to their number and exten-
sion, include all the tributes that came to the Editorial Rudolph Klement
at the time of the assassination of Abu Al Baraa. Of course, we apolo-
gize to those whose tributes are not printed in this work. But they have
been reproduced by mass media such as the Editorial’s website, social
networks, party presses, etc.

***
“Write a book, I have in my hands the book of a dead man”...

Rafael Spregelburd, an Argentine playwright, wrote a tribute to Abu

Al Baraa for the newspaper Perfilof Argentina, which is reproduced in
this work. He did it with the sensitivity of an intellectual announcing that
the author of the book he had in his hands (Syria Under Fire), had been
killed. He was not one more dead man, or one more dead writer.
Indeed, Abu Al Baraa was not just a writer, but also a fighter, a socialist
and a militiaman, of the most distinguished of the Syrian revolution.

We Socialists were part of that struggle, part of that revolution, and

with our blood we also irrigated the Syrian soil. Before his murder, Abu
Al Baraa, along with the Syrian socialists, watched for Mustafa Abu Ju-
maa, his father, who was recognized throughout Syria as “the first martyr
of the struggle to break the siege of Aleppo.” Mustafa was the founder of
the Trotskyist current in Syria. He had adopted as his sons all the young
people who fought with Abu Al Baraa, both in Syria and the rest of the
world. The farewell of his father was a very cruel moment for Abu Al
Baraa and for all of us the socialists who accompanied the struggle of the
Syrian revolution.

The reformist lefts of the world, hanging from the bourgeois parlia-
ments, in the upper layers of the labor aristocracies and bureaucracies,
see today’s Syria as a historical anomaly. Well, no. It is the norm of this
rotten capitalist system, where “democracy” is a privilege of a few rich
countries that live subjugating their own working class and oppressing
and plundering the colonial and semi-colonial world.
It is enough to see the martyred Africa, China ruled by a regime of
terror, as everywhere in Asia ... It is enough to see Eastern Europe and
Putin’s Russia ruled by the saber of the generals... It is enough to see the
majority of the European working class, which is an immigrant one, mis-
treated worse than their masters do in the colonies, to realize that today’s
Syria is nothing more than a photogram of a film of a system that is sus-
tained with hunger, war, fascism, counterrevolution and barbarism.
In Europe, we have seen how imperialism treats the peoples that “dare”
to rise for their liberation. The brutal treat and even the coup interven-
tion of the Borbons in Catalonia is just a sample of what is to be expected
by any national independence struggle of the subjugated people of the
world after a defeat in Syria.

Reformism cannot hide this reality. Day after day the blood and mur-
der of the masses of the Maghreb and the Middle East arise and will
emerge from all the seams of the planet. Sooner rather than later millions
of workers will become aware of the enormous treachery that their lead-
erships have imposed on the workers and the oppressed peoples of the
Middle East. Life is already giving its verdict.

The bourgeoisie, imperialism and the murderers of the people want

everything to be forgotten. Much more do those who concealed such a
massacre before the masses.
Those who in the name of socialism and the struggle of the oppressed
peoples supported Bashar al-Assad and Putin, the sniper dog of imperial-
ism, will increasingly be less able to justify what facts and life already tell
for themselves. Syria has been demolished. A scream of Freedom keeps
coming out of her insides. At the moment this book is published, of the
more than 40,000 political prisoners who once passed through the pris-
ons of al-Assad, about 550 remain alive in Homs, ready to be transferred
to Damascus, where a real death sentence awaits them, same as in Aus-
chwitz at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. From the prison, they
have taken out a letter in which they are staging a mutine, which states:
“We are the prisoners of the central prison of Homs and have five hun-
dred and fifty detained on occasion of the revolution that has taken place
in our beloved country.” (…)
“This is a call to all humanitarian organizations to intervene immedi-
ately to prevent any incursion into jail. (...)
 We demand to be evacuated from prison, as a matter prior to
any negotiation, as happened in each area or city that was evacu-
ated in just hours, under the auspices of international observers.
We only want our freedom and our dignity, together with that of our
families, so that we can go back to them, with our children and our loved
ones.”

Even from the dungeons of the regime, the vanguard of the Syrian rev-
olution continues to resist. In the last trenches of the revolution the fire
has not died down. On October 14 of this year, called by the US anti-war
movement, a Day of Rage for Syria was developed, where thousands of
young people and workers won the streets around the world, and in Syria
in particular. The authors of this book, like the members of the Syrian
newspaper The Truth of the Oppressed, actively participate in these ac-
tions.

***
A new call for international solidarity with the Syrian revolution, before it is
too late

Imperialism prepares its final blow. The fall of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor,
sold out by ISIS (who is protected from those cities by al-Assad, Putin
and the US troops), announces that the final battles are in the making
and that a split, colonized Syria is formed, one with the regime and the
al-Assad government fulfilling until the end their roll of executioners of
the revolution, and with the US imperialism distributing the businesses.
The “safe areas” plan of the Astana conference conceals the attack that
has been launched to finish crushing the last trenches of the revolution.
Turkey is waiting. It threatens to enter Idlib by iron and fire. Al-Assad
is offering himself to do so as well. The one who will decide it is Trump
in the Astana Conference. The final massacre is in the making. We must
prevent it. This is achieved by stopping the murderous hand of imperial-
ism that sustains this enormous counterrevolution. The entry of sectors
of the US anti-war movement into this struggle opens up this perspective
of giving new leaps forward in this fight.
 The rupture of the siege, to prevent the final massacre of the Syrian
revolution, is a pending battle. The passivity of the leftist currents that
claim solidarity with the Syrian revolution like the English SWP, the
French NPA or the USA’s ISO, is striking and arouses indignation. They
proclaim their adhesions to the Syrian revolution in their congresses and
conferences just to wash their dirty clothes, since they are incapable and
have refused to call for decisive action in the streets or to coordinate an
international action to end the torment and the massacre of the Syrian
masses.
But there is no less rejectable what currents like the MAS or the Ar-
gentine PTS deserve, or sectors of the anarchist movement that, waging
the flags of the “fight against ISIS” and “in defense of the Kurd YPG”,
conceal the massacre of al-Assad against the Syrian masses.
Against them, other revolutionary currents of the anarchist movement,
like those grouped in the D wing of the Korydallos prison in Greece,
have correctly located themselves in the trenches of the revolution, from
the beginning, while its most advanced and combative elements were the
vanguard throughout Europe of active solidarity with the Syrian refugee
movement. We salute them.
At the proposal of the Syrian Socialists, the last congress of the mili-
tant trade unions in Brazil, organized in Conlutas, voted for support and
solidarity with the political prisoners of Homs. Representatives of mil-
lions of workers did it. This is a step forward, along with the actions that
are unified and coordinated for Syria in order to make new leaps and
break both siege and isolation. Already, on May Day, the factory workers
of La Paz, Bolivia marched with the flag of the Syrian revolution on their
front and they sent their solidarity to the resistance.
The revolutionary Marxists of Japan of the JRCL-RMF have also ac-
companied the enormous struggle of the revolutionary socialists of Syria
and their fight against al-Assad.
On the Day of Rage on October 14, there was an episode that, to those
who know the last trenches of the revolution, made us vibrate with ex-
citement and enthusiasm. It was in the city of Ainjara where the largest
mobilization took place inside Syria, to the cry of “we keep fighting; we
want the regime to fall”. The remains of our comrade Abu Al Baraa are
buried there. There is his land. And our commitment is to break the siege
of the Syrian revolution, defend the last trenches of the revolution and
our effort is directed to call the workers and the oppressed peoples of the
world to upsurge and stop the monstrous war machine imposed by bar-
barism in each sector of the planet where the exploited struggle for their
dignity, their conquests, for bread and freedom.

Before it is too late, we must regroup all the international forces that
are willing to prevent fascism and counterrevolution from imposing in
Syria. There is no time to lose. The oppressed peoples of the East and all
over the world will see, sooner rather than later, that if the Syrian revolu-
tion is definitely defeated... Syria will knock on the doors of your country,
your city,
your neighborhood,
your home.

***
And the truth could not be hidden ... The truth was told

This is Chapter V of this work, and as part of the struggle to break the
siege of the Syrian revolution, we publish a review on the presentation of
the book Syria Under Fire held at the National Library of Argentina on
August 22, 2015. This book was also presented in different cities of the
world, highly remarcable is the one held in Madrid at the Book Fair and
through a talk-debate on June 1, 2017, which featured the presence of
prominent activists and fighters of the Syrian cause.
We have also included a claim to different writers, poets and authors
of books on the Syrian cause, who raised their voices in the silence of the
brutal genocide. Their courage also showed the cowardice of the world
reformist left that surrounded the revolution and tried at every step to
break the bonds of solidarity of the international working class towards
the Syrian people. That is why in this chapter we present a series of po-
ems, excerpts and chronicles about presentations of different books that
we have shared in Europe and Latin America with these courageous writ-
ers, poets, intellectuals and fighters with whom we were and are part of
the international solidarity with the revolution Syria.
In this same sense we highlight the work of Suzanne Zaura, journalist
of the Spanish State, who led in that country the solidarity for the rev-
olution, along with other activists. We also mention the work of Radio
SiriaLibre, which was a spokesperson for the Spanish-speaking resistance.

***
Dedication

We dedicate this work, as Abu Al Baraa would have done, to all the
comrades fallen in the struggle to the cry of “bread, freedom, the fall
of the regime, socialism and nothing more”: Mustafa Abu Jumaa, Abu
al-Jud, Abu Issac al-Janubi, Hamza al Twil, Mohammed Sheikh al Jeb,
Mohammed Abdallah, Mohammed al Hamudi, Abu Attia, Abu Nur, Abu
Mwawyah Al-Massry, Abu Mussa Al-Jazaery, Abu Al-QayssHesham,
Abu Salamah, Sanad Abu Khattab.
Till socialism, always.
 
Carlos Munzer and Abu Muad
 Final Words

The last chapters of the Syrian revolution have yet to be told. They are
just now in the way to be defined in the combats that are taking place
in the last trenches of the revolution, which still resist. They are writ-
ten in the struggle of workers and oppressed peoples around the world,
who are far from surrendering, at a time when imperialism only sur-
vives by attacking one by one the gains of the working class on the planet,
deepening the plundering of semi-colonial nations and with new wars.
As we report in this work, 2015 was a true turning point in the calendar
of the Syrian revolution.

Two years later, we find ourselves with a divided Syria, torn and occu-
pied by foreign powers, with the imposition of a true genocide that is still
far from over. When we are writing these final words, the bombs of Putin
and al-Assad are still falling, demolishing the Syrian cities.

What we are experiencing today is the advance of the counterrevolu-

tion. The “safe zones” announced at the last conference in Astana proved
to be a real trap. There, where the resistance still lives, all the fire of al-As-
sad and Putin has concentrated, with the support of Turkey and the USA.
The bombing of the provinces of Aleppo and Hama, as well as Idlib and
Ghouta, which are the most punished areas, has not ceased.

As we can see, with the advance of the counterrevolution in Syria, no

civilization is being imposed, quite the contrary. Syria has been taken to
medieval times and is a thousand times more destroyed. The barbarism
has come hand in hand with an imperialist counteroffensive, which came
to crush a revolution that, from Tunisia to Damascus, moved from 2011
to the entire Maghreb and the Middle East and advanced to the world.
Meanwhile cholera, like the missiles, have taken over martyred Yemen,
victim of the Saudi clan that, under the orders of British Petroleum and
the armies of the United Arab Emirates, is not leaving stone on stone of
that nation. Today it is counterrevolution and fascism that are advancing
in the Maghreb and the Middle East.

When we are closing this work and the authors find ourselves engaged
in writing Volume III of Syria Under Fire, the most tragic moments of
the heroic Syrian revolution are developing. It is not only bombings and
sieges by hunger to the “safe areas”, but also the direct entry of US impe-
rialism to the north of Syria, the provinces of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The
partition and occupation of Syria has begun to be consummated, now
with the commander in chief of all the occupation troops in the territory
itself. 
In those provinces, where the “true owners” of Syrian oil pipelines and
oil infrastructure are returning, ISIS begins to be withdrawn by its US
chiefs and by al-Assad, who in 2014 sent it from Baghdad and Damas-
cus to control the exploited of that area that had been the outpost in the
crushing of the regime’s army in 2011. 
ISIS went there “to close the Circle of Death”. In 2011/2012, the Syrian
army, with its caste of counterrevolutionary Alawite officers, disintegrat-
ed when al-Assad gave the order to attack and massacre the unarmed
people. The rank and file soldiers passed to the side of the revolution-
ary masses. Therefore, the bourgeoisie and imperialism -which could not
intervene directly, as we have already demonstrated extensively in this
work-, had sent the Sunni generals of the FSA and Al Nusra to disarm the
masses. When that was no longer enough, ISIS was sent to control manu
militari the oil regions of northern Syria. 
ISIS went to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor as guardian of the hydrocarbons.
From there it guaranteed the flow of oil to Turkey, al-Assad and Baghdad
during the entire civil war. The oil extracted there during these years was
processed at al-Assad’s refineries in Latakia and bought at $ 7 a barrel by
Erdogan. It passed through the northern borders, transported by trucks,
which were protected by all the “belligerent” bourgeois forces in Syria.
Now, towards Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor the true owners are marching of the
“black gold” produced in abundance in the countries of the Maghreb and the
Middle East: the imperialist oil companies and their chiefs, US imperialism.
Under these conditions, the masses have begun a new uprising against
ISIS, which, in its retreat, loses the iron-clad military control of the re-
gion. Neither the US nor Putin or al-Assad are bombarding ISIS; in-
stead, they make it leave the cities in air-conditioned buses. 
They bombard the masses that have upsurged to get rid of the terror
regime of ISIS, and that in their uprising - as we can see in Abu Khamal
or in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor neighborhoods – are planting the flag of the
revolution and shouting again: “The people want the fall of the regime!”
There Putin and al-Assad are bombing. There also imperialism attacks
and chastises them with its aviation fire, with its Kurdish ground troops -
allied to al-Assad - and with fractions of the FSA coordinated directly by
the Pentagon. All of them will cover the withdrawal of ISIS in those cities
and ensure the US imperialism’s takeover of those oil wells and pipelines. 
In these provinces, the torment and the bombings intensify minute
a minute. Today the provinces of Raqqa and Deir ez Zor, as happened
yesterday with Homs, Aleppo, Daraya or Qsair, are being demolished.
Women and children flee to the Euphrates, where they are massacred by
Russian and al-Assad’s aviation.
These are the “battles” of cowards and murderers who attack recklessly
the helpless masses. This is the “war against ISIS”: the extermination of
the Syrian oppressed people who “dared” to stand up for bread, freedom
and dignity. This is the Operation Massacre, which in itself testifies to
what we the Socialists have been denouncing: when the counterrevo-
lution succeeds coordinated by Russia, the USA and Turkey, with their
mercenary and murderous troops, they impose in the cities they recover
a regime of terror, extermination and destruction a million times worse
and more cruel than the one imposed by ISIS itself. 
We are facing a policy of occupation and looting comparable to that
imposed by Zionism in the Palestinian nation. The homes and property
of the more than 15 million refugees and internally displaced Syrians are
distributed among the mercenary troops. The Syrian workers and com-
mon people have been left, like the Palestinian nation under the Zionist
occupation, as outcasts in their own land.

While we are writing these “Final Words”, the APEC (Asia-Pacific

Economic Cooperation Forum) meeting, which was held under the com-
mand of the USA, has just finished. There, Trump imposed conditions
-country by country- on the relationships that each of them should have
with the masters of Wall Street. He ordered China to fulfill his orders to
open its markets and to impose an embargo on and surround North Ko-
rea to make it surrender. With Putin, he coordinated the termination of
the counterrevolutionary operation in Syria for a few weeks ahead. There
was convened a short period of time to finish recovering all the territory
of that country. In addition, they agreed that only the Sunni bourgeoisie
generals of the FSA able to control and discipline the masses in the rebel-
lious cities would be the ones actually admitted.

In martyred Syria, all the lies and infamies crumble that the currents
of the word left, in fact treacherous fake leftists have piled up against the
Syrian masses. Life is giving its verdict. Genocidal Trump and Putin take
off their masks and openly discuss -before the eyes of the world- their
alliance, which was always strategic, to complete the task of crushing the
revolution under US imperialist command. 
Here is the end of the deceit poured out by this “left”, of a supposed
“Third World War” that would have begun in Syria between the US and
Russia. Here ends the lie of the “self-governing communes of Rojava”,
when we see the YPG fighting very far from their “communes”, and mas-
sacring, under US imperialist command and coordinated with al-Assad,
the impoverished masses of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor . 
Here all inventions are over. Al-Assad has been supported by all the
forces of the enemies to the revolution during these 6 years. He is who
has done everyone’s dirty work.
He still has work to do. The last trenches are resisting. The bourgeois
generals of the FSA, on their fours in Astana, claim that they want to
be the ones who sellout and control them. Meanwhile, the regime forces
together with the Iranian Republican Guard offer to invade Idlib. The
“operational board” of counterrevolution is planning its last blows.
 
“The regime must fall!” was the slogan that motivated the struggle
of the masses in 2011-2012. “The Assad regime must not fall; instead it
must stand firm by massacring the masses”, is the slogan and program
of the counterrevolution.
Al-Assad was the guarantor of the business of the entire bourgeoisie
and imperialism in Syria and thus he was sustained with counterrevolu-
tionary mercenary forces sent by imperialism: the Shiite bourgeoisie of
southern Iraq, Lebanon with Hezbollah and Iran (which was awarded by
Obama with the lifting of the embargo). These troops proved to be the
ablest to fulfill this objective of preventing the fall of al-Assad. 
Meanwhile, the Saudi clan -the other bourgeois gang agent of impe-
rialism- was given the task of crushing the Yemeni revolution and the
uprising of the Shiite masses in Bahrain in 2011, by iron and fire. From
Qatar, this bourgeois gang sought to enter the partition of Syria, via the
generals of the FSA, but has not yet managed to do so. The reason is
that the real counterrevolutionary force that was able to crush this heroic
revolution was the Iranian Republican Guard, the mercenary militias of
the imperialist oil companies of southern Iraq, and the same ISIS, which
from the Sunni triangle took great care that its “Caliphate”, while it exist-
ed, stayed far, very far from Damascus.

The fallacy about Iran and Saudi Arabia being two quasi-imperial-
ist  “regional powers” fighting over the Maghreb and Middle East, does
not resist the slightest serious analysis of the political, economic and so-
cial conditions of that region. They are strong native bourgeoisies, but
lesser partners of the true owners of the region, which are the impe-
rialist oil companies, the “seven sisters”  who manage the oil and the
banks of those countries, under the command of Wall Street, the City of
London, Paris and the Bundesbank.
Defining Iran or Saudi Arabia as imperial powers could be a joke in
bad taste, if it were not a deception to the workers of the world about the
true organizers and promoters of the counterrevolution in the Maghreb
and the Middle East. But what is worse, is that they make the Iranian
semi-fascist regime pass as an “anti-imperialist” champion, when it is a
murderous regime, jailer and repressor of the workers, one that makes
Zionism or the Egyptian military dictatorship turn pale. 
Iran remained embargoed for years. Its industrial-financial apparatus
is broken and is only sustained by Germany. We are talking about one of
the largest oil producers in the world; but Iran does not have refineries
and therefore must buy from Merkel its own refined oil in Germany to
obtain gasoline, fertilizers, etc. 
Saudi Arabia’s state oil company (Aramco) is increasingly unable to
demonstrate its “independence” from its real board, which is still in New
York and the City of London, since British Petroleum handles the gas that
this company produces. 
Italian ENI plunders the Libyan gas from Tripolitania, with which
70% of the production system of Italy is supplied. Benghazi oil is sacked
by French Total. This distribution of Libya’s hydrocarbons accompanies
the partition of that nation by the imperialist gangs. Before, Qadafy was
the manu militari guarantor of the delivery of gas and oil. Today this de-
livery is carried out directly by the different bourgeois gangs, all of them
ex-Qadafists.
In the Maghreb and Middle East the “seven sisters” command.
In Egypt, the US Navy, which finances the Egyptian army with 13 bil-
lion dollars a year, is which commands, because it controls the Suez Ca-
nal and all the shipping routes in the world.

It is time to end with so much lies and infamy launched by the Is-
lamophobic “anti-terrorist front” of all the imperialist powers, supported
by the social-imperialist left, which only seeks to cover up the ferocious
imperialist plundering of a region where 80% of the energy is produced
with which the world economy works.
They wrote rivers of ink to lie and deceive the exploited... so that the
masses do not realize that US imperialism and the European powers
were not able to intervene directly to crush the revolutions opened in
2011/2012 because the Iraqi people and their heroic resistance had just
cornered and expelled the troops of the 23 armies that had invaded Iraq
under Bush.
Those imperialist troops and their lackeys were defeated and forced to
leave the region, because the USA, the Spanish State, France, Germany
and Great Britain’s working classes had risen up, shouting “Your war, our
dead!”

Therefore, imperialism had to implement a strategy based on coun-

terrevolutionary pacts, which meant that each bourgeois gang of the
Maghreb and the Middle East, and even the mercenary Putin, had to be
those who intervened to drown in blood the revolutionary processes that
were shaking the world and threatened to reach the streets of imperialist
Europe while provoking a “new Vietnam” to the US. 
Ultimately, US imperialism “outsourced and leased the counterrevolu-
tion”, which it oversaw ironically from the conferences in Geneva and As-
tana. This he did not without sharp contradictions, as each of the forces
that were an active part of the counterrevolution, have begun to dispute
their share of the booty after their military victories. The clashes aimed
to see who arrives first to take charge of the oil wells and oil pipelines of
Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zor are an example of this.
The government of Great Russia emerges strengthened from these
counterrevolutionary victories, after NATO pushed its troops back from
the borders with Ukraine. 
Turkey leaves this counterrevolutionary war full of bitterness. It has
not been able to intervene directly, after handing over the rebel zones and
agreeing to dominate Syria, because the masses did not accept it and also
because neither the US nor Germany allowed it. The occupation of Syria
(or part of it) by Turkey would have meant the return of the Ottoman
Empire, and this is something that the dominant imperialist powers are
not willing to allow.

In these “Final Words”, the authors want to advance these conclusions

about the current situation of the Syrian revolution, since in the present
crucial moments the last acts are being defined.
 If the last trenches of the revolution fall and the counterrevolution
settles, what will become is not a time of peace and stability.
That is because the imperialist plan does not end here. 
In Syria a lesson is being given to all the exploited in the world. Im-
perialism wants its agents to finish massacring the masses, but it is Wall
Street that wins the war and defines the post-war period. They seek to
ensure that the exploited, from Bahrain to Morocco to Tunis to Tripoli
to Cairo to Sana’a to Damascus to Jerusalem, never again “dare” to rise
again and put the business of the “seven sisters” and the global financial
oligarchy at risk. 

If the Syrian revolution ends up being crushed, none of the “military

victors” who centralize in the Astana Conference under the command of
US imperialism will be strategically strengthened, as it now seems to be
the case of Iran and also the same Russia. They, for now, are the victors
of the massacre and the crushing of the masses. But the USA is already
in the field. Wall Street has embargoed the Great Russian bourgeoisie in
300,000 million dollars so that they know who the boss is. Those who are
going to win the war and distribute business will be the imperialist pow-
ers, the oil companies and the global financial oligarchy. 
Imperialism will quickly know how to discipline any agent that ex-
ceeds its functions. We have already seen the fate of the YPG in northern
Iraq. These had wanted to conquer the independence of that region after
the fall of Mosul, and what they received were fusillades from the govern-
ment of US imperialism’s protectorate. 

The same will happen with the sinister and murderous Shiite bour-
geoisie, if this goes further than the role that imperialism has assigned
to it in Syria: that of holding al-Assad by iron and fire. The US has the
scourge of Zionism to discipline Iran, placing it once again, when it needs
it and decides, within the “Axis of Evil”.
The directors of the companies are not generous with their managers
and much less with their smaller partners, once they have used their ser-
vices.
 Imperialism has used the Islamic bourgeoisies and their various fac-
tions and parties to strangle the working class and oppressed peoples of
the region and create a river of blood among them. The fact of being the
Shiite bourgeoisie the best agent that imperialism has to massacre in Syr-
ia has its reason in the 80% of its population being Sunni. This massacre
left a hatred and fratricidal resentment among all the exploited and op-
pressed of that region. This prevents and disrupts any common struggle
of both Shiite and Sunni exploited against imperialism. 
In the 1980s, imperialism organized a war between Iraq and Iran,
which lasted 8 years and left 4 million dead. That fratricidal war opened a
river of blood between the Shiite and Sunni masses, and greatly facilitat-
ed the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the counterrevolution seeks to settle in martyred Syria, while

the masses resist in the last trenches, drums of war are sounding in Saudi
Arabia.
British Petroleum is buying most of the shares of Aramco, which is
bankrupt. The fall in the price of oil is causing the beginning of an eco-
nomic crisis in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
All the governments of the region have been filled with state-of-the-
art weapons, which the USA, UK, France, Turkey and Russia have sold
them. Though, weapons are sold to be used.

If the world working class does not prevent it, imperialism already has
a true counter-revolutionary plan on its agenda after the Syrian genocide,
which if necessary will re-issue the Iraq / Iran war on a thousand times
higher scale. If necessary, imperialism will have no scruples in organizing
a war where not only Zionism, taking back it firepower, will attack Iran,
but also in pushing a military clash of proportions between Saudi Arabia
and Iran, like the one that it drove in the 1980s between Iraq and Iran.
The policy of imperialism, as already demonstrated in the Maghreb and
the Middle East, after its withdrawal from Iraq, is -in the last resort- that
everybody confronts each other, in order to crush the revolutionary pro-
cesses, and in the future to re-establish solid control devices for the oil
routes, on the basis of deep historical defeats given to the masses. But this
must be done in the midst of a monumental political and commercial
struggle between the imperialist powers. 
Likewise, the threat and the possibility of war against North Korea and
the siege of China are also the counterrevolutionary wars that the USA
military industry, the Pentagon and the imperialist capitals supervised by
NATO have in their agendas.

But for this to be the case, for imperialism to have its hands free for
such a holocaust, it must first defeat the working class of the central coun-
tries. And it is far from being able to achieve it.
The rebellion of the American working class persists and deepens day
by day. The fight against labor flexibilization still takes place in France.
The crisis of the Bourbons is every day increasing in the Spanish State.
German youth and hungry workers showed the hell to the G20 in Ham-
burg. The masses have not at all withdrawn from the scene of internation-
al class struggle.
The latest acts of the Syrian revolution will not be written in the Penta-
gon binders or in the counterrevolutionary plans of Wall Street. The next
counterrevolutionary wars will have to be defined earlier in the class war.
And it has not said its last word yet. 
The enormous advantage that imperialism and its agents have in the
region is the perfidious counterrevolutionary helping hand of the cur-
rents of the social-imperialist left and the corrupt union bureaucracies
that live on the coins that fall from the super-exploitation of the working
class and the looting of the semicolonial world.
When the exploited masses of the Maghreb and the Middle East burst
for their bread with a chain of worker and socialist revolutions, defeating
governments, demolishing states, attacking transnational property and
arming themselves, the reformist left proclaimed that theirs were “dem-
ocratic revolutions”, “spring of the peoples” and sought the “progressive”
and “democratic” bourgeois to control the revolutionary masses. 
The left told the masses of the world that “times of peace, democracy
and progress were coming”; thus they disarmed the proletariat so that it
would not take power. They supported calls for elections and Constituent
Assemblies that were a scam, while “democratic” politicians and generals
ended up imposing a bloodbath in the region on behalf of imperialism as
we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. The “democracy” that the left proclaimed
was nothing more than a detour to fascism. 
In Syria, reformism was divided between, on the one hand, those who
asked Obama to arm the Syrian resistance, while it was he who sent the
generals of the Sunni bourgeoisie of the FSA to disarm it; and on the oth-
er, those who directly supported genocidal al-Assad. Both currents of the
reformist left have argued that “the enemy is ISIS” and not the imperialist
oil companies and Wall Street, or al-Assad and Putin who do their dirty
work. They isolated the Syrian masses and gave the dog Bashar a free
hand for carrying out the massacre. 

15 million refugees, the Mediterranean dyed with blood of refugees

and immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa ... Is this the
civilization? No. It’s barbarism. It is looting. It is hunger. It is genocide.
Imperialism is reaction along the whole line. In its counter-offensive
in the Maghreb and Middle East, it will even redraw the borders it drew
at its convenience at the exit of the first and second world wars. It will not
hesitate to draw new caliphates, fiefs and small “emirates” in Libya, to do
it again in Syria or to divide Lebanon. It will not hesitate to make Yemen a
second-rate Saudi province. It is the imperialist barbarism that will even
push back the current nations to small fiefs and caliphates, if the imperi-
alist oil companies so require. 

What is happening in the burning Middle East today is the content

of the counterrevolution. Civilization, which emerged in history fighting
against hunger, against looting and for freedom, has been drowned in
blood. It is a task of the world working class to do justice and end barba-
rism ... and it will.

The last word has not been said.

The last trench of the Syrian revolution has not yet fallen.
 The last stone of the Palestinian Intifada has not yet been hurled.

The first strikes of the working class of post-revolution Egypt have

already begun.

The masses of Yemen continue to claim their crust of bread.

The last battles of the American, French, Japanese, German, British,

Spanish, and of other imperialist countries, working class are far from
being exhausted.

In sectors of the planet, such as in the Pacific Rim and in Russia itself,
those battles are still to begin. 

Therefore, before the counterrevolution in Syria settles, crushing the

last trench of the revolution, what will begin, as it is already doing, is a
new intifada: that of the Syrian refugee camps of Jordan, of Turkey, of
Lebanon, of Greece, where millions of homeless exploited survive in the
worst conditions. They will be the outpost of the fight that will hit Da-
mascus, Homs and Aleppo; they will fight in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in
Gaza, in Bahrain, in Cairo... 
Sooner rather than later, the world working class, getting rid of so
many enemies of the revolution, will break the siege that surrounds the
brave exploited of Syria. And in doing so, it will find the way to defeat its
own executioners: the imperialist gangs that threaten to bring the entire
civilization to barbarism. 
For these enormous historical challenges, the struggle to found again
the Fourth International is the task of the moment. This will be the orga-
nization that will allow the revolutionary vanguard of Syria to set up an
insurrectionist revolutionary party, which will lead the “second Syrian
revolution” to victory.

To write these last chapters of revolution, counterrevolution and war,

we will not have with us our comrade Abu Al Baraa. But thousands like
him will write them on the battlefield of the class struggle.
And the truth will be told!
And there will be no forgetting or forgiving!

Carlos Munzer and Abu Muad

 
 Index

Prologue
Press Release of Rudolph Klement Socialist Publishing House on the
assassination of the writer and journalist Abu Al Baraa by the forces of the
genocidal al-Assad
Writing a book. I have in my hands the book written by a dead man by
Rafael Spregelburd

Chapter 1 – Diary of a Syrian writer

A journalist with no visa
Al-Assad’s deadliest missile: to besiege and starve the people to death
The life of the Syrian refugees in Turkey
The life of a Syrian refugee in Turkey is worth nothing
Refugees from Syria, the Maghreb and the Middle East suffer each time
more the reactionary wave in Europe
The Russian bombings pave the way for the PKK-YPG in northern Aleppo
Erdogan’s government continues to brutally repress the exploited Kurdish
people
Turkey shot down a Russian plane on the Syrian border letting Putin know
what his role is
On the scam of Vienna Conference
The Syrian resistance has nothing to do with the Saudi clan
Press Release and denunciation from Rudolph Klement Socialist Publish-
ing House about the persecution to its writer and Syrian correspondent in
Istanbul.
Invitation of the CSP-Conlutas of Brazil to the “Seminar on the Arab Spring
and the refugee crisis”.
Bashar’s intelligence services monitor visas for the Syrian people in all em-
bassies in Turkey
Voices from besieged Aleppo
Abu Al Baraa was a member of the editorial board of the Syrian paper The
Truth of the Oppressed
Presentation of the Syrian paper The Truth of the Oppressed

Chapter II - Abu Al Baraa, the last interview

First Day / August 10, 2015
Revolution and counter-revolution in Syria
Second Day / August 11, 2015
The Syrian Revolution and the Kurdish Question
Third Day / August 12, 2015
ISIS, “the perfect enemy”
Fourth Day / August 13, 2015
The counterrevolutionary plan for the Middle East.
Fifth Day / August 14, 2015
The falsifications of the currents that claim to be “leftists” on the situation in
the Maghreb and the Middle East.
Conclusions
“Socialism or barbarism is the immediate perspective.”
Maps
Maghreb and Middle East
Syria 2011-2012: Mass offensive
Syria 2017: The last trenches of the revolution
Kurdistan

Chapter III - 2015: Key year of revolution and counterrevolution in Syria.

Final operation massacre has begun
2015: Imperialism sends Putin, the most effective mercenary, to turn the
tide of the civil war and support al-Assad

Chapter IV - Homages
Letter from the revolutionary Marxists of Japan: “We say goodbye to the
young Trotskyist”.
From the prisons of Greece, imprisoned anarchists pay tribute to the Syrian
revolutionary socialist Abu Al Baraa
From “Radio Free Syria”: “ Today we say goodbye to the comrade and friend
Abu al Baraa, hero for the freedom of Syria.”
Syria’s Levant Front proudly says goodbye to the martyr Abu Al Baraa.
From South Africa: Marikana miners write about the assassination of Abu Al
Baraa
From Mexico: “ A huge hug for Abu Baraa’s family on the behalf of the 43
parents seeking our children”.
From Argentina: Alberto Santillan’s letter to the Leon Sedov Brigade after
the assassination of Abu Al Baraa
English alternative media pay tribute to Abu Al Baraa and the Leon Sedov
Brigade
One year after the assassination of Abu Al Baraa: Tribute from Abu Muad
Tribute from Democracia Obrera (Workers Democracy) of the Spanish State
On the 6th anniversary of the Syrian revolution: tribute to the revolutionary
socialists who fought and fell in the Syrian revolution

Chapter V - And the truth could not be hidden... The truth was told
The courageous voices of the Syrian revolution in the world.
Poems extracted from the book Syria, spring and jasmines
Presentation of the book El Caparazón (the shell) by Mustafa Khalifa in the
Spanish State
When the revolution finishes: a novel by Leila Nachawati Rego
Review of the book Diary of the siege of Duma, 2013 by Samira Khalil
Syria drown in blood, by Lourdes Hidalgo
Syrian Flowers, by Jorge Terracotta
Special mention to Suzanne Zaura
Special mention to Radio Free Syria
Presentation of Syria Under Fire at the National Library of Argentina
Presentation of Syria Under Fire in the Spanish State

Final Words
Glossary