Palestinians in Gaza wildly celebrated the initial announcement of the ceasefire agreement. But their hopes for a better future after 15 months of hell and misery turned to trepidation when Israel immediately unleashed a further furious campaign of airstrikes on civilian targets.
It was a clear message of Israeli intentions. Yes, a ceasefire might be coming, but Israel will maintain and enforce its military control over the Palestinian population of the enclave. Gaza will remain an open-air prison camp on which Israel will unleash hell whenever it suits its interests. 
The ceasefire, if it holds, will of course be a relief after all the suffering. However, the complex three-stage deal is fragile, and the Israelis may well try to disrupt or sabotage it.
The Israeli far right and fascist forces are furious about any pause in the genocidal war. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded “complete victory”—endless war against the Palestinian population and the destruction of any hopes they have of achieving a state of their own. The far right is demanding that the attacks resume after the six-week first phase of the ceasefire deal and the release of hostages. 
The lives of the people of Gaza will be only minimally improved by the ceasefire. On top of the tens of thousands killed, and the much greater numbers wounded, the whole infrastructure of Gaza has been laid waste—hospitals, schools, housing, roads, the sewerage system, agriculture, bakeries, electricity and water supplies. There are no jobs. Disease and famine stalk the streets. The bombs might stop, but none of this will change. 
Gazans will be allowed no genuine democratic rights under the ceasefire agreement. There will be no free elections. A military dictatorship is to be imposed upon them.
The US government wants an interim international body, made up largely of troops from “reliable” authoritarian Arab states, to police Gaza, followed by the appointment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to run the show. The PA is attempting to establish its credentials with the US and Netanyahu for a role as a reliable Vichy-style regime in Gaza by waging a brutal offensive in the West Bank to destroy all democratic opposition to its dictatorship.
Having ravaged Gaza, Israel now has the green light from the US to step up its assault on the West Bank, which is the main game for the Zionists. The Israelis are rapidly expanding their illegal settlements and relentlessly driving Palestinians from their land. To make their intentions crystal clear, immediately after the ceasefire was announced, a murderous crew of Zionist settlers were released from detention and unleashed on the West Bank population. 
US imperialism has been the decisive winner of this prolonged war, even more so than Israel. The US’s rival Iran has been much weakened—its strategic position in the Middle East severely set back.
Iran’s key ally Hezbollah has taken major blows militarily and politically. Hezbollah’s leadership was decimated by Israeli attacks, and much of its military apparatus destroyed. And after long months of political stalemate in a further attempt to isolate Hezbollah, a new US-backed president and prime minister have been installed in Lebanon.
The monstrous Assad regime in Syria, another key piece of the supposed “axis of resistance”, has been overthrown. Hamas has been battered, the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq weakened.
The US ruling class and political establishment, not simply Trump and Biden, appear to have laid down the law to Netanyahu that Israel had achieved all it could out of the war on Gaza. The US was for moving on after its victory in the Middle East and focusing back on the main game for US imperialism: preparing for a future war with China.
A series of utterly hypocritical Western leaders came out declaring the ceasefire in Gaza should be the prelude to a two-state solution for the Palestinians. This is a monumental facade to make it appear that they have a shred of moral decency and care about human rights.
These capitalist politicians know full well that the Zionist state is never going to accept a Palestinian state being set up alongside Israel. And Western leaders have never been prepared to seriously take on Israel to obtain even an ounce of justice for the Palestinians. A powerful Israeli state very much serves Western imperialism’s strategic interests in the vital Middle East.
The radical international movement in support of Palestine that emerged over the last 15 months is one of the few positive developments to come out of this terrible genocide. We have seen the largest and most sustained protests ever across the Western world in support of Palestinian rights. Political opinions have shifted substantially, especially amongst a layer of younger people. 
The movement can’t let up the fight. Even if the ceasefire holds, it will not resolve the terrible problems facing the Palestinian people.
The movement must demand as a very minimum that the Western powers, which backed Israel, pay for the rebuilding of Gaza with no strings attached. This must begin immediately. Food, medical supplies, fuel and temporary housing need to be poured in.
The sick and wounded must be allowed to leave Gaza for proper medical treatment. Palestinian refugees must be allowed into Australia and granted immediate asylum. 
The Israeli army must be immediately withdrawn from all of Gaza. Israeli raids in the West Bank have to end now. Netanyahu and the whole Israeli war cabinet should be arrested and tried for genocide. The Australian government should break all ties with Israel. We must not forget what happened in this genocidal war.
But more than that, the movement needs to be fighting for genuine social and national freedom for the Palestinian people, from the river to the sea. The only solution worth fighting for is a completely democratic society in which all the people of historic Palestine, whatever their religion or no religion, whatever their ethnic background, have genuinely equal rights.
The pro-Palestine movement also needs to address and debate out the road forward for liberation. How can the freedom of the Palestinian people be achieved in the face of the military might of the Zionist state with its strident backing from the US and other Western imperialist states such as Australia?
It is clear after all the horrors of the last 15 months that we can’t rely on capitalist politicians of whatever political hue, Democrat or Republican, Labor or Liberal. There is no point begging them to be humane or electing the supposed “lesser evil” alternative, which always turns out, once in government, to be simply another form of evil.
The whole Western capitalist order needs to be challenged. That means building a socialist movement with a strong base of support amongst the working class.
That is not some simple or easy task. It is not going to happen overnight but it is the only hope for genuine liberation.
In the Middle East, the so-called “axis of resistance”, which sections of the Palestine movement looked to, has been revealed as a complete paper tiger. It was never willing nor able to deliver meaningful support for the Palestinians, let alone defeat Israel.
The axis of resistance was simply a mechanism to protect the reactionary Iranian state’s interests. It was not about standing up for the rights of the Palestinians and the oppressed and exploited of the Middle East.
Many decades of experience have also amply demonstrated than none of the capitalist regimes of the region, for all their at times radical pretensions, have ever been prepared to wage an all-out fight against imperialism and for the liberation of Palestine. Such a struggle would necessitate the mobilisation of the mass of workers and the oppressed, which would inevitably threaten the wealth and power of the ruling class elite.
As well, guerrilla struggle, no matter how heroic, is not going to be able to defeat the might of the Zionist state backed to the hilt by US imperialism. This was the approach for decades of first the old Palestine Liberation Organisation under Yasser Arafat and now Hamas, but without success.
The only force capable of decisively rocking the whole of the Arab world and bringing revolution to the very borders of Israel is the working class. The interests of the Palestinians are closely aligned with the workers of the surrounding states suffering under brutal dictatorial capitalist rule.
The 2011 Arab Spring revolt showed the potential for mass uprisings to sweep across the region. Next time round, the revolts will need to go much further, not just toppling dictators like Mubarak in Egypt, but workers taking power directly into their own hands. That will mean rebuilding a fighting revolutionary left that is prepared to take the struggle all the way.

Mick Armstrong

Gaza ceasefire: keep up the fight for a free Palestine

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the sixth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a> section.
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“Our public servants are a national asset”, read one placard from a strike by government employees in Suwayda last week. “No to the unjust decree, No to the sacking of our workers”, read another. 
Around 600 people had gathered to protest against the dismissal of hundreds of public servants by administrators appointed by the new government led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The crowd reflected the full spectrum of working-class life—from nurses, doctors and administrators from the public health system to telecommunications workers, agricultural workers and employees of state-run factories. Importantly, it included those who had been fired but also those still employed by the state. The latter haven’t been paid in nearly two months and so joined not only in solidarity but also to raise their own demands.
Last week, hundreds of workers occupied the department of public health in Daraa. This was in response to the HTS-run department announcing plans to halve its employee numbers, from roughly 1800 to nearly 900. They were joined by workers in the local tourism, culture and treasury offices, who face similar cuts. 
Accounts from the Daraa demonstration conveyed the workers’ fury and sense of betrayal: “We served in the most difficult times of war, and did not abandon our post during the pandemic ... We stuck to our jobs for years, despite salaries shrinking to no more than $20 a month”, one worker explained. 
The cuts are coming as part of an effort by the interim government to resolve what it calls the “obesity” and inefficiency of the public sector. “[The government] does not have a magic wand to solve Syria’s economic problems”, said the caretaker finance minister, echoing managers of austerity drives from time immemorial. 
What they do have is a very large axe, and their target is to slash 300,000 jobs from a total government workforce of around 900,000. If allowed to proceed, this plan will leave many families without any source of income, increasing the poverty rate in one of the poorest countries on Earth. 
This reactionary measure is being dressed up in revolutionary, anti-Assadist rhetoric. The government claims that cuts are a necessary response to the corruption and mismanagement of the old regime. For instance, managers would create fake jobs for their friends and families regardless of their qualifications or even whether a job opening existed in the first place. The lucky few with deep connections (here, they are called wasta) could have as many as six salaries from such means. 
Another argument that has appeared on social media and other unofficial channels is that anyone hired in the last ten years is, by definition, a supporter of the old regime. But this is a profoundly cynical perspective. As one working-class man said to me in Damascus: “[HTS] were living the good life in Idlib, earning good money sent to them via the Gulf [states] ... so it’s easy for them to blame every other Syrian who had to work for the disgusting regime to survive. But what were we supposed to do?” 
The explanation for these moves is that HTS has a clear and reactionary economic vision for the country: “[Syria] will be a free-market system based on competition”, declared the head of the Damascus Chambers of Commerce after meeting with senior government figures, including the interim economy minister. As well as sacking hundreds of thousands of workers, they have made moves to open Syrian markets to foreign trade and have cut subsidies on bread. The government has faced criticism for these decisions, including that, as a transitional government, it should be making only emergency, as opposed to strategic, policy decisions.
For now, the HTS-led government is enjoying a grace period, still basking in the glow of its role in defeating the Assad regime. This is reinforced by the growing support Ahmed al-Sharaa and his team receive from international ruling class figures in the Middle East and the West.
It’s also reinforced by the important improvements in life for many Syrians. The first, and most commented on, is the capacity “to breathe”—that is, to speak freely about life and politics. Then there is the freedom of movement across a country once occupied by a regime every bit as brutal as any foreign power. Damascus is filled with people from Syria’s north who haven’t visited their families in over a decade. I was constantly asked for directions to the touristic areas, quietly comforted that others were just as disoriented by the labyrinthine streets.
On an economic front, the abolition of government checkpoints, where farmers would pay substantial bribes to get their goods through, means that the price of many fruits and vegetables has fallen substantially. The opening of borders to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan has also helped. Ahmad, my driver in Suwayda, informed me that, at one point, a kilo of bananas cost 50,000 Syrian lira. But they’re coming in from Lebanon now, so “you won’t pay more than 14,000”. 
Still, as one hotel employee explained despairingly, “It doesn’t help us much if prices go down a bit, if our wages are still worth nothing”. Syrians earn their income in lira, so the more than 99 percent collapse in the value of the Syrian currency since 2011 has devastated their living standards. She expressed cautious hope about the future when pressed, but her profound anxiety about the cost of living made it hard for her to revel fully in the fall of Assad.
Mohammed, a young man who works in Daraa as a salesperson for a medical company, came across similarly. While thanking God for the fall of the regime, he kept coming back to the challenges of daily life. “Never once have I been paid my full wage on pay day, because I’m always getting advance payments to cover costs”, he explained, somewhat embarrassed. “My whole life is debt; I can’t catch up.” 
To address these fundamental issues, al-Sharaa initially promised a 400 percent increase in the wages of public sector workers. The finance minister subsequently clarified that “this increase will include workers whose qualifications are appropriate for the job, while others will remain on the same salary”. The current public sector salary is about US$15 a month, woefully inadequate even for basic survival.
Then there is the housing crisis. Syria has a severe shortage of livable homes, a product of the extreme destruction wrought on entire cities and towns across the country. The problem will get worse as exiles and refugees return in greater numbers. Syrian Facebook group INT, which I’m told is a moderated and reliable source of news, regularly features reports of disputes between returning Syrian exiles and the internally displaced refugees who have been occupying their vacant homes, in many cases for over a decade. 
There’s a desperate need for more affordable housing. But property developers and tycoons are not in the business of providing affordable housing—they are interested in maximising profits. Nearly a decade ago, there were <a href="https://webarchive.archive.unhcr.org/20230602063845/https:/www.refworld.org/docid/591313c04.html">reports</a>
that Assad had plans to rebuild damaged parts of Damascus. But rather than restoring popular neighbourhoods to their former glory (or even just improving them), the plan was to deploy private capital to create luxury housing for the super-rich. The project stalled due to the ongoing turmoil in Syria. If foreign investors are given free rein, without any government planning, control or oversight, then these are the types of projects that will be prioritised. 
As with so many aspects of Syria’s future, the nature of the economic model that results from this transition will depend on a clash between conflicting interests. Figures from the international political and economic elite want Syria opened up, Lebanon style, where a laissez-faire economy allows for a class of super-wealthy investors to extract massive profits from tourism, construction and finance, while the rest of the country stagnates. 
The actions taken by workers in Suwayda and Daraa are especially important because they point to the only force that has the power to fight for a different kind of future. There are other, smaller, initiatives taking place, and grassroots organising is happening among workers and professionals across the country. 
But it would be wrong to expect an explosion of unionisation and class struggle overnight. Over a coffee in a Lebanese cafe, Syrian socialist Joseph Daher suggested that the location of these actions is no accident: “Daraa and Suwayda have experience in organising themselves, they have a culture of this kind of politics now”. This was confirmed when I discovered that the strike in Suwayda was organised through the same WhatsApp community that has organised the region’s Movement for Freedom and Change since 2023. 
“There have also been protests in Idlib against HTS’s decision [now rescinded] to raise tariffs on the import of essential goods”, Daher continued. “All of these places were liberated by the revolution some time ago; they are used to mobilising. It’s not quite the same in Damascus and Aleppo.” The process of developing trade union and left-wing organisations will thus take time and effort.
Yet, after so many years of misery, many young Syrians can’t bear the thought of more years of struggle and poverty. Many exiles, particularly the younger ones and those who made it to Europe, are only returning for short visits to see their loved ones. And many of those who stayed in Syria but now have the capacity to leave are planning to do so, especially those with university qualifications. 
“I’m delighted that our country is finally free, but who knows how long it will take for things to actually get better”, revealed one young doctor in Damascus. “It’s impossible to build a secure life here, and I feel like I’m starting to get old.”

Omar Hassan

Can the Syrian people resist a new capitalist regime?

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. All his articles can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
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“Each and every family has paid a price for our freedom”, explains a middle-aged man, his dark eyes betraying suppressed despair. “Some lost their homes, some lost years of their lives, and others lost their children, whether as exiles or martyrs.” Preferring to remain nameless out of fear of retribution, he spent seven years in jail for the crime of living in the Syrian town of Daraa, whose revolutionary spirit was a perpetual thorn in the side of the regime. He returned to his home, a shack in a refugee camp for Syrians displaced during the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, to find his neighbourhood destroyed. Yet another Syrian town turned to rubble. 
Daraa was one of the birthplaces of the popular revolution against Assad, when a group of around twenty teenagers were arrested and tortured for anti-government graffiti. The local backlash to their abuse was the spark that inspired a heroic rebellion that lasted more than a decade. “We didn’t understand the full significance of what we were doing at the time”, explains Mouawiya, one of the teenagers <a href="https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3162211/one-daraa-children-who-sparked-syria-revolt-recounts-asharq-al-awsat-his">involved in the action</a>. “We were still just kids.” 
But his experience of being tortured in Assad’s prisons taught him all he needed to know about the dictatorship’s brutality. It instilled in him a lifelong commitment to struggle for justice. “They tortured us so badly, using electric shocks, pulling off our fingernails ... it was hard.” Another local explains that he was hung for two weeks by his wrists and allowed only one ten-minute break each day for a sip of water. The jailors hoped to turn the activists into informers, and to find out “who was funding us”, Mouawiya explains. “But none of it had any impact. When they released me, I spent the next five or six months in peaceful protests that kept getting attacked, first with batons and then with bullets and bombs.” 
This was the fate of the revolutionary movement across Syria at the time. In Egypt and Tunisia, the regimes abandoned their figureheads in order to preserve the core of the ruling edifice, whose military, economic and political power lay untouched. They calculated that such a move would best preserve their power in the long run. The brutal suppression of protesters in Bahrain and Syria proved to be an alternative option. In both cases, the dictatorship was too narrowly based, and in the Syrian example, too tied to the personality and family of the leader, to attempt the Egyptian method. “So after a while, we formed the Free Syrian Army to fight back.”
Mouawiya explains that the Free Syrian Army was a fairly loose outfit, neighbours arming themselves to defend their communities against an unimaginably violent state. “To begin with, it was mostly small groups of young guys who knew each other, say 20-50 people”, he says. “They would have a leader that would work with other similar groups in the broader district. Eventually we developed a unified command.” That process of organisation took time, and according to Mouawiya, never went beyond the level of Daraa province. Despite its name, the FSA was never a national army, with coordinated battle plans and resources. Rather, it was, depending on the area, a mix of former soldiers that had defected to the revolution and local citizens that had armed themselves to defend their families. 
Like in other parts of Syria, the revolution was especially strong in the poorer, working-class areas of Daraa, whose people had suffered the worst impacts of the crony capitalist dictatorship. It is not a touristy area, nor one blessed by natural beauty or resources. Rather, generation after generation has earned a living tilling the stony soil, the bottom strata of workers living in tents on the land where they work. The city’s main roads are dusty and dilapidated, even by Syrian standards. Its one hotel manifests the absolute disconnect of the regime from its people. Clearly designed for official visits, the ground floor is opulent in a classical Arabian style, built from marble, gold and glass. Never mind the slums outside. 
With extraordinary difficulty and bravery, the FSA in Daraa liberated large swathes of the governorate for substantial periods of time, including many of the suburbs and small agricultural towns. By 2024, the only part they didn’t control was the heart of Daraa’s capital city, which remained under heavy military occupation. 
Though the people of Daraa are rightfully proud of their heroic resistance, it has left their region scarred beyond recognition. Arriving from Suwayda was like entering another country. Every single home on the freeway is marked by the conflict, and entire suburbs lie in rubble. My driver takes an unscheduled detour to show me what the regime did. We pass through the suburb of Al Mansheyah, which lies on top of a little hill, and it’s like being back in Yarmouk or Harasta. Every other house has been liquidated; kids play soccer in the debris.
All this devastation is the product of thirteen years of assault from the land and sky. Some parts of Daraa were fought over multiple times. Others were mostly free but subjected to endless bombing from above. Mouawiya’s brother Mohammad shows me the three-metre hole in his roof where a barrel bomb hit, destroying an entire level of his apartment building as well as a bedroom below. Sealing off the damaged areas is the best they can do for now. They can’t even afford to eat properly each day, let alone rebuild. 
The Russian air force also bears much responsibility for the damage, launching wave after wave of bombing raids from its Hmeimim airbase. One boy, around 11 years old, tells me that they used to get warning calls from friends in Damascus, giving them a few precious minutes to seek shelter before the bombs began falling. Many people fled the area, seeking refuge in Jordan or Lebanon, while some fighters were sent to Idlib in the north as part of various truces. But many others had no option but to stay. One man says that he spent months living in the nearby telephone interchange without sanitation, water or electricity.
Faysal, a teacher and member of a grassroots committee for the provision of social services, explains that the district had 40 schools to begin with, but by 2018, only four were still standing. The rebels have built another sixteen since then, he says proudly. Families here clearly value education highly, their children’s futures a big concern even amidst the horror of war: “We didn’t want the kids to miss one day of school, and they didn’t”, beams Hanaan, another local teacher. But she admits that the war badly affected the younger generation. “They’re mentally unwell, they recoil from loud noises”, she says, ruffling the hair of a nearby boy.
There are other initiatives to try to improve amenities in the area. Nagham, a local activist I met in Damascus two weeks ago, is leading a campaign to replant trees that had been chopped down for heating fuel during the war. “I see the re-greening of Daraa as serving two purposes”, she says. “First, it’s about bringing natural beauty back to Daraa. Second, I see it as a way of holding on to the souls and memories of the revolution’s martyrs.”
The area’s many mosques are also slowly being rebuilt after the regime destroyed almost all of them. In this fairly religious and largely Sunni town, such spaces are a vital centre of social life as much as they are a place for prayer. It is moving to see thousands of these impoverished people gathering for Friday prayers in the partial ruins of a mosque, having survived, both physically and spiritually, the systematic terror of the past 54 years. 
Mouawiya does not romanticise the armed phase of the rebellion, saying that “things started getting messy when money and guns started coming in from the outside”. Some hustlers and crooks got involved, some of them making a lot of money reselling guns meant for the resistance. Mouawiya is visibly angry at this, insisting that it was possible to remain clean if one was fighting for the right reasons. It is inspiring to see this man hold on to principle in a situation of social and economic breakdown, when the regime has made all normal life impossible.
In recent times, some of the FSA brigades in Daraa have begun affiliating to HTS. They were attracted by its superior funding and organisation, but also by what they saw as its success in governing Idlib province. “Things are great there, almost like Europe”, claims an armed guard patrolling the streets. He moved to Idlib just a few months ago after his father was appointed to a leading position within HTS. They returned to Daraa triumphantly, part of HTS’s southward march through Hama, Homs and Damascus. “We’re in HTS, but all the fighters here are local guys”, he emphasises. His fellow militiaman never went to Idlib but has joined HTS for similar reasons. He was first politicised by being shot in the back at the age of nine for playing on his front porch during a government-imposed curfew.
There are plenty of fighters that have not joined HTS. Mouawiya insists that he remains independent and that, in any case, HTS won’t exist for much longer. “It’s finished. All the groups will all be united into the Syrian army. And then there will be elections. There has to be.”
Overall, the dominant impression from Daraa is a feeling of somewhat resigned relief, a great distance from the elation and bustle of central Damascus. People are hopeful, but the suffering of previous years is inescapable, bruising, inscribed both in their physical environment and their collective psyche.
This is partly due to the terrible economic conditions that plague Daraa, and much of Syria. Mouawiya and his family continue to live in grinding poverty, as do most people he knows. Work is hard to find and doesn’t pay much. Freedom hasn’t yet increased anyone’s capacity to buy food, or diesel for heating. Nor has it dealt with the extreme electricity shortages, which mean most people get no more than a couple of hours a day. Several people also rage about the lack of viable homes in the area. “You’re lucky to find a single enclosed room for your whole family”, one says.
If a viable and better Syria is to be built from the ashes of the Assad dynasty, it will need to meet these essential needs—in Daraa and across the rest of the country.

In Daraa, heroes of the revolution plan their future amid the ruins

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the sixth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
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“We grew up with [socialist musicians] Marcel Khalifi, Julia Butros, Shaikh Imam ... many of us were communists when we were younger, back before they joined the regime”, Safaa says. We’re in an apartment in the southern city of Suwayda, where three women—Safaa, Oussayma and Omayma—explain the history of the area’s revolutionary resistance to former dictator Bashar al-Assad. 
“The hirak, the movement for freedom and change, started in August of 2023. It started because prices were going up so high; inflation was just making everything unbearably expensive”, Oussayma explains. At the same time, the government decided to cut state subsidies on essential goods like petrol and bread. “These were the issues that mobilised people: we wanted to eat, have water and electricity, to live a decent life. At one point, the state-subsidised bread amounted to less than a full loaf. That’s why it was initially called the bread revolution. 
“A group of youth, very small to begin with, went down to Karama Square to protest in August 2023”, she continues. “They came back every single day after that for one year and four months. Of course, not everyone could be there every day, so Fridays became the focus for large actions. Once the fear was gone, people just went for it.”
They’ve been doing it ever since—a year and four months of daily and weekly actions. The protests grew quickly, peaking at around 8,000 people. Most of the initiators were veterans of the 2011 revolution and had been active in the repeated waves of protests in Suwayda in the intervening years. To begin with, the movement focused on renewing the subsidies and lowering the cost of goods, that is, for reforms. But quickly, their ambitions grew, and they started demanding the fall of the regime. 
“People endured the biting cold, the snow, the heat of summer—it didn’t matter, we were there”, Omayma says. Through their placards and chants, protesters sought to highlight grievances and issues from across Syria, but also international events such as Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Inevitably, there were debates. 
“A section of people stopped coming when we raised the slogan of bringing down the regime”, Safaa explains. “They said, ‘We were here about the price of bread’. What they were really worried about was that the regime would do to Suwayda what it did to the rest of the country.”
This situation was worsened by undercover officers who were sent in to cause trouble and division wherever possible. “They used to start fights over everything, things as simple as what songs we would play during the protests. As numbers got smaller, they kept saying that we were defeated, that we should stop”, Oussayma says. “At times, when the actions were smaller, they would just try to snatch people off the street.”
“Also, you have to understand that women were the big majority of the movement here”, she continues. “The reason was that there had been a collective decision made in 2016 that no man from Suwayda would agree to serve in the Syrian army, to kill their brothers, their people, fellow Syrians. If the army was fighting Israel, we would happily have served.” 
Many men left the country to avoid this fate, often by paying Hezbollah a bribe to take them over the mountains to Lebanon, from which they could go elsewhere. The women find humour in a situation where the party responsible for propping up Assad through murderous repression would simultaneously profit from his victims. Those who couldn’t afford to get out were often trapped in their local towns and villages, unable to travel for fear of being snatched at government checkpoints.
Women were therefore vital to maintaining the street mobilisations organised by the umbrella group, Movement for Freedom and Change. The regime’s supporters and security services began a terrible campaign of slander and harassment of activists online, particularly targeting women. They hoped that by posting unflattering photos and suggesting that they were behaving inappropriately, their partners or family members would discipline them into silence. 
Safaa, Oussayma and Omayma are furiously speaking over one another at this stage, conveying their disgust. But they admit that it did have an impact. “Even if your family was supportive, people knew what was happening in Sednaya and other prisons, so once you became a focus for the security… well, it was seriously scary”, Omayma says.
Were there any difficulties regarding women’s involvement from within the movement itself? “No way, our community here isn’t like some other places. We’ve been involved from the start”, Safaa says. “Actually, the guys were encouraging us to come out, they were quite open-minded.” 
Having said that, it was mostly a small group of men from the 2011 era calling the shots to begin with. But the movement gradually became more collective and inclusive. “We didn’t have separate women’s meetings; we were encouraged to take part as equals in decision-making, as spokespeople, in everything”, Oussayma says. “Some meetings were called off entirely if there weren’t enough women present. But of course, it wasn’t all easy—there were sometimes big debates. Democracy can be hard in this country. But I used to say that even if we didn’t overthrow the government, the movement taught us a lot about politics and how the world really is.” 
How is it that they weren’t just slaughtered by the regime, like so many others around the country? The activists say that they had taken full advantage of a contradiction within the regime’s propaganda, which claimed to defend minorities against violent extremism (that is, against the Sunni majority). This made it harder for the army to drown Suwayda in blood. This constraint gave the people here precious space to organise, but it was far from easy. Activists were still being killed and kidnapped—the kaleidoscopic range of security forces in Syria continued to operate underground. But through their courageous defiance, activists in Suwayda eventually won a degree of political freedom unheard of in other regime-controlled areas. 
“We have not been under the direct control of the regime for something like ten years”, Safaa confirms. “That’s why, when the movement began, [the regime] counted to one million before dealing with us militarily.” The government had made an effort to reestablish itself in 2018, after ISIS occupied some eastern villages and towns and committed massacres across the region. “Actually, the regime brought ISIS here”, Safaa says. “But the people here rose up and we crushed them, drove them out ourselves on the very first day.”
This significance of the city’s independent military capacity is emphasised more by others in Suwayda, especially Alaa, a leading figure in one of the town’s largest militias, Liwaa al Jabal, or the Mountain Brigades. Joining us in the flat, he explains Suwayda’s relative autonomy as being a product of their fighting strength.
“My militia alone had 4-5,000 people under arms, and there were many others”, he says. “Most of the time, we didn’t directly clash with the regime. But if they tried anything, for instance, if they snatched one of our people in Damascus or from a protest, we fought back. We would kidnap their soldiers and exchange them or threaten their commanding officer in the region. Things were mostly resolved that way.” 
Walking and driving around Suwayda, it is obvious that the city and surrounding districts have not suffered the same devastating destruction seen in other parts of Syria. There are no buildings destroyed by missiles or bombs, no bullet-ridden homes. There are also fancier buildings and shops, more large construction projects underway, and fewer visible signs of poverty. 
“Almost every family in Suwayda has some people outside the country, sending money back”, Ra’fat, my driver, later explains. “As well, there’s a higher proportion of people who’ve studied at university, in higher paying jobs.” Alaa makes a similar point, saying that most of the militia was made up of educated people. It’s impossible to confirm many details as there is little data on Syria’s population (though the transitional authorities are planning a census soon). But this relatively clean and functioning city of 500,000 is a taste of what Syria could have been had the Assad family not clung to power with such maniacal tenacity.
Alaa is quietly confident about the future. This week, his militia announced their intent to merge with the other main local militia, the Men of Dignity (Dignity Square being the location of the many protests held in Suwayda’s capital city). In a joint press conference, both declared their willingness to join a future Syrian army. “We will negotiate with [Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)] as equals”, Alaa insists. Their unified command now controls 10-12,000 fighters. 
Their statement was endorsed by the most prominent sheikh in the area, who has long positioned himself as an advocate of the movement. (“Though he has always had his own ambitions that don’t exactly match ours”, warns one of the women). Importantly, he emphasised that Suwayda must have a role in the shaping of the new Syria, not simply be told of the outcome. 
People here remain fiercely committed to their independence, which they see as the only guarantee of their freedom and rights under the new regime. Alaa explains that HTS sent 35 cars filled with soldiers on New Year’s Eve, hoping to occupy the area by catching the local fighters by surprise. “We turned them around on the highway and told them that if they entered, they would be slaughtered. And that was that.” As a result, along with Kurdish-controlled areas in the north-east, Suwayda is the only governorate in Syria without an armed HTS presence. There is, however, an HTS envoy, Mustafa al-Bakkour, who is in practice functioning as the area’s governor, which nobody seems to mind. 
There is a trend, represented in the Liwaa Party (unaffiliated with the militia), that advocate the secession of Suwayda from Syria. They have an informal alliance with the right wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish forces controlling north-eastern Syria, and are similarly open to collaboration with the West and Israel to achieve this goal. But I’m told that most people in Suwayda reject this approach, and that the movement voted not to allow their slogans in the square. “We are Syrians; we do not want to be separate”, Safaa says. The others agree. 
There is some disagreement about how to proceed with the transition. Alaa expresses some lingering bitterness about those who served in the old regime: “Honestly, I feel we can’t just move on—we need them to know that we know who they are, to feel the shame”. Safaa disagrees: “We need justice, but it needs to be restorative justice. We need to rebuild a sense of community, to forgive each other for the crimes of the past”. Ra’fat concurs: “We should hold senior figures accountable, but most of them have left the country. The average soldier had no choice: they were conscripted, there was a gun to their head. We need to start with a blank page”.
The women speak about HTS with a familiar mix of hope and trepidation. “Things have been pretty reasonable so far—Jolani is acting carefully. His ministers have said and done wrong things, but when there’s been a popular uproar then Jolani walks it back”, Oussayma says. (Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is the nom de guerre of HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has become the country’s de facto leader.) 
Safaa offers a slightly different perspective. “We lived many years under this terrible regime, with so much fear and anxiety. It hasn’t just all gone away overnight”, she says. “We don’t even really know what freedom will look like. Also, in this area, most of us are Druze ... We are very worried that the new government will adopt a strict interpretation of Islam; their ideas are very conservative.” 
Alaa is even more sceptical: “The man was al-Qaeda, and politically, he’s still al-Qaeda. His ideas don’t fit with the people here; we want a progressive, secular state”. These fears are far from baseless. Where HTS and its predecessors governed the northern city of Idlib, Christian and Druze villagers were subjected to serious sectarian violence and had their lands and homes stolen. Women were forced to wear the hijab, and conservative social norms were policed strictly. While Jolani has recently made an effort to undo some of the worst excesses, if only to soothe domestic and international opinion, issues remain, and these crimes have not been forgotten. 
Yet, once again, all insist on differentiating between HTS, with its strict interpretation of Sharia law, and the Muslim community as a whole. “Suwayda has received so many refugees from parts of the country that the regime was attacking. We were happy to welcome them; we don’t have any problems with anyone living here”, Safaa says. “But [HTS] have been trapped in Idlib for so long, they don’t know what Syria is like, what Damascus, Suwayda, Tartous are like.” 
Oussayma cuts in: “There’s no way that [HTS] is going to be able to run the whole of Syria like Idlib. If they try, we’ll rise up again. We defeated the old regime, we have our own militias, we can do anything now”.

‘We can do anything now’: how activists in this Syrian city plan to shape the country’s future

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the fifth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
--------------------
As I climb out of the microbus and take my first steps in Yarmouk refugee camp, in the south of Damascus, I spot two young boys slowly digging through a pile of garbage and rubble. I ask if I can take their photo, part of documenting what Assad did to this area and its people. They look at me suspiciously, layers of filth clinging to their faces and clothes. “No, go photograph someone else”, one of them says. They look tired, defeated, possibly embarrassed. I sense their eyes on me as I walk away, wondering what my deal is. Eventually, they return to their scavenging. They’re no more than 10 years old. 
According to UN records, Yarmouk was home to around 160,000 people before 2011, overwhelmingly Palestinians. My driver, Ahmad, boasts that it was once one of the most economically vibrant parts of Damascus, with shopping districts, industrial sectors and more. He takes me to visit Abu Saeed Aidi, an old man born in 1945 in the now obliterated Palestinian village of Lubya. He’s lived in the camp for decades and tells a similar story of Yarmouk once being a thriving centre of Palestinian life. His eyes shine with pride when he describes how the camp was designed by a Palestinian engineer from Jerusalem using the most modern ideas available at the time, how it had a democratic structure different from the rest of Damascus, and how generous donations from abroad meant it had the best infrastructure of any suburb. 
There’s nothing left of that now. 
Ahmad drives for over half an hour, winding through the narrow, desolate streets. I try to film, but it’s hopeless. The reality of such devastation can’t be captured with images alone. Row after row, block after block after block of destroyed homes. An old UN school bombed to smithereens. The shell of not one but two enormous mosques, meeting places and cultural centres for a once thriving community. A small garden, its healthy crop of string beans merely highlights the devastation surrounding it. An old playground, a rusty swing, a fading children’s painting of a happy family, one of the kids waving the regime flag. 
Saeed al-Shneeni is keen to talk as soon as he gets in the car. “You need to record this”, he says confidently. He’s a long-term camp resident, and he has stories to tell about every building we pass. “That’s the checkpoint where they used to randomly kidnap people”, he says as we pass a small concrete pillbox on a narrow street. “That’s the line of demarcation, where every building was demolished to give the government a clearer shot into the camp. Then, they stole the steel from the rubble to sell on the black market. Criminals in every way, these people.”
He tells a tale of the five-year siege of Yarmouk, which the regime imposed between 2013 and 2018. Its effects were so brutal, so total, that an Amnesty International report published in 2014 found that 128 people starved to death that year alone. This was collective punishment for the crime of supporting the Syrian revolution. 
Saeed says that a wealthy Palestinian exile eventually bribed the regime to allow an aid delivery. Authorities took the cash but opened fire on those who lined up for food. It became known as the Rijeh square massacre. “It was just like what the Israelis did in Gaza last year”, he says. Seven more people died in that incident, killed while lining up for bread to feed their loved ones.
Yarmouk had also been home to a vibrant Palestinian civil society. “There were more than fourteen [political] factions”, says Ahmad’s nephew, Mohammed, who joins us for lunch. “Each faction had their own organising committees and armed wings ... but that’s all finished now.”
The regime kept them on a very short leash. In fact, they had a special office within the internal security department tasked with abducting, torturing and killing Palestinian organisers who stepped out of line. Referred to as the “Palestine branch”, it attracted some of the most brutal and sadistic people within the Syrian state. They were responsible for responding to the revolutionary uprising that found a strong echo in Yarmouk and the surrounding neighbourhoods.
By the time Assad’s forces retook Yarmouk in 2018, the camp was a wreck, and only a few hundred people remained. The combination of famine and endless bombardment had made the area unliveable, forcing over 100,000 Palestinians into yet another exile. To make matters worse, ISIS and Nusra had overrun the camp a few years earlier. These reactionaries drove out the remaining rebels and spent the next three years terrorising any citizens that remained. 
Undeterred by the scarcity of living beings to harass, the soldiers were ordered to abuse the dead instead. Ahmad takes me to Yarmouk cemetery, where the gravestones have been smashed. “They gave us no peace, even in death”, he says. 
It’s not until we’ve sat down for lunch in Ahmad’s home that Saeed talks about how the arbitrary violence of the Syrian state forever changed his own life.
“At the time, we were still living in our flat on the fourth storey of a building near here”, he says. “But the bombing was so constant that my wife and I had decided to sleep in separate rooms, so that if one of us died, the other could keep looking after the kids.” 
They were eventually forced to move to their parents’ house after a bomb landed on their next-door neighbour’s apartment. A few weeks later, their 16-year-old son, Mahmoud, went missing. “It was strange at the time—nobody was staying outside after dark due to all the fighting. I was up all night worried, and when he didn’t return, I spent the next week looking for him. I looked everywhere, asking anyone if they had seen him.”
After trying everything else, Saeed went to the morgue. “The worker there showed me body after body ... At one point, I thought I had found him, but it turned out to be someone else’s child. I was relieved, but still very stressed.” The mortician told him to try the internal security office, where a database was kept of dead bodies “found” locally. 
Saeed’s eyes glaze over; retelling the story has sent him back in time. “When I got to the relevant room in the security building, [there was] a man sitting behind a computer, with an officer on either side. They were showing him pictures of dead faces, sixteen to a page.” Saeed stood behind them and watched them scrolling through endless pictures. He describes feeling torn between wanting to find his son and yet wanting to cling to the hope that he was alive. Soon, his face showed up. “I yelled, ‘That’s my son!’ They hadn’t even noticed I was there until then.” Saeed was then shown eight pictures of Mahmoud’s body. He’d been shot in the head at close range. That’s all Saeed ever learned about the loss of his precious child.
But this story isn’t finished.
In 2014, two years after Mahmoud’s execution, Saeed’s son Ousama was a month away from graduating high school, having specialised in administration and law. Saeed’s family had moved to yet another apartment—“more space for the kids”, he explains. One day, a government employee came to their house and asked them to go to the mayor’s office to register their new addresses with the local administration. On arrival, both Saeed and Ousama were arrested and thrown into a van. After a few minutes, Saeed was let out and dropped off on the street without charge or explanation. He was never to see his son again. 
For years later, members of the internal security came to his house, promising to get information about his son in exchange for money. “I must have paid out over $5,000”, he says. This was a common practice, Ahmad interjects—a way of extorting cash from desperate people. “I knew they were manipulating me, but I would have done anything to hear something about my boy”, Saeed says. He never got anything in return for these transactions but doesn’t regret trying.
Two weeks ago, he received a message from his daughter. Her friends had sent her a photo of an official document from 2015. It was a photo of a list of names of dead bodies found in the region surrounding Yarmouk. It included his son, described only as “Palestinian” and listed as number sixteen. 
Because Ousama was never officially declared dead, Saeed’s last surviving son Abdullah was almost forced to serve in the same Syrian army that had killed his brothers. The prospect nearly drove Saeed insane. It took another round of bribery—worth another couple of thousand that he didn’t have—to convince the local bureaucracy to sign off on his status as an only child. Today, he’s in Germany, building a new life for himself.
In tears, I find myself apologising to Saeed for his suffering, on behalf of an indifferent world. He shrugs, tells me not to worry. He leaves shortly after with the look of a man who has completed a difficult but necessary task. It seems that sharing this traumatic incident with the world, even just some nobody from Australia, is for Saeed an act of resistance and love. 
Ahmad subsequently tells me that Saeed suffered enormously during the intervening years, the stress and sadness leading to a range of health issues. “The regime took his sons, but they also took the best years of his life.”
By the end, the Assad regime’s sole claim to legitimacy was its supposed support for the resistance to Israel. Of course, those with the most basic knowledge of Syria’s history know about the regime’s treason during Black September, its defence of the far-right, pro-Israeli forces in Lebanon’s civil war, its role in driving Yasser Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon not once but twice, and how it defended Israel’s borders better than any other Arab state in the region. 
But regardless of this history, what the regime did to the Yarmouk refugee camp, to people like Saeed, should stand on its own as an unforgivable crime. Indeed, Assad’s thugs killed more Palestinians in Yarmouk than Israel did in any one of its wars prior to 7 October. 
As we’re digesting our dinner, Ahmad gets a call from his son in Germany. He announces that it looks like the government might be about to revoke the asylum status of many of the nearly 1 million Syrian refugees in the country. 
Mohammed grimaces. Just minutes earlier, he had explained that he planned to seek asylum in Germany alongside his wife and 10-month-old baby. This news must have broken his heart, but he hides it behind a bitter smile: “The Arab world doesn’t want us, and the West doesn’t want us. They should just send me to Gaza so I can die fighting for my country”, he says.

Yarmouk: Assad’s obliteration of a Palestinian refugee camp

US President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed trade war, his proposals to increase military spending and the stacking of his cabinet with China hawks have made it clear that the US will continue preparing for war with China. Australia’s military alliance with the United States means that Canberra has practically signed up the country for such a war if it breaks out.
For the Australian political establishment, Trump’s election victory was an opportunity to express unwavering commitment to the US alliance. PM Anthony Albanese was one of the first world leaders to phone Trump and congratulate him on his election victory. Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who considers himself an Australian version of Trump, said the relationship with the US “will strengthen, and we will make sure that we work very closely with the incoming administration”.
The US alliance—and new agreements such as the AUKUS military pact between Australia, the US and the United Kingdom—have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/24/us-military-base-australia-china/">transformed</a>
Australia into a central <a href="https://youtu.be/a3HhPU9DGsQ?si=msq1o2NhLzPADK3x">base of operations</a>
for the <a href="https://youtu.be/CW1TYDVBSmI?si=iKjpIQ1cbsoksrgA">US military</a>
in recent years. 
Northern Australia is now routinely used by the US Marines and Air Force. The Tindal air base near Darwin has been expanded to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. The construction of giant fuel storage tanks on Darwin’s RAAF base means that both now act as a stationing and refuelling point for US aircraft, enabling the US to conduct more flights to and from the NT.
Western Australia will soon host <a href="https://www.defence.gov.au/about/locations-property/infrastructure-projects/submarine-rotational-force-west-infrastructure-project#:~:text=Overview,West%20(SRF-West).">rotational deployments</a> of US nuclear submarines and a <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-10-16/new-defence-precinct-henderson-deliver-continuous-naval-shipbuilding-and-nuclear-powered-submarine-maintenance">naval industry</a> that WA Premier Roger Cook claims will rival the state’s massive resources sector.
The joint US-Australian “<a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/is-gweo-on-target/">guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise</a>” aims to transform Australia’s weapons manufacturing industry to produce large enough quantities of precision-guided missiles to support deployed US forces across the Indo-Pacific. Spy and communications bases—such as the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/pine-gap-australias-secret-and-deadly">Pine Gap</a> satellite surveillance facility near Alice Springs, which covers the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East—are vital elements of US strategic command, control, communications and satellite systems for launching attacks against China. Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles recently bragged that the US military is now operating in Australia across “all domains ... land, sea, air, cyber and space”.
What explains this slavish support for the US alliance—shared by Australia’s main political parties, the security establishment, business elites and mass media—no matter who occupies the White House?
The answer given by the political establishment is that the alliance protects the Australian population and deters threats from “our enemies”. Chief among these threats, we are told, is China. Yet the Australian government’s own strategic planning documents admit that an invasion of this island continent, by China or anyone else, remains a remote possibility. The risk of a Chinese attack on Australia arises only because Australia serves as a base for US military capabilities and because Australia’s own defence forces have pledged their commitment to joining a US war against China in the Indo-Pacific. 
Most critics of AUKUS and the US alliance answer that Australia is a puppet of the United States: our leaders are nothing but spineless dupes grovelling at the feet of US presidents. Proponents of this view—from the <a href="https://greens.org.au/platform/world">Greens</a> to former Labor PM <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/13/paul-keating-aukus-australia-us-alliance/">Paul Keating</a>—argue that Australia should pursue a foreign policy that is “more independent” from the United States.
But the Australian state jumps at the opportunity to stir imperialist tensions more often than not. This can be seen in it joining or supporting every US war since World War Two with little to no prompting.
The Australian political establishment backs the US not because it is too weak to resist US bullying but because the alliance enhances the power of the Australian ruling class and increases its capacity to dominate the Pacific region.
Australia is an imperialist power in its own right, with the thirteenth-largest economy in the world and the strongest military in South-East Asia. However, as a middle-ranking power, it has always relied on a “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6557">great and powerful friend</a>” to help safeguard its regional interests, first through an alliance with Britain and since the Second World War with the United States.
Chief among those interests is the security of the sea approaches to the island continent: Australian capitalism is dependent on international shipping to buy and sell commodities in Asian markets, to import oil from the Middle East and to access deliveries of weapons, machinery and equipment from the United States. Only the US Navy can control the wide arc of maritime territory from the Indian Ocean off north-western Australia to the South Pacific. 
In addition, Australian capitalists have long regarded the country’s neighbours—in particular Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Pacific island states—as Australia’s “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7150">backyard</a>”, with Australian companies dominating their economies.
Australia also lacks the industrial base to field a modern military without the support of a larger ally. Without the backing of the US, Australia would need to triple or quadruple its military spending. Instead, through AUKUS and the US alliance, the Australian capitalist class can piggyback on the US military. And this allows Australia to access the latest US military technology—not just nuclear submarines, but advanced jet aircraft, missiles, naval combat systems and more. 
This is why the US alliance remains an article of faith for both ALP and Liberal governments. Any party that is serious about governing Australian capitalism must sign up to the alliance—the alternative is to face destabilisation by the capitalists and the military top brass.
Australia’s dependence on its “great and powerful friend” means that the ruling class goes out of its way to keep its “friend” firmly anchored in the Indo-Pacific. This helps thwart the emergence of a rival imperial power or nationalist forces that might obstruct the country’s sea lanes or disrupt its investments. One example is the Menzies government aggressively lobbying the Johnson administration in 1964 to commit more US troops to the Vietnam War. 
The AUKUS agreement fits within this general orientation: it is an aggressive alliance designed to maintain US imperialist domination of the Indo-Pacific region. But it also strengthens the power of the Australian state as a junior partner of US imperialism. Rory Medcalf, the head of ANU’s National Security College and a leading China hawk, has <a href="https://nsc.anu.edu.au/content-centre/article/opinion/australian-way-war-and-peace">hailed</a>
AUKUS as Australian imperialism’s “coming of age as a truly Indo-Pacific power”.
The price paid for US military protection is that Australia contributes to almost all US wars and occupations. From Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s to staking itself as China’s most aggressive antagonist in the region today, the Australian government embraces these opportunities to remind the US of Australia’s value to its broader imperial project. 
China is indeed challenging US domination of Asia and hence Australia’s own imperialist project, which is closely identified with the US. China’s growing ambitions threaten Australia’s informal empire in PNG, East Timor and the Pacific island states, as well as its trade routes and, potentially, its influence in Indonesia, a critical power to Australia’s north.
China’s state capitalist model of economic development is also viewed as a threat to the US-dominated liberal economic order that Australian capitalists have greatly benefited from.
Trump’s first administration was an <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-trump-presidency-us-imperialism-and-the-future-of-the-neoliberal-order/">aggressive</a>
response to the rise of China (although he only generalised what Barack Obama before him acknowledged with his “<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/88/us-imperialisms-pivot-asia/index.html">pivot to Asia</a>”). His program to “Make America Great Again” used tariffs and increased military spending to increase US military-industrial might. Nonetheless, by alienating US allies and destabilising American politics, the Trump administration created opportunities for China to expand its influence, thereby undermining America’s ability to contain its new imperialist rival. 
Rather than mark a break with Trump, the <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/bidens-plan-for-the-us-empire/">Biden administration</a> continued and intensified the China pivot, continuing the focus on rebuilding domestic manufacturing capability and infrastructure alongside an <a href="https://pacforum.org/publications/pacnet-85-countering-complaints-about-bidens-china-strategy-lessons-from-the-us-asia-first-policy/">escalation</a>
of military pressure in the South China Sea and Taiwan. 
Where Biden did depart from Trump was in his multilateral approach to building <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">alliances</a>
and his ability to sell war as peace. Indeed, Biden and Albanese (the so-called “progressive” wing of the establishment) have overseen the biggest destabilisation of the Indo-Pacific region and acceleration toward war with China of any recent governments: they have carried out Trump’s program with gusto.
Trump has made it clear that his main priority during his second presidency will be great power <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">confrontation</a>
with China. This includes a proposed 60 percent tariff on imports from China and a promise to raise the military budget from 3 percent to 5 percent of GDP (US$1.5 trillion) annually. His appointment of aggressive <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-nsc-china-hawks">China hawks</a>
to key positions in his new administration fits with this general strategy. <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3286448/what-does-trumps-pick-pentagon-chief-mean-us-china-military-ties">Peter Hegseth</a>, the proposed defence secretary responsible for the Pentagon, recently bemoaned: “China has a full spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination and we have our heads up our arses”.
Contrary to what much of the liberal commentariat says about him, Trump is not an isolationist, nor does he propose a withdrawal of US global power. Trump is an economic nationalist who sets out to make deals with both friends and foes alike; unlike liberals such as Biden, he does not hide the fact that it must be to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. It is this transactional nationalism that leads Trump to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or withdraw from them completely. In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, Trump prefers bilateral deals with US allies. 
While Trump’s strategy is to restore US imperial dominance, it will most likely, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. This means other imperial powers as well as regional ones becoming more assertive, which will intensify conflicts between states over a failing capitalist system.
What this means for AUKUS and the US alliance is unclear. Trump’s demand that US allies “pay their own way” already fits with a general consensus among Australian ruling circles that they must do more to <a href="https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/australias-defence-strategic-review-forging-partnerships-and-self-reliance/">increase</a>
their self-reliance as part of the US alliance. The AUKUS pact is a prime example of a junior partner that “pays its own way”.
What is clear is that the Australian political establishment is frantically preparing to use the second Trump presidency to further enhance the power of Australian imperialism. Their main orientation so far has been to accept Trump’s argument that US allies must do more to foot their own defence bills. For example, John Blaxland, former head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies, recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/the-prospect-of-australias-defence-being-dependent-on-the-whim-of-donald-trump-points-to-a-need-to-muscle-up-on-our-own">argued</a>:
“The prospect of Australia’s defence being dependent on a presidential whim points to the need for Australia to muscle up on its own, including with as much US-sourced technology as can be accessed, without waiting for another white knight or great white fleet to come to the rescue.” 
In other words, Canberra must prepare to further increase military spending (probably funded by cuts to working-class living standards) and pick up the slack among US allies in preparation for the diplomatic dysfunction that is likely to emanate from Washington under a second Trump presidency.
For the Australian ruling class, the lie that the US alliance is about protecting the Australian population helps legitimise increased military spending and the drive to war. AUKUS and the US alliance have been much easier to sell to (and hide from) the Australian public with Biden and not Trump leading in Washington. Under Trump, larger numbers of people might see the alliance for what it really is: boosting Australian imperial power to protect US domination of the region.

Robert Narai

Trump, AUKUS and the US alliance

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the fourth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
--------------------
“Field executions and random killings [have become] a daily occurrence. Among the most affected areas, the provinces of Hama and Homs were at the forefront of these crimes ... followed by the Syrian coast, particularly in Latakia and Tartous.” These chilling lines are taken from a bulletin by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights released on 3 January. 
It’s a stark reminder that the situation in Damascus, where stability reigns and the right to protest and gather peacefully is fairly unchallenged, is not the experience of all Syrians at this time.
Footage and reports from a four-day siege of the town of Khirbet Al-Ma’azzah went viral in the days before Christmas. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had subjected its people to daily searches, harassment and interrogations. It was eventually lifted, but only after an entirely apolitical employee of the state electricity company was found shot dead in his house. 
Meanwhile, in Homs, residents have been subjected to door-to-door searches by armed HTS militants. The most terrifying rumours about what was going on quickly spread, some of which were confirmed in a definitive statement released by the Homs Civil Peace group. In careful and nuanced language, they accepted the principle of the operation, which is to arrest and punish senior figures from the Assad regime, but condemned its heavy-handed approach. 
They described incidents of arbitrary destruction of property, physical and verbal assaults of civilians, forcing people to bark like dogs, harassment of some women found not wearing the hijab, arrests conducted without explanation or chance for appeal, and the deployment of tanks in civilian areas. 
Stories of these outrages spread throughout Syria primarily via Facebook, which I’ve noticed is not hobbled by the same censorship that has driven English-speaking activists to other platforms. Posts written in Arabic routinely receive hundreds if not thousands of reactions, followed by furious debate in the comment section. 
At times, these debates can fall into sectarian patterns and discourses. Syria has vast regional variations in economic conditions, ethnic and religious compositions, languages and accents. The old regime expertly pitted groups against each other to expand its profits and power. 
For instance, it is widely understood, both externally and within Syria itself, that the Assad dynasty was a sectarian Alawi operation. There is an element of truth to that, as many key posts in the state and public institutions were given to fellow members of the Assad family and those from its community. This then tended to cascade down in the form of nepotistic hiring practices and so on, which in turn led to hostility from other communities towards the Alawi.
While the top leaders of the transitional government have been careful to avoid saying anything explicitly bigoted, their cadres and supporters have been less restrained. Calls to “cleanse” Syria of supporters of the former regime can sometimes be code for wider attacks on the Alawi community. 
But Nour, a young comrade from the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current (RLC), has a different perspective: “People talk as if the Assad regime was defined by its sectarianism, but that’s wrong; its only religious commitment was to wealth”. This is an important point. Assad’s most consistent supporters were the largely Sunni bourgeoisie of Damascus. There are huge economic, social and political divisions within the Alawi community, as with all others. A number of courageous efforts were made to organise resistance to the regime by Alawis themselves, and the left is filled with figures from that community who rejected the regime for the same reasons as everyone else. 
She made these comments at a public meeting of RLC, in the relatively clean-cut Damascus suburb of Sahnaya. It was a young and dynamic crowd, with women a slight majority of the 35 people present. Nour kicked off proceedings, explaining that it was the first public meeting the group had held since the fall of the regime. The meeting was held in the back room of a house that had been used for illegal meetings through the years of dictatorship. 
British socialist and Middle East expert Anne Alexander addressed the audience on lessons from the Arab Spring, her face projected onto a cardboard screen. 
Later, I attended a meeting organised by the Nissan Women’s Group in the Jaramana Social Forum, previously the local HQ of the ruling Syrian Ba’ath Party. I’m told that Jaramana itself is an interesting part of Damascus, with a strong alternative subculture and a more liberal attitude to relationships and women’s rights. On this night, about 100 people, much older and with more men than the earlier meeting, showed up for what turned out to be fairly technical talks on macroeconomic policy in Syria. 
It was clear, however, that the attendees at both events were far more interested in discussing concrete perspectives and proposals than historical and theoretical issues. Where the talks had a somewhat abstract flavour, especially in Jaramana, audience members wanted to know how to take forward the fight for social and economic justice in Syria today. 
Both meetings saw repeated complaints that there had been no shift in the approach to decision-making from the old regime. “We can sit here and talk about what we would like, but they’re not listening to us”, one man complained in Jaramana. “How do we turn that around?” One young radical responded by arguing forcefully, if optimistically, for a general strike: “It’s the only way to force them to listen”. 
In Sahnaya, attendees expressed similar concerns: “Do [HTS] really need 3-4 years to write a constitution, or is that just a tactic to stall until they have all the power?”, someone asked. Another pointed to the elephant in the room: “How do we mobilise to defend our rights without provoking another civil war?” No easy answers. 
Alexander stressed the need to build and strengthen independent unions that can use their power at the point of production to discipline bourgeois forces like HTS. Such a project is well beyond the capacities of this small group of young revolutionaries at this stage but it helped point the way forward.
Lines are quickly being drawn between supporters and opponents of the new government. For now, its critics are mostly on the back foot, responding to specific incidents and policies rather than setting the agenda. They’re racing to establish institutions and spaces that can allow them to think, organise and resist collectively. 
On the other side, HTS are taking full advantage of their status as the only nationally organised force in Syria. Governing in Idlib gave them time and space to consolidate their political and military machine, assisted by extensive foreign donations. Their leaders are intelligent and battle-tested and are learning to enjoy being at the helm of the Syrian state while being wooed by global capital. 
To justify their unilateral assumption of power, HTS use the slogan, “Those that did the liberating get to do the decision-making”. It would be a lie to say this argument, as anti-democratic as it is, has no purchase among the broader Syrian public. But HTS’s reactionary program—and the brutal, anti-revolutionary actions of many of its leaders during the civil war and its reign in Idlib—mean that many remain wary. 
For now, the majority of Syrians are watching and waiting to see what comes next, willing to give the new government a chance. But that could change at any moment, triggered by an overreach or some other crisis. The transition from a 54-year dictatorship will take months, if not years, to unfold, and there will be many shifts in momentum and the balance of forces. 
As we leave the meeting in Jaramana, my companion, an experienced journalist who has thrown herself into democratic organising, seems a bit down. She asks me what I think will happen to Syria. I tell her I have no idea, but that’s a positive in and of itself. Under Assad, it was guaranteed misery from here to eternity.

In Damascus, leftists continue to organise

Joe Allen is a Chicago-based socialist, former Teamster and author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. In this piece, <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/">first published at his blog</a>, Joe critically evaluates the Teamsters union’s recent strike at Amazon warehouses in the United States. 
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The Teamsters’ five-day strike against Amazon ended inconclusively, but the union hinted at future actions with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/26/business/amazon-strike-teamsters-warning/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Stay tuned”</a>. Beginning on 19 December, the Teamsters called strikes in response to the failure of Amazon to meet the union’s demand to come to the bargaining table four days earlier. The Teamsters <a href="https://teamster.org/2024/12/teamsters-launch-largest-strike-against-amazon-in-american-history/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">declared</a> that it was “the largest strike in Amazon’s history”. The union’s General President Sean O’Brien said in an official statement:
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it. These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”
The Teamsters called for strike action at eight locations across four states, including Amazon centres in Queens and Staten Island, New York, Atlanta, Southern California, San Francisco, and Skokie, Ill. They claim to represent the drivers or the warehouse workers through elections or card checks.
The Teamsters sent Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) pickets to scores of Amazon locations across the country, mostly made up of local officials and union stewards with little or no connection to Amazon. The union has not publicly stated how many locations were picketed or what the results were. The Teamsters also called upon community supporters to join the picket lines across the country.
On one level, the Teamsters’ actions were a bold move, but their sparse presence, possibly representing one percent of the company’s entire US workforce, has raised some serious questions. Among them are whether there was any tangible goal beyond the Teamsters maintaining their franchise at Amazon, and left hanging what the next steps, if any, were in the organising campaign.
When I spoke to long-time labour lawyer and negotiator Joe Burns, the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Joe-Burns/author/B004B3WZU0?ref=ap_rdr&amp;isDramIntegrated=true&amp;shoppingPortalEnabled=true&amp;ccs_id=faa8abf9-f80c-46e1-8794-2a1bc15bb88f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">author</a> of many important books on strike strategy, about the Teamsters’ actions at Amazon and what his thoughts on it were. He told me:
“While it is hard to tell due to the lack of credible reporting. These ‘strikes’ seem very similar to the approaches in fast food, rideshare and at <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/our-walmart-union-ufcw-black-friday" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Walmart</a> over the last decade or so, where the union would put out press releases claiming a giant corporation had been struck. This would gather publicity and generate some excitement on the left but it did not impact production or even draw out more than a tiny fraction of the workplace.
“The actions are really more informational picketing with a media spin of a strike tacked on to it. The problem is we have over a decade of experience showing such efforts don’t really work. They gather press and at times can help liberal groups or unions pass labour legislation, but have shown little in the way of furthering permanent union organising.”
It’s hard not to agree with Burns’ assessment. But then why are the Teamsters recycling a failed strategy? Or is there something bigger and better coming down the road?
An existential threat
In 2021, at the thirtieth convention of the Teamsters, delegates overwhelmingly passed a series of resolutions to combat what then-General President James P. Hoffa called the “existential threat” that Amazon posed to the union. “The Special Resolution: Building Worker Power at Amazon”, which is worth quoting at length, declared:
“Amazon is changing the nature of work in our country and touches many core 
Teamster industries and employers such as UPS, parcel delivery, freight, airline, food distribution and motion picture, and presents an existential threat to the standards we have set in these industries;”
Leaning on its own history, it said:
“Whereas, Teamsters have been building power in the logistics industry since before a meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets;”
And it concluded:
“Finally, be it resolved, that building worker power at Amazon and helping those workers achieve a union contract is a top priority for the Teamsters Union and the Union commits to fully fund and support the Amazon Project, to supply all resources necessary and to ultimately create a special Amazon Division to aid Amazon workers and defend and protect the standards in our industries from the existential threat that is Amazon.”
An <a href="https://teamster.org/divisions/amazon-division/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amazon division</a> of the Teamsters was created and California Teamster leader Randy Korgan was appointed as its first director by Hoffa, and then reappointed by his successor Sean O’Brien. So, it’s remarkable given that Amazon, which was declared an existential threat three and a half years ago—and probably a decade late at that point—how little the Teamsters have actually done.
The biggest initial breakthrough was accomplished by the independent and financially threadbare Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which made international news and made ALU leader Chris Smalls into a celebrity. Despite an initial burst of interest in the ALU from Amazon workers across the country, it couldn’t reproduce its success at JFK8 elsewhere and soon went into crisis.
Meanwhile, small groups of Amazon workers began to form organising committees in other facilities but faced Amazon’s notorious <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/26/amazon-trader-joes-starbucks-anti-union-measures" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">union-busting operation</a>. However, faced with the prospect of its victory in Staten Island dying through attrition, the ALU negotiated a merger with the Teamsters as an autonomous unit. I took no position on whether they should join the Teamsters, but cautioned that it wasn’t a silver bullet solution to their challenges. I <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/14/beware-of-teamsters-bearing-gifts-2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a>:
“Some ALU reformers and supporters argue that for the ALU to succeed at Amazon it needs a big gun to back it up. While you can understand the allure of being affiliated to a larger union after a series of defeats, is this a solution to the existential crisis of ALU? Even recent history at Amazon doesn’t suggest this is a silver bullet solution. Way back in April 2021, when the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), affiliated with the mammoth UFCW, lost two to one in a union election at Amazon in <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2021/04/defeat-in-bessemer/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bessemer, Alabama</a>, despite having a successful record of organizing in the South.”
Now that the big gun has been fired, what were the results?
The big strike?
“Understanding these strikes is made difficult because labor left reporting, including outlets like Labor Notes and Jacobin, does not cover key questions such as level of worker participation in these strikes, which should be a key aspect of labor reporting. However, from accounts online, mainstream sources such as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/business/amazon-warehouse-staten-island-strike.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a>, it appears that participation is very low in these strikes”, Joe Burns wrote to me. 
“For example, at the main Staten Island facility of thousands of workers, the New York Times estimated 100 workers. Other accounts have been a very small percentage of the workplace and mainly outside Teamster officials or supporters picketing. I have not heard of any facility that had a large percentage of Amazon workers on strike. Good independent labor reporting would zero in on such questions and not merely parrot the official union press releases.”
While the Teamsters made an effort in the major media markets to have a larger number of people protesting at some of Amazon’s facilities, outside of those areas, the lack of Amazon workers on the picket lines was more glaring. I asked several rank-and-file Teamsters and union activists who visited the Amazon picket lines for their observations. Most asked to be quoted anonymously or by a pseudonym. Kat from Florida, who is active with <a href="https://teamstersmobilize.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Teamsters Mobilize</a>, reported:
“It was very weak and ineffective from the standpoint of actually interrupting Amazon’s production process. In the three hours I was there, we let through two union drivers and one UPS manager without any struggle at all. Apathy on the part of the local officials at the picket. Even short of blocking the road, there were very simple tactics we could have employed to try to talk to every trucker as they were coming in. The officials were utterly disinterested in doing that; they clearly saw this “picket” as a last-minute top-down order that they had to follow formally but not play any substantial role in. Except for myself, the few other workers who showed up basically followed this lead.”
Yet, Kat also reported:
“At one point, a woman who worked inside the warehouse we were stationed at pulled over and was very excited to hear what was happening and to learn whether there were any ongoing efforts to organize her building. Me and the other rank-and-file members were the only ones who spoke with her, which seemed like a huge missed opportunity.”
Alyx reported from Salem, Oregon, on Friday 20 December:
“There were two Teamsters retirees from Local 324 holding the line. From what they said, most shifts were being covered by retirees from their local and another. I don’t know how many current Amazon workers participated. From what I saw, this location didn’t seem to have much impact. The facility is fairly remote, so not a lot of public visibility. The picket spot was set closer to the entrance than the main street, so only drivers and warehouse workers saw us. Since turnout was low, picketers weren’t able to impact access.”
Joe from Southern California wrote to me after visiting the City of Industry picket line. His experiences were more positive, though the number of Amazon workers involved was still small. He wrote:
“Where I was at, I’d say around 45–50 Amazon drivers on the picket line. Some of the striking Amazon workers were well versed on how to talk to their Amazon driving coworkers. I did not see any cards getting signed. The local Teamster union played both a primary and secondary role. Primary role in, they were active in moving striking Amazon workers to the other locations of the picket lines. Some talked to leaving Direct Service Providers (DSP) drivers, but most of the talking was striking Amazon drivers to their fellow DSP Amazon driving coworkers. I have seen many of the striking Amazon workers being interviewed by various online publications, pages and social media accounts. These actions made a difference. It brought publicity to the efforts of the Amazon workers. The public is aware of their efforts. Where I’m at. It was a good start. I would say this was a structure test to really gauge where the IBT Amazon Division is at.”
Karl, a longstanding union steward in Oklahoma City, wrote me:
“We picketed 2 Amazon facilities next to each other. Approximately 20–30 workers talked with us over the course of 48 hours. This, out of a workforce of 4–6 thousand. None participated directly, though strongly indicated that they would be interested in organizing and participating in further union campaigns if the local ​union were to follow up. Many of these provided contact info and requested information on the local. The local’s role seemed to be restricted to one of an informational picket. Little effort had been expended towards contacting workers or establishing any prior inside organization with which an informational picket could reinforce. It remains to be seen whether the local ​union will squander or follow up with new contacts. I think that the actions can make a difference provided the local and international makes a concerted effort to consolidate organization in the picketed plants and follow up with escalating actions that invite increasing numbers of workers to participate.”
Despite Amazon’s insistence that there was <a href="https://www.kwtx.com/2024/12/20/amazon-teamsters-strikes-no-impact-operations-by-unions-attempt-push-false-narrative/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">no interference</a> with their operations, the Christmas actions proved to be a public relations black eye for Amazon. The largely favourable media coverage highlighted the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/newsxofficial/reel/DEC_4mnzuAe/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">poverty wages</a> of drivers, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-injuries.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dangerous</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IT0Jhqr9kI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">humiliating</a> working conditions. Yet, we have been here before. No amount of public shaming has changed Amazon’s ways. With barely 1 percent, and that’s being generous, of Amazon’s workers participating in the union’s action, there is certainly a long way to go to organise a small fraction of Amazon’s workforce.
Missed opportunity
“I certainly would not want to discount the organizing and the efforts of the workers who did go on strike. Hopefully, it will spur some more activity but the history of publicity strikes is not very good. I do think a serious analysis needs to be done of levels of participation. The tendency however, is to simply declare victory and learn nothing. But I also think we need a sober analysis of what kind of labor movement it would take to organize Amazon. I do not think we can talk about organizing giant employers without talking about the structure and ideology of our labor movement. In order to truly take on these giant employers, we would need a labor movement capable of employing picket line militancy and solidarity tactics capable of mobilizing the entire labor movement against corporate giants”, Joe Burns wrote to me.
I do think the Teamsters missed an opportunity last year. The Teamsters raised expectations about last year’s UPS contract, the largest private sector contract in the country. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51p1rWkvddM" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">transformational strike</a> was expected and could have been the lever to organise a behemoth like Amazon. Yet, the contract campaign ended on a flat note. As I <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/beware-of-teamsters-bearing-gifts-25ee74ffb645" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a> last year:
“[T]he U.S. Left ... repeated continually that we were on the eve of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4e8jI_qzro" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">biggest strike</a> in modern U.S. history. This, of course, did not occur leading to the frustration and<a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-the-big-ups-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> demoralization</a> of the hundreds of young radicals—many identified with the Democratic Socialists of America, <a href="https://www.dsausa.org/strike-ready-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DSA</a>—who went out and got jobs on some of the worst shifts at UPS to be part of this transformative campaign.”
We operate in the wake of failure of a <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-the-big-ups-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">transformational strike</a> at UPS and its consequences at Amazon. We are also facing a much more difficult political environment with the incoming Trump administration that promises a full-scale assault on trade union rights, including the Teamsters, despite the union being led by Trump-ally Sean O’Brien. The political terrain can shift quickly, but it will require a clear-eyed assessment of the recent events at Amazon and the creation of new left to take advantage of them.

Joe Allen

The Teamsters’ ‘strikes’ at Amazon: a critical assessment

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the 
Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to 
report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship.
 This is the third in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
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“This revolution is just getting started”, says Fadi, a man in his late 50s, standing on the steps of the Syrian Ministry of Education. “We have to keep pushing forward. It’s not over until everyone has their rights cemented”. I’m with about 50 Syrians, who are protesting against a move by the new government, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to shift the school curriculum towards a sectarian and conservative Islamist worldview. 
Everyone agrees that the pro-Assad propaganda that saturates the textbooks needs to be removed. But the proposed reforms go further: eliminating lessons on evolution and the Big Bang theory, abolishing all negative references to the Ottoman Empire, and removing all mention of the various polytheistic communities in Syria’s history. The changes would also teach students in primary school that Christians and Jews are “those who have lost their way” from Islam. 
The decree was immediately rejected loudly by many, many Syrians. So much so that the government was forced to walk back the changes even before the demonstration today, which meant it was fairly small. But it was an important gathering nonetheless. For one thing, there were lots of media present, giving left-wing activists a rare opportunity to make their voices heard to the Syrian people about their vision of an inclusive and just society for all. 
More important, however, was the chance for progressive activists to meet each other and share ideas and plans for the future. There were two types of people present. Many were veterans of the underground, aged 60 or more, some having served lengthy jail sentences for their brave efforts. 
“I was an oppositionist against the dad [Hafez al-Assad], I was an oppositionist against the son [Bashar], and I’m an oppositionist today”, says a charismatic older man, who eventually outs himself as a member of the Communist Labor Party. I’m introduced to Haseeba Abdulrahman, an independent socialist and feminist writer, who concurs: “We haven’t won anything yet, we need a stronger left, serious political parties to cement our gains and push for more”.
There was a good number of younger radicals who had been active in the early days of the revolution in 2011, and had been waiting desperately for a chance to take to the streets once again. “We were there from the start, and even in the last years there’s been some organising happening underground”, says Dima, a speech pathologist in Damascus. 
I ask them what they think of those who say to be patient, to give the new government time. Tarek, a computer engineer, interjects forcefully: “How can we give them more time? They sat down for two hours this week and produced this terrible reform of the education system. If we leave them alone, what damage will they do tomorrow?! The first responsibility of a citizen is to hold their government to account”. 
Dima jumps back in: “We’re not seeing different methods of operating from the last regime; they change the policy and we’re just expected to just accept it. Where’s the participation, where’s the democratic Syria we’ve been promised?”
These guys are impressive, but they’re in their 30s and early 40s. When I ask about the lack of representation from students and youth, it was put to me that their generation were too young to have experienced the revolutionary era, and so are less politically engaged. Presumably, the winter holidays don’t help either.
In any case, it’s been less than a month since Assad fell, and people are still finding their feet. Still, there’s been an explosion of political meetings and actions. At the same time as the education protest, a group of former prisoners was rallying to demand justice for those who tortured them in prison. Every day, there are meetings and actions organised by socialists, feminists, liberal NGOs, artists, the families of those who were disappeared in Assad’s prison system, and more. 
It’s not all fun and games. At times, the efforts of this emerging left have been widely criticised and condemned. Partly, this can be due to sincere misunderstandings about their goals because many associate the concepts of secularism and socialism with the old regime. But there’s something more cynical at play too—a serious effort by HTS supporters to discredit any opposition as feloul (“remnants” of the old regime). Dima laughs when I point that out: “No way, it’s the exact opposite. People I know who were total sucks for Assad are now some of the biggest supporters of HTS”. 
Halla, a member of Syria’s Revolutionary Left Current (RLC), made a related point when we met for coffee yesterday. “They call us the feloul, but actually, HTS has incorporated a number of figures from the old regime.” This is particularly the case when it comes to economic policy: the new governor of the central bank was the deputy under Assad. 
Other leading figures from Assad’s economic team, known for privatising everything and cutting as many subsidies as possible, are being tapped to play important roles. HTS is doing this to signal its commitment to playing by the rules of the capitalist system. Halla also explains how, across the country, a number of former regime figures and bureaucrats have flipped their loyalties to HTS, including the top leadership of many trade and student unions. 
It’s early days, but some have already begun organising against the new power. Firefighters in Damascus struck after being sacked and replaced with people from Idlib, winning a promise to be re-employed later. The lawyers’ union has come under attack after Damascene lawyers were indefinitely barred from working, and there’s now talk of establishing an independent union. The reopening of schools and universities in a few weeks could also create new possibilities for resistance. 
At the end of the education rally, someone makes an announcement about an organising meeting scheduled for later that day, the second meeting of a new group called the Syrian Democratic Movement. It takes place in a cavernous cafe that I’m told is an historic haunt of the left. We walk past a classic scene of wizened old men playing cards and backgammon, and take our places in the room beyond. One man, who I subsequently learned has spent sixteen years in one of Assad’s dungeons, set the scene beautifully: “Comrades, we are living through a historic moment and we have a golden opportunity to shape our country’s future. Let’s work seriously”.
What follows is both familiar and extraordinary, as 55 people thrash out a program on which to build a progressive front to intervene in Syrian politics. There’s inevitably a bit of debate about secondary and semantic issues. But everyone is dead serious about trying to make this work and establishing the group on solid political foundations. There is broad consensus about emphasising women’s rights, opposing Israel’s occupation of Syrian land and working towards involving more youth in the movement. 
Abdullah, an older man who translated Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch into Arabic, pipes up about the need to add a section about Kurdish rights, given the ongoing attacks against them by Turkish-aligned militias. He gets some support, especially from the RLC, but it doesn’t seem unanimous. There’s a long history of chauvinism towards Kurds in Syria, and evidently there’s still work to be done on that front. 
If there was something missing from the conversation, it was a focus on economic grievances. Halla had warned me previously of the danger of the left being pigeonholed merely as spokespeople for minorities. “Of course we have to defend their rights, but we also need to speak in universal terms, to push economic demands that can appeal to workers from all religious groups”. Given that Human Rights Watch reported that over 90 percent of Syrians lived below the poverty line as of late 2023, I can’t help but agree.
Still, it is a wonderful experience to sit in a room with people experimenting with open democratic organising for the first time. There is something a bit magical about the golden light coming through the windows, the haze produced by the widespread chain-smoking, and the passion of comrades speaking their minds, constructing an important collective platform, out in the open, after 54 years of dictatorship. 
Tomorrow’s schedule of events includes a public meeting by the RLC arguing that removing the head of a regime is by no means enough to guarantee permanent, progressive change. In a totally different part of town, there’s a lecture being held on Syria’s economic future featuring well-known oppositionist intellectuals, and a documentary screening about the life and activism of Syrian dissident Yassin al Haj Saleh. And that’s just what I’ve gotten wind of. Presumably, there’s much more.
There will definitely be huge challenges and many debates ahead, but the left has well and truly entered the battle for Syria’s future.

‘This revolution is just getting started’: an encounter with the left in Damascus

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the second in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
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Standing in the ruins of the Syrian suburb of Harasta is an experience like no other. This was a town of tens of thousands of people, a centre of life and commerce in a region known as Damascus’s breadbasket. It’s now mostly rubble. 
Many of the apartment buildings are totally demolished, collapsed in on themselves under the weight of years of bombardment from Syrian and Russian forces. Those that remain standing intact are mere shells—broken concrete facades, all the windows and doors shot out, the steel rods used to strengthen the concrete exposed everywhere. Every block as far as the eye can see is like this, barely standing buildings and mounds of debris and garbage. 
Harasta feels like a ghost town, with most buildings emptied of all life. Every now and again you see the odd sign of life, a family that has nowhere else to go. Their determination to go on living evident in their attempt to turn these broken buildings into a home, plugging holes with cardboard and bricks. Passing through this area does something to one’s soul; standing on the shattered streets I feel rage, disbelief and tears welling up in turns. 
Yet for those that have been forced to eke out an existence here, the situation is far worse than we can ever imagine. For them, this isn’t simply a landscape of anonymous destruction. It is the place where they grew up, played soccer in the streets, messed about in school. Where they first found love, visited their cousins on weekends, and raised their children. They are living in the ashes of a life and community that has been obliterated and scattered to the four winds. I pity the children growing up in this place, who will think this devastation is somehow normal. 
We park the car and approach some locals to talk. They warn us about an unexploded Russian bomb less than two metres from where we stand. “They flattened this whole area”, one man says bitterly, “but some of their bombs didn’t explode. Later, Russians soldiers came through and instead of removing them, they just put up posters warning us not to step there. But these were our homes, and those of our neighbours”. The hatred etched on this man’s face is overwhelming in its purity. 
In the distance, we see a few old men picking something from the ground, carrying huge sacks on their back. “Firewood”, explains our driver. “They either use it to stay warm themselves or sell it to buy food.” He doesn’t say more, but his words can’t hide the shame of living in a country where men old enough to be grandparents must do such things to survive.
One of my companions points out that this is what Gaza must feel like. The comparison is apt. Indeed, Assad killed at least 500,000 people, more than Israel has managed. These scenes are replicated around the country, usually in working-class and poor areas.
Harasta itself is just one small part of a wider zone of annihilation that stretches for kilometres around the eastern outskirts of Damascus. These were one of the heartlands of the revolution, a place where mass protests and demonstrations flourished, where rank-and-file soldiers, forcibly conscripted according to the rules of the country, decided that they could not fire on their friends and families, and so mutinied to form a branch of the Free Syrian Army. 
It took the government roughly seven years to finally wrest this land from the people who loved and defended it. Some areas were fought over multiple times, with the regime capturing them, only to be driven back again, and so on. Eventually, the government enforced a harsh siege that lasted for almost five years. 
By 2016, around 400,000 people were trapped in the area, starved of food and water by Assad’s armies. When that failed, they decided to use chemical weapons, killing 70 people including many children, and sending hundreds more to hospital. 
Eventually, a deal was reached in 2018, and well over 100,000 people were shuttled up to Idlib in the buses normally used for public transport. (To this day, some Damascenes boycott these buses in solidarity.) It was a terrible defeat, symbolising a moment that marked the nadir of the heroic struggle to free Syria. 
There was no upside to being reincorporated into government-held territory. Reconstruction efforts were banned in the area, a reminder of what happens when you do not accept your position as a slave. Food remained scarce, the infrastructure non-existent. 
In one strip, there are huge holes in the road, large enough to fit a car. A local man, who does not wish to identify himself for fear of retribution, explains that the government wanted to redirect the water supply. When they didn’t find what they were looking for, they just moved on and left these cavernous holes in the street. But there are no lights or electricity here, so cars and bikes kept falling in. They found an old bookshelf and used it to cover the hole. “They didn’t care about us”, he says. “They only cared about themselves. So we had to fix the problems.”
He’s hopeful about the future, but cautious. “The new guys seem to be different, treating people with respect”, he says. “Inshallah.”
It’s now dark and freezing cold, so we decide to head back to Damascus. While others chat among themselves, I’m genuinely unable to participate, moved to silence by the sheer barbarity of the capitalist system and those who defend it. 
Campfires dot the highway, families huddling close together, trying in vain to keep warm on a terrible winter’s night.

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