Yeni Komünizm- A few days ago, jihadist groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise offensive on Aleppo, one of the largest cities in Syria. Meanwhile, the “Syrian National Army” (SMO), another jihadist gang formation supported by Turkey, attacked both Assad’s forces and Kurdish forces led by the YPG through Idlib. The reason that the nature of this attack on Alleppo can be considered as surprise is because that the Assad regime, with the heavy support of Russia and Iran, had consolidated its power in the city almost since 2015, when it expelled the opposition factions from Aleppo. Russian airstrikes were decisive in the process.
- The recent capture of Aleppo by the jihadist forces must be analyzed through the contradictions in the world and in the region, regardless of whether they will be able to retain control of the city or not. As a matter of fact, the three decisive factors for the Assad regime’s military success are the active use of Russian air power, Iran’s Shiite proxy militias, particularly Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards command’s leadership in the conflict. Russian imperialism is advancing more aggressively in the uncertainty created in the Ukraine War, due in particular to the arrival of Trump in office, and its influence on conflicts elsewhere in the world has been weakened by the intensification of the conflict with the Ukrainian forces, which are almost a decoy armed with all NATO’s weapons. Hezbollah forces, on the other hand, are in a weakened position on the Syrian front as a result of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its murderous attacks on Lebanon, expanding the battlefield. The other decisive component of the war: Iran, which has been providing military force via its proxies but most importantly providing strategical military leadership throughout the war. Now majority of its commanders were assasinated by Israel.
- Although this is the objective situation, HTS and its derivative factions are not “rebels” or “opposition” as the Western media portrays them. HTS is an Islamist fundamentalist jihadist organization that broke away from Al-Qaeda in Syria. Western imperialism embraces even the most reactionary forces to the extent that they do not work against its interests and weaken its enemies. However, supporting the Assad regime because it is “secular” in the face of jihadism means supporting one of the most powerful reactionary force in the region until the civil war. This brings us to the decisive contradiction in the region, the contradiction of the two outmodeds. Bob Avakian describes this contradiction, which he analyzes in depth in terms of its dynamics, as follows:
“What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.”
Although it can take different forms in different specificities, the contradiction that is decisive in the Middle East today is two outmodeds, without seeing this contradiction it is not possible to shed light on this dark picture we are experiencing in the Middle East.
- The Islamist-Turkist fascist regime represented by Erdogan is a solid foothold for the jihadist forces operating in the region, including the SNO. The Erdogan regime has repeatedly violated Syria’s sovereignty with military operations under the pretext of “protecting its borders from terrorism” – in fact, it is rabid chauvinism – and has repeatedly violated it with dozens of military observation posts and military personnel in Idlib. The regime has been constantly exacerbating the contradictions in the region, both for its own necessities and for its neo-Ottomanist ideological ambitions of becoming a major regional power, and it has been repeatedly exposed for doing so. It has been revealed by journalists working despite regime repression that the regime has been training jihadists in camps inside Turkey and supplying military equipment from Turkey to fundamentalist jihadist gangs, including Daesh, under the guise of “helping Turkmens in the region”. Therefore, the statements of the regime’s foreign minister Hakan Fidan that “we would not take any action that would trigger a new wave of migration” and “we have no involvement” are an attempt to quickly hide the historical truth that the Erdoğan regime is constantly destabilizing the region.
- To seek an emancipatory vision for the peoples of Syria, the peoples of the Middle East and the masses of the peoples of the world through the “politics of the existing” and choosing sides between the reactionaries accordingly is not revolutionary but defeatist and this does not benefit the masses of the people. We do not have to choose between imperialist reactionaries, regional reactionaries and Islamic fundamentalist forces. It is a vital necessity for all those who are sick and tired of the the endless wars in the region, the bloody showdowns of the reactionary “big shots” of the region, the genocide committed with the support of the US and at the hands of Israel, the millions of displaced people, the endless plunder of humanity’s cultural heritage and the environment, of the jihadist fundamentalists and the relentless bloody interventions of imperialism, and who want a world without them, to urgently start studying the new communism of which Bob Avakian is the architect, and to become part of a real revolutionary movement.
