With the rupture among rebels against President Bashar Assad, Syria is now engulfed in a three-way civil war. All three forces represent different imperialist camps. All three offer workers nothing but capitalist terror.
Mass butcher Bashar Assad and his Syrian Army are fronting for Russian and Chinese imperialism, along with Iran’s pursuit of regional dominance. The opposition, meanwhile, is a dysfunctional umbrella group of mostly secular nationalists and Islamists. Neither faction has the interests of Syria’s working class at heart. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) stands for the interests of U.S. imperialism, while the Islamists represent regional capitalists and transnational jihadists, who in turn are funded by rival, non-royal segments of the Saudi ruling class. After a jihadist recently killed an FSA commander, the two camps fell out. In cities like Aleppo, Assad’s military is shooting at the FSA while they are shooting at the Islamists.
These sharpening contradictions could help the U.S. ruling class inject itself more directly into the conflict. With the FSA essentially declaring war on the Islamists, Barack Obama can argue that advanced weapons from the U.S. won’t fall into the hands of jihadist terrorists. (The reality on the ground, however, is that rebel brigades swap and sell weapons among themselves, regardless of ideological affinity.) Assad, meanwhile, is seizing the opportunity to reclaim as much territory as possible from the FSA. He is struggling to reclaim the urban production centers while mostly abandoning the undeveloped countryside to the rebels.
Whoever wins will institute fascism of one stripe or another. Assad will butcher the working class in the interests of his imperialist patrons. The FSA will most likely follow the U.S.-led destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan as a blueprint for slaughtering the working class. The transnational jihadists from Pakistan and other countries will keep fighting whatever ruling class gains state power while murdering workers in line with their religious fanaticism.
As the civil war intensifies in Syria, we must keep in mind that there is no possible victory for the working class under any capitalist-backed forces now fighting for state power. Only a communist revolution led by the Progressive Labor Party can win for the working class, in Syria and throughout the world.