As ISIS loses ground and influence over eastern Syria, two larger, more lethal terrorist organizations—the U.S. and Russian capitalist ruling classes—are escalating their competition for control of this strategically vital area in the oil-rich Middle East. The inevitable result: more carnage for our working class sisters and brothers in Syria. From April 23 to May 23, more civilians were killed by U.S.-led airstrikes than in any other month so far in the six-year-old war, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (Independent, 5/23).
In the current month alone, in a move to protect Syrian rebel ground troops fighting the Russia, and Iran-backed regime of President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. warplanes have downed two Iranian-made drones and a Syrian SU-22 warplane—“the first time the American military had shot down an enemy plane since an F-16 took down a Soviet-era MIG-29 during the 1999 conflict over Kosovo” (New York Times, 6/19). In response, Russia threatened to target any U.S. or allied planes sighted west of the Euphrates River. A bloody proxy war that has already slaughtered and displaced millions of workers and children may be evolving into more direct—and more lethal—inter-imperialist conflict.
The catastrophic turmoil in today’s Middle East is a direct result of U.S. efforts to dominate the Persian Gulf region since the end of World War II. In 1980, the Carter Doctrine made it official that U.S. imperialism would stop any other “outside” power from challenging U.S. hegemony. In the words of the late mass murderer Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, “such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”  
While the blunt force of U.S. imperialism has guaranteed billions of dollars in profits for Exxon Mobil, it has also enabled regional capitalist powers to mislead masses of workers and make their own grab for bigger pieces of the petroleum pie. In 1979, Iran’s mullahs gained power by deposing the hated shah of Iran, who’d been installed to protect U.S. and British oil interests after the CIA engineered a coup to overthrow the elected president (Guardian, 8/19/13). In the 1980s, before the unreliable Saddam Hussein made the U.S. most-wanted list, he was propped up by U.S. power during the Iran-Iraq War. The CIA incubated al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. ISIS was born out of post-Saddam manipulation of mass anti-U.S. sentiment after the 2003 Iraq invasion.  
Today, as the U.S. bosses find their capacity to shape events eroding, rival ruling classes in Russia and Iran are growing more aggressive. Even traditional U.S. allies—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel—are charting more independent courses to challenge U.S dominance.   
Imperialists Murder With Impunity
U.S. rulers’ fight to control Middle East oil and natural gas has been a disaster for the international working class. According to the Washington, DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility, the death toll from the “War on Terror,” launched after 9/11, may be as high as two million (Middle East Eye, 4/18/16). That number doesn’t include the millions killed in the Gulf War in 1991 and the murderous U.S. sanctions on Iraq that followed. By themselves, President Bill Clinton’s no-fly zones of the 1990s cost the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children—a price that Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, considered “worth it.”
Now, in their quest to wrest control of territory from ISIS, U.S. coalition forces are committing war crimes in urban centers in Syria and neighboring Iraq. According to Human Rights Watch (6/4):
In both Mosul and Raqqa, the US-led forces are using US-made M825-series 155mm artillery projectiles containing 116 felt wedges impregnated with white phosphorus, which ignites and continues to burn when exposed to the air….White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and they are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal.
Refugee Crisis
The spread of fighting has led to a dire humanitarian crisis, with 6.1 million internally displaced people and 4.8 million seeking refuge abroad, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. By mid-2016, according to Human Rights Watch, an estimated 1 million people were living in besieged areas, with no access to life-saving assistance or and humanitarian aid. A recent polio outbreak punctuates the health risks to the population, and to children in particular (NYT, 6/20).
Perpetual War is the New Normal
As the conflict in Syria has grown into the most intense urban combat since World War II, living on the brink of wider war has become the “new normal” for the international working class. Atrocities by U.S. imperialism are now routine, the backdrop of daily life. This is a great danger for our class, especially in the absence of mass anti-imperialist mobilization. In the Vietnam War era, communist-led and communist-influenced movements around the world fought back against these imperialist atrocities. Today, after the reversal of the communist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, workers’ fightback has been muted or misled by fake leftists, racist nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists. This is the challenge for Progressive Labor Party—to pick up the red flag and lead the workers of the world to their only solution—communist revolution.  
Only communist revolution removes the conditions that create imperialist war.  Only a dictatorship of the proletariat enables workers to decide which wars are worth fighting.  In 1917, when the Bolsheviks led workers, soldiers, and peasants to sweep the Russian ruling class from power, an inter-imperialist war (World War I) was transformed into class war. The towering lesson of that event is that imperialist war spells doom for capitalists if working people reject patriotism and embrace proletarian internationalism. Every worker is a foot soldier in class war. When workers from the U.S. to Russia, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and beyond place class consciousness above national identity, the end of war in the Middle East will be in sight.