In the past month the Syrian government forces have recaptured vast areas of the Syrian countryside, routing the murderous ISIS fanatics and liberating thousands of people from cruel oppression, hunger and misery.
Fighting continues into the eastern desert as the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) pushes ahead to lift the ISIS siege on the government-held town of Deir ez-Zor.
Elsewhere in the country, government forces face off with shrinking pockets of “rebel” groups, including many backed by US imperialism and the remnants of Al Quaeda and Jabhat Fateh al Sham (previously known as the head-chopping jihadist al Nusra Front) When not sniping at government positions, any number of these groups form and re-form alliances and factions and shoot at one another!
No wonder then that the government has been able to negotiate a ‘reconciliation’ process that allows some ‘rebel’ fighters to leave with their families and small arms for other ‘rebel-held’ parts of the country, while the remainder are disbanded or can join the SAA.
Illegal foreign intervention
In the north, an alliance of mainly Syrian Kurdish forces has rolled back the ISIS fanatics and has now surrounded their stronghold of Raqqua where fierce street by street fighting continues. While the Kurdish forces have been receiving material support from US imperialism, as time goes on more and more direct US intervention is building up. The US clearly wants to have a presence in the future of Syria and has established a number of forward bases in the North and East of the country, plus significant air power.
Between the Kurdish forces and the Assad government there seems to be a truce of sorts, with only occasional flare-ups.
The US purports to be targeting ISIS terrorists with its illegal airstrikes, but it is really wrestling with Assad government forces for control of key regions inside Syria, and between Syria and its neighbours. It has brazenly attacked and killed Syrian government forces as it did, for example, on 18 May. This was a deliberate attempt to deny Syrian government troops access to the Iraqi border in the south-east of Syria through which Iranian supplies are passed. As Robert Fisk noted the next day in The Independent, “Cutting Syria off from Iraq – and thus from Iran – appears to be a far more immediate operational aim of US forces in Syria than the elimination of the Sunni “Caliphate” cult that Washington claims to be its principal enemy in the Middle East”.
More recently, a US claim that it had evidence that Syrian troops were planning to use sarin gas came to nothing. It clearly lacked credibility even though it was used to threaten Syria with a second cruise missile attack.
Turkey has also moved to have a stake in the post-ISIS ‘re-structuring’ of Syria, by driving a wedge between the eastern and western Kurdish areas, and aimed at preventing any movement towards the establishment of a Kurdish province within Syria or indeed a separate Kurdish state. This is consistent with the Erdogan government’s vicious treatment of the Kurdish people and its persecution of the Kurdish Workers’ Party.
Both the US and Turkish intervention are, of course, illegal: never invited by the legal Assad government and never authorised or endorsed by the United Nations. In contrast, the Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies of the Assad government are there by invitation, even if they have their own agendas to block and frustrate US imperialist hegemony in the region.
Golan Heights
Scarcely mentioned in all of this is the role of key US ally Israel, which continues its illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan territory. For all their fundamentalist jihadist rhetoric, ISIS has not attacked Israel! Nor have the ‘patriotic rebel’ forces tried to liberate the Golan, but have used it as a secure haven for the treatment of their wounded. Israel, for its part, regularly bombs Syrian government positions in ‘retribution’ for stray mortars that land in the occupied Golan. You have to wonder, just who launches these mortars, and whether Israel needs an excuse to bomb Syria, anyway?
Question we can already answer
As the curtain falls on the ISIS ‘Caliphate’ will US imperialism just go home and let the Syrians work out their own future, or will they beef up their own enclaves to attack the Syrian government?
Will the Kurds still have the support of US imperialism when they try to recover the land occupied by Turkey?
The Australian air force and some troops are presently, at least officially, confined to Iraq under the command of US imperialism. Will Australia be dragged into yet another war zone as the loyal deputy sheriff?
Victory to the courageous Syrian Arab Army!
Victory to the Kurdish people!
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