The question currently being posed in regional and international media is: What system will replace Assad’s dictatorship? However, the primary question is: What will happen to the future of the Syrian people and Rojava?
The rise of extremist Sunni Islamists to power in Syria and Afghanistan, and the silence of the United States and the West toward them, marks a shift in the political situation and the conflicting fronts in the Middle East.
The system of “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” (formerly ISIS) requires little prediction, as it has already imposed the same laws that the Taliban enforced in Idlib. The question is: How can these Islamist forces contribute to implementing the plans for securing markets and the strategic economic and political projects of the bourgeois states currently executing these schemes in Syria and the Middle East through political and military warfare?
The relationship between America and the West with Islamists always changes based on interests and strategies. Initially, America and the West supported these groups during the Cold War, but they became adversaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. On the Iranian side, these groups were used to confront America. Now, with Iran’s weakening presence in Syria, Turkey has replaced it and is using Islamic forces to bolster its influence in the Syrian situation.
Turkey Wants a Deal with the United States:
The deal is that a Sunni Islamic authority in Syria will agree to remain under the U.S. military umbrella if America allows Turkey to curtail the authority of the Rojava Kurdish administration.
The main shifts involve the collapse of the Syrian regime and the disintegration of the “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran, resulting in a comprehensive strategic failure for Iran in the Middle East.
Amid these changes, Israel and America now have more room to strengthen economic, security, and military projects with Saudi Arabia and Arab states.
The collapse of Assad’s regime has merely ended the Ba’athist dictatorship, and the Syrian people are no longer a strategic hostage of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Middle East against Israel. However, the Syrian people and the region have not been spared from the war against other brutal forces—Islamists, Iran, Turkey, the United States, and Israel—who have turned Syria and the region into a hellish battleground for two decades, killing or injuring half a million people and displacing more than 14 million. The fall of Assad is the elimination of a war criminal in a barbaric war where all the other criminals hold power.
How can we expect to establish a safe haven and a dignified life for the Syrian people during this regional war waged by these same powers?
Just as the war in Gaza has shown that the Palestinian issue is no longer within the framework of a previous solution but has become part of a broader regional war, so too the collapse of Assad’s dictatorship is not the end of the Syrian people’s wars and struggles. Syria’s future is now engulfed in a broader regional and global war and military, political, and economic conflicts.
The romanticism of the late 20th century, with its visions of the collapse of dictatorships, the rise of democracy and human rights, the sovereignty of Middle Eastern borders, and the war on terror, has now given way to the economic calculations of capital, corporate and oil markets, redistribution of power and territories, energy resources, and the geopolitical calculations of warring bourgeois states and powers—decided through political and military wars.
Syria’s future is now bound by regional and international military, political, and economic conflicts. The Syrian people and Rojava have become victims of this chaos.
The people of Iraq and Kurdistan have been paying a similar price for over 20 years due to this turmoil. The bourgeois forces in Syria offer nothing but Islamic alternatives, remaining under Turkish influence, or involvement in regional and international wars. Therefore, the Syrian people and Rojava have no choice but to rely on their own strength, as they did in defeating ISIS in Kobani.
The struggle of the Syrian people and Rojava requires breaking free from the chaos of the substitute conflict between Islamist forces and capitalist states, and seizing the opportunity created by Assad’s absence to establish a revolutionary popular alternative.
Aso Kamal
December 21, 2024
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