THE Hezbollah TV channel yesterday showed a fighter planting a Syrian flag on Al-Qusayr’s clock tower while the Western powers’ surrogate, the Free Syrian Army, admitted that the strategic town had been taken, and that they were in full retreat, and threatening to extend the war to Lebanon.
Syrian state TV said a large number of NATO’s ‘rebels’ had died and many had surrendered.
General Selim Idriss, the NATO-supported commander of the Free Syrian Army, said Hezbollah fighters were ‘invading’ Syria and Lebanon was doing nothing to stop them.
Government control of most of the surrounding countryside had already cut an important ‘rebel’ supply line to Homs and central Syria. The loss of Al-Qusayr itself consolidates that gain and signs the death warrant of the pro-imperialist ‘opposition’.
The Syrian news agency said that the army was now destroying barricades, tunnels, and weapons caches and searching the town for explosives.
The Syrian army command said the victory was ‘a clear message to all those who share in the aggression on Syria … that we will continue our string of victories until we regain every inch of Syrian land.
‘We will not hesitate to crush with an iron fist those who attack us … Their fate is surrender or death,’ it said.
‘We declare the city of Al-Qusayr as a safe city now.’
The outcome of the struggle for the city is a significant defeat for the imperialist powers and their Arab feudalist allies in the Gulf, and the various islamist movements that have put themselves, and tens of thousands of fighters, at the disposal of imperialism.
They are now faced with going to a peace conference in Geneva, convened by the US and Russia, with Assad having the upper hand, something that they are definitely not in favour of, since the already publicly declared script for the conference reads that its solution will be that Assad and the Baathist command stand down, quit politics and the country, in favour of Nato ‘rebels’ and some remnants of the Baath party forming a transitional regime. This is to prepare the way for an open pro-imperialist, pro-Zionist regime in Syria that will completely change the relationship of forces in the region at the expense of the Arab masses especially the Palestinians, for the benefit of imperialism.
This script has now been dumped in the bin by the victors of Al-Qusayr.
The imperialist powers will not hold a peace conference under these conditions, so a decisive effort to change the situation can be expected.
Almost on cue, the imperialist powers with the UK and France at their head, and with a rather less cocksure USA trailing slightly behind them, have announced that the Assad regime has been using poisoned gas and sarin and that air strikes must be launched to destroy all the stocks allegedly held by the Syrian armed forces.
The US has said that it is not sure about this information, but nevertheless it has moved Patriot missiles and F16 fighter planes to Jordan in preparation for establishing a no-fly zone in Syria.
They have been given the go-ahead to do this by the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who said on Tuesday that Russia had not despatched S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria because he was very worried about upsetting the balance of power.
The imperialist powers are organising to take action while the going is good.
The Stalinist bureaucracy is showing as it did over Libya that it values what relationship it has with imperialism higher than it does the defence of the peoples of the Middle East and Asia. In fact, it is incapable of learning the lessons of the Libyan debacle when it allowed the imperialist powers to murder Gadaffi. It is an ingrained appeaser of imperialism.
Now is the time for workers in the UK to show where they stand.
They must demand that the trade unions take strike action to stop any Anglo-French-US attack on Syria by bringing the Cameron-led coalition down.
The essence of the situation is that ‘Our enemy is at home’.
