YESTERDAY it was reported that as many as 1,300 people, including over 800 civilians, were killed in the Syrian cities of Latakia and Tartous in three days by army and militia units associated with the Western-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) regime that took power following the ousting of president Bashar al-Assad in December.
These two cities are mainly inhabited by members of the Alawite branch of Islam and widely portrayed in the Western media as strongholds for Assad supporters.
The Alawites, along with other religious and ethnic minorities in Syria including Christian and Druze, have been deliberately targeted by the regime that seized power in a lightning coup with the support of US imperialism and its allies.
HTS and its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, emerged out of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaida, and before the coup was designated a terrorist organisation by the UN, EU and the UK.
This didn’t stop these same governments from proclaiming their undying support for HTS and applauding the Islamic jihadists for leading a ‘democratic revolution’ in Syria last November.
Since the coup, there have been numerous reports, ignored in the West, of violence, looting and oppression and the seizure of land and properties by ‘security forces’ and army aligned with the HTS and other terrorist groups associated with HTS.
Arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions have been carried out regularly since December with minorities deliberately targeted in so-called ‘security operations’.
The massacre that took place over the weekend was on a scale that couldn’t just be ignored by western media although they went out of their way to play it down as a ‘reprisal’ for an armed attack on HTS soldiers instead of what it really was – a murderous killing spree carried out by thousands of HTS soldiers who rushed to the two cities to kill unarmed men, women and children.
In a speech broadcast late on Sunday, the leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, strongly condemned the deadly violence in Syria and said it was an object lesson for Arab and Muslim nations as well as a looming threat to the perpetrators of such crimes and their patrons.
Houthi said: ‘Takfiris in Syria are serving the interests of Israeli and American enemies by tearing apart Syria’s social fabric. This comes as Americans and Zionists are seeking to portray themselves as the advocates and saviours of Syrian people.’
The Zionist method of portraying themselves as ‘saviours’ has involved a non-stop bombing campaign against Syrian infrastructure along with invading southern Syria.
This is despite Sharaa’s constant pleadings that HTS would never attack Israel.
Of course, the US along with leaders in the EU and UK have all joined up in issuing statements deploring the massacres while Sharaa has promised an ‘inquiry’ and that those responsible would be brought to justice.
This is nonsense.
The imperialist powers knew precisely what carnage they were unleashing in Syria when the Takfiri terrorists – that they created and funded in all the years of war to depose the Assad government – finally succeeded.
It mirrors the carnage imperialism wreaked in Libya after the fall of Gadaffi in 2011 and Saddam Hussein in Iraq after 2003.
Out of all the bloodshed and massacres the US and its allies are intent on only one thing, making profit out of the resources of Syria, while for the Zionists, despite reeling from their inability to defeat Hamas and the Palestinian people, it is an opportunity to make another land grab.
But, as has been shown in Palestine, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East region, resistance to imperialist wars and occupations will not be crushed through terror. The events in Syria are indeed an object lesson not just for the people of the region but for workers and masses of the world.
Workers throughout the world are standing in opposition to imperialist wars to smash up the Middle East and steal its oil wealth, and today that opposition must be turned into action.
The way to put an end to imperialist wars is for the working class to call mass strike action to bring down their own governments and put an end to imperialism itself through the victory of the world socialist revolution.