THE United States might have lost control over the situation in Syria and cannot fulfill their pledge to separate the opposition from the terrorists, Russian Ambassador to UN Vitaly Churkin stated on Sunday. This must be the understatement of the year.
Churkin spoke after US planes bombed Syrian troops fighting IS in north east Syria, killing 62 of them. This was at the same time as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was threatening US special forces who had been fighting alongside the Turkish army against the Kurds that they would all be killed if they did not leave the area at once.
In a video that is being shown currently, fighters from the FSA chant that US forces are ‘pigs,’ ‘crusaders’ and ‘infidels’. ‘Dogs, agents of America,’ one man can be heard to say in Arabic, while others chant: ‘They are crusaders and infidels, down with America, get out you pigs,’ and: ‘They are coming to Syria to occupy it.’ These are the allies that the US has spent billions on!
The FSA is now assisting the Turkish army in its fight to drive the Kurds over the Euphrates River. The Kurds had been fighting with the support of these same US Special Forces, plus US aircraft to drive IS out of Syria. Then Turkey entered the war to smash the Kurds, their main enemy in the region. The US forces after some waffling changed sides to ally themselves with Erdogan, after he made noises about Turkey leaving NATO and seeking out Russia to be a friend.
The US forces have now been chased out with murder threats ringing in their ears.
What we have here is the complete disintegration of US policy and the forces that were organised by the UK-US in the wake of their ‘great victory’ in Libya to carry out the same operation in Syria.
These disintegrated when they collided with the rock of the masses of the Syrian people, who emulated the defenders of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow with their refusal to be defeated. The US and UK imperialists have lost the war, and they have been hanging on to see if Putin and the Stalinist bureaucracy could negotiate the removal of Assad, so that they could snatch an element of victory from their historic defeat.
The combativity of the Syrian masses, and their refusal to bend the knee means that the Syrian people will not allow any force, not even Russia to tell them who should lead the government of their country. The ceasefire was seen by the US and UK as the means of turning a great defeat into a limited victory by preserving the Syrian opposition while talks were set up to work out a transitional Syrian government, with a timetable for the retirement of Assad.
However, as the Russian leadership has observed, the US was incapable of dividing the Islamists into moderates and terrorists. Senior IS leaders have been killed fighting in Aleppo so where the moderates end and the IS and Nusra front terrorists begin, and whether there is this division at all cannot be firmly established. Thus the US quickly found out that the moderates opposed the ceasefire as much as did Al Nusra.
So far they have broken the ceasefire 199 times! This is according to the Russian authorities who have been overseeing the peace process. No aid supplies have been able to make it into Aleppo. The days after the declaration of the ceasefire have proven that the US Emperor has no clothes, and could not convince those that it had armed to the teeth and stuffed with billions of dollars to cease fire.
The time has now arrived for decisive action by the working people of the world to support gallant Syria and to enforce the withdrawal of all of the imperialist forces. Trade unions in the US, the UK and the EU must demand that all imperialist forces are withdrawn from Syria and that the Syrian people are allowed to settle their own affairs.
The UK trade unions must tell the UK government that all UK forces must be withdrawn from Syria and Jordan, and that it must stop arming the Saudi and Bahraini feudal oligarchs. The trade unions must organise a national campaign of action to secure these ends, to prepare the way for the establishment of the Palestinian state and clear the way for a socialist federation of Middle Eastern states to use the great wealth of the region for the benefit of its people, and put an end to imperialism.
