A POWERFUL car bomb exploded in Damascus on Friday, on the first day of the Syrian cease-fire, killing five people and injuring 32.
Thus was spelt out the truth about the Syrian war. This is that the imperialist powers and their allies Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia who are arming supplying and organising the armed gangs that are seeking to overthrow the Assad regime, are not interested in a cease-fire, peace talks or peace – they remain determined to proceed with their regime change intervention, come what may.
All their propaganda about the plight of Syrian refugees and the numbers of Syrians – men women and children – being killed inside the towns and cities of their own country, are now revealed, in the refusal to allow the cease-fire, to be just an ocean of crocodile tears.
The Syrian military said that it had responded to attacks by insurgents on army positions in line with its announcement on Thursday that it would cease military activity during the four-day holiday but reserved the right to react to ‘rebel’ actions.
It is now clear that this is what has happened.
In fact, heavy fighting has been reported from around the army base at Wadi al-Daif, near the Damascus-Aleppo highway, which armed gangs have been trying to seize from the army for two weeks.
Clashes also erupted at a checkpoint near the Mahlab army barracks in Aleppo, and there was shooting at checkpoints near Tel Kelakh on the Lebanese border.
On Saturday, a car bomb attack was carried out in Syria’s eastern city of Deir al-Zour in front of the Syrian church, causing significant material damage to the church façade.
The ceasefire had absolutely no support from the imperialist powers, the US, UK and France, and their agents in the field, mustered by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Their response has been to step up the arming of the gangs who now have the same kinds of hand held anti-aircraft missiles that the US supplied to its then Al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan in the late 1980s.
Now it is up to the same tricks in Syria, supplying the Al-Qaeda gangs with missiles – that they will turn on the US, sooner or later.
After all, it was only weeks ago that Al-Qaeda elements who were supplied with US weapons by the Saudis and Qataris, cornered the US ambassador to Libya and killed him.
The issue is not that the US has failed to learn anything from these episodes.
It is that the US is continuing to use these Al-Qaeda elements, because its number one enemy is the revolutionary masses of North Africa, Palestine, Syria and Iran, who are the huge barrier to the US holding the oil, gas and other resources of the vast area in its grip.
Their allies in this struggle are the most backward feudal forces in the region, the absolute monarchs who treat democracy as a capital offence, and Al-Qaeda, which wants to restore a Caliphate.
The US and the UK regard the kind of murderous activities that these elements have been engaging in in Libya and Syria as a price worth paying for grabbing all of the resources of the Gulf, North Africa and the Middle East.
It is the Syrian people who have thrown a huge spanner into these works with their refusal to allow the imperialists to do to Assad what they did to Gadaffi.
However the imperialist powers are already preparing to step up their intervention after the US election is out of the way. It was Vladimir Lenin who developed the policy for this situation. He urged the Russian workers that their enemy was at home and that the way to end the First World War was to overthrow the Tsarist autocracy.
US-UK and EU workers must answer the imperialist war drive with their own drive to bring down their imperialist governments and replace them with anti-imperialist workers governments – then all will be well!