‘Sectarianism Is the Enemy of National Liberation’: An Interview With Patrick Higgins on Syria, Imperialism and the Palestinian Cause
In this interview, Louis Allday speaks to writer and researcher Patrick Higgins about Syria’s long-standing and complicated relationship with the Palestinian cause, its opposition to Zionism, relationship with imperialism and role in the world system as a whole, and how, notably since 2011, propaganda has seriously distorted public understanding of the country and events within it. Also discussed is what the implications of the overthrow of the country’s government in December 2024 – in effect the culmination of over a decade of US-led aggression and subversion against it – are likely to be, and why the fate of Syria is so important, not only for its own people but for the wider region and beyond.
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Louis Allday: Thank you for agreeing to do this, Patrick. We discussed it a few months ago but didn’t get round to it then, so I am very happy we’ve eventually made it happen. I’d already felt that it was an important moment to talk with honesty and clarity about Syria in relation to Zionism, US imperialism and the Palestinian cause, and that has of course only taken on more pertinence since the overthrow of the Syrian government in December 2024 and all that has already transpired since then. Given your important work on this topic and consistently principled stance over many years, I genuinely think that there are few people better placed to do that than you, so thank you very much for your time.
Patrick Higgins: Thank you for taking the time to discuss this, Louis, as you’ve been an important touchstone for me on the topic of Syria over many years: somebody with whom I’ve shared notes, essay drafts, and research sources for more than a decade in order to improve my own understanding and analysis. I know you agree with me that the fate of Syria is unquantifiably important: in its own right, for the Palestinian cause, and indeed for the entirety of the world-system.
LA: Absolutely and as a result of that, I know you, like me and many others we know, have felt a sense of disorientation and – I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say – angst at these events, notably Israel’s virtually immediate destruction of Syria’s defence capacity and its seizure of even more Syrian territory, beyond the Golan Heights, as soon as the government fell. Of course, contrary to the cheap smears that we’ve faced over the last decade, we feel this way not because we were, or remain, invested specifically in Bashar al-Assad as an individual or as a leader. Our concern, and the reason why, despite the opprobrium we’ve often faced for doing so, we’ve chosen to speak out against the dominant imperialist narrative for so long, is of course about something much greater than that. I was wondering if you’d like to talk about what that is from your perspective, give your own reaction to recent developments and perhaps place the end of the Syrian Arab Republic in the broader historical context of the country and the region?
PH: The fall of the Syrian Arab Republic pushes the entirety of the Arab liberation struggle against the US-led imperialist world-system into unchartered territory. Since the onset of Western colonialism, the peoples of West Asia have waged various forms of political and military struggle for substantive independence, sovereignty, and development. The British and French empires imposed partition on the region, which separated populations by borders and checkpoints; forced competition among states for natural resources; and led to trade anarchy with each state operating under distinct customs markets. Economic anarchy corresponded with military disorganisation, weakening the capacity of West Asian countries to resist stronger outside military powers. And even within each of those newly partitioned countries, colonial state building projects based on sectarianism in countries like Lebanon and Syria often promoted distrust among populations along ethnic and religious lines. As we are witnessing unfold in Syria now, interminable internecine conflict is highly useful to imperialist extraction, which keeps the West Asian majority poor, living in appalling conditions.
Since 1945, the end of the Second World War, the primary, though not sole, imperialist power responsible not only for maintaining these conditions, but deepening them – in a de facto sense, we are witnessing partitions within partitions in Syria and Iraq – has been the United States of America. For reasons of contiguous geography, language, history, and culture, cutting across the colonial partition lines, the Arab national movement historically assumed the helm of organised resistance against US imperialism in West Asia and North Africa, although there have been other iterations of organised resistance, such as the Kurdish national movement against NATO Turkey, for example. Within the broader Arab liberation movement, Palestine, having been conquered in the late 1940s by the US-supported Zionist settler-colonial movement, has served as the central point of consensus, unifying populations from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. And of course, with United States imperialism being the principal oppressor of the broader global South, the fate of the Arab and Palestinian liberation movements are of paramount interest to the majority of the world’s peoples. So, with that being a general outline of the situation at hand, the key questions we must ask in regards to Syria are: what role has Syria played in the Arab and Palestinian liberation struggles against US-led imperialism? And how essential has Syria’s government and state systems been to that role?
Since it achieved independence in 1946, Syria has served as a relatively stable, developed, progressive, and independent country–a base of operations–within the geographic heart of the West Asian Arab region. It was the first Arab nation to turn to republicanism, to do decisively away with monarchism. Now, for the first time since the United States became the world’s largest imperialist power at the end of World War Two, the forces of Arab liberation must find a way to chart a path forward with a relatively unstable, regressive, de-developed Syria with no sovereignty to speak of – a Syria effectively occupied by and carved up among imperialist and sub-imperialists powers, principally the United States, Israel, and Turkey. In the postwar Arab and Palestinian liberation movements, there simply is no precedent to work from: every strategy hatched in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries proceeded on the basis of Syrian sovereignty, more or less taking it for granted. Any map tells you what you need to know about the importance of Syria and its territorial unity. Although it is not as resource-rich as, say, Gulf Arab countries, it is at the center of the Arab region, the great connector of its activities, and its cultural and historical heart. As the Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt once remarked, for regional political players, there is no way around Syria – you have to deal with it one way or another. Regardless of who governs Syria, its importance remains, for better or worse.
That being said, the operative phrase you used regarding its fallen government is the “Syrian Arab Republic,” a product of successive waves of Syrian revolutions which as a state system extended beyond Bashar al-Assad and his inner circle. There is an important analysis to be undertaken regarding the class Assad represented and its own role in the weakening of Syria’s defenses against imperialism. But at the very least, even in compromised form, the Syrian Arab Republic allowed for the ideological reproduction of three important principles that I believe to be valuable to Arab and Palestinian liberation against US-led imperialism, which the new rulers in Damascus clearly oppose. The first is Pan Arabism, which embraces Syria’s responsibility to the Arab region in general and Palestine in particular. The second is secularism, which has allowed Syria to draw on the skills and talents of its people without restrictions on religious sect or gender. And the third is socialism, which had enabled Syria, comparatively speaking, to keep its national assets out of foreign hands. I believe socialism is essential to safeguarding national sovereignty; and that national sovereignty is in turn essential to resisting and defeating imperialism.
LA: As you illustrate so skilfully in your article, “Gunning for Damascus: The US War on the Syrian Arab Republic”, Syria’s support for the Palestinian cause was one of the primary reasons for the US’ long-standing antagonism towards it and decision to launch a covert war against its government in 2011. Now of course, the relationship between Syria and the Palestinian liberation movement has not been uniform or straight forward, and it has not been without dark moments like Syria’s role in the Lebanese Civil War in 1975-76. However, unlike what some people disingenuously portray, those events are not illustrative of the nature of that relationship overall and Syria has in fact at various times played a distinct and crucial role in supporting the Palestinian cause. I was struck recently watching a clip of the PFLP leader George Habash, who had not been uncritical of Syria, speaking at the Palestinian National Assembly in Algiers in 1983, in which he argued the strength of the Palestinian revolution was tied directly to the strength of Syria and called for reinforcing and deepening ties with it. Much has changed in the 40 years since then, but many dynamics remain the same, so I was wondering if you could talk a little about the history of Syrian-Palestinian relations, contextualise Habash’s remarks and explain what Syria offered the cause that others did not or could not?
PH: While I’d argue that the Syrian Arab Republic escalated both the forms and scale of Syrian support for Palestine, Syria’s oftentimes unique role among Arab countries in the Palestinian liberation struggle preceded the rise of the SAR and the Ba’ath Party. Of course, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, whose revolt against the British mandate and Zionist settler authorities in Palestine opened the door to the 1936 Palestine Intifada, hailed from Jableh on the coast of Syria. In 1947, under the direction of Syria’s elected president Shukri al-Quwaitli, Damascus hosted the Arab Liberation Army led by the Lebanese-born Arab nationalist Fawzi al-Quwaqji, who gathered volunteer fighters from around the Arab world to enter Palestine in an attempt to stop the Nakba. What exactly distinguished Syria among Arab countries on the Palestinian issue and thus allowed it the freedom of maneuverability to assume such policies? There are several factors at play, but I believe an important early one was its anti-monarchism, its republicanism. The kings of the region, including King Faisal who assumed the short-lived throne of Syria in 1920, never had strong bases of popular support and relied overwhelmingly on the cash stipends of the imperialist powers. In Syria, Faisal found himself navigating proposals such as the partition of Lebanon and the Zionist takeover of Palestine while pitted against the pressures of the British and French on the one hand, and the nascent Syrian Congress on the other; eventually, this attempt to serve two masters became untenable, and Syrians tossed the king aside to bid farewell to monarchism forever.
Syrian republicanism developed in tandem with anti-colonialism through several waves of popular struggle incorporating diverse segments of the population geographically and culturally, such as the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, a guerrilla uprising against the French Mandate headquartered in Jabal al-Druze, and the waves of revolt through the 1940s against the French authorities in both their Vichy and de Gaullist iterations. But through these years of struggle, the unaddressed class character of the hitherto existing Syrian congresses – primarily consisting of land owners and old notables – often placed restrictions on Syria’s freedom of maneuver in relation to Palestine. The often competitive and sometimes cooperative rise of parties such as the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, the Syrian Communist Party, and even the Syrian Social Nationalist Party reshaped the relationship of Syria’s popular classes – peasants, workers, intellectuals, and unemployed – with the state by delivering them a national development project. National institutions sponsored by state power opened up new possibilities for exporting military and social support to other national liberation struggles – not only in Palestine, but also Algeria at the time – that transcended the volunteer-based guerrilla bands of yore. Akram Hourani, founder of the Arab Socialist Party, which eventually merged with the Ba’ath Party, was deeply impacted witnessing the desperate conditions of the peasants in his native Hama and consequently theorised that “any new constitution will be sterile if it does not solve the land problem.” He blamed the Nakba on the treachery of the Palestinian land owners who sold land to the Zionists, and he believed the Syrian land barons would eagerly do the same. This type of class analysis moved the Syrian position on Palestine from one of humanitarian empathy and a feeling of kinship to an existential imperative for the national security of Syria.
Now, the 1983 quote you reference from PFLP Secretary-General George Habash comes from a specific context, a historical moment occurring against a backdrop of Habash’s own extensive personal experiences with and in Syria. In the 1950s, Habash had organised in Jordan and Lebanon for the Nasserist aim of the United Arab Republic, which became a tenuous reality between 1958 and 1961 when Egypt merged with Syria. That project failed quickly, but it did transform Syria in a few ways. It occasioned the introduction of agrarian reform, which deepened the involvement of the popular classes in the state. Two Ba’athist coups expanded those reforms, one involving the “early Ba’athists” in 1963 and another in 1966 involving a radicalised military wing, the “National Command,” launched against the founding circle of the party. The National Command were Marxist-Leninists in all but name and took very seriously the linkage between the Palestine question for the region and the class question for Syria. They instituted a number of initiatives to support and guide and even command the Palestinian feda’yin; the PFLP was thus formed in 1967 out of groups based principally in Syria. I think this period gave Habash some insight into the potentialities opened up when resources – land on which to train, arms with which to fight, finances with which to commission research – are made accessible by a state power with overlapping interests.
The PFLP’s 1969 document “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine” elaborated the theoretical basis for this orientation in the section titled “Forces of the Revolution on the Arab Level.” Listed there are the “national regimes,” in Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, South Yemen, and Syria, all of which were “antagonistic to imperialism, Zionism, Israel and Arab reaction represented by feudalism and capitalism” and inaugurated a shift towards socialism. They were led, however, by petit-bourgeois nationalists whose class perspective did not transcend the institution that enabled their upward mobility out of the peasantry, namely the military. They did not adapt their theoretical program accordingly and remained fixated on the orthodox war strategies of a traditional state military. The PFLP predicted that the relationship of the revolutionary forces to these states would be one of “alliance and conflict at the same time: alliance because they are antagonistic to Israel, and conflict over their strategy in the struggle.”
In other words, overlapping interests are not equivalent interests. Habash understood as much through his personal experience: even before Hafez al-Assad rolled back Syrian commitments to Palestine following the “Corrective Movement” of 1970, Habash was imprisoned in Syria in 1968 and relations between the Syrian authorities and the early PFLP were often quite tense. After the ascent of Assad, the relationship between authorities and the Palestinian national movement grew more strained. Syria’s entry into Lebanon in 1976 that you mentioned led to long-term deep animosity between the Syrian authorities and Fateh, on whose movements Assad placed strict restriction in areas under his control, a tension that exacerbated existing splits within Fateh itself. This distrust of the Palestinian forces never abated, and the Syrian authorities continued to imprison Palestinians from the factions, even as they continued to provide training grounds, materiel, and connections to those very same factions. Habash understood all of this, but he wasn’t interested foremost in taking revenge at his former jailors or over-moralising his organisation’s assessment of Syria as a “petit-bourgeois military” government. This was a scientific designation intended to guide his party’s path to Palestinian revolution. To return to 1983, recall the PLO was leaving Lebanon; a group within Fateh, the largest party within the PLO, was engaging in secret talks towards a settlement. A serious strategic disagreement emerged around what would eventually culminate in the Oslo Agreement. The PFLP took a rejectionist position, and in order to turn this position from a mere sentiment into an actionable strategy with a depth of support, priorities had to be made. The fact remained that the Syrian government had an overlap of interests with the Palestinian movement in its continued conflict with Israel–in Lebanon and in the Golan, which Israel occupied–that the “Arab reactionary regimes,” that is, the monarchies, did not.
In 1991 and 2003, the PFLP took the same policy (that is, offering support for national defense efforts against US invaders) in regards to the Iraqi Ba’athist government, with which they had deep disagreements; the party considered any potential fall of either Iraq or Syria to US imperialism to be a disastrous prospect for the cause of Arab national liberation. When Habash was asked late in life, during the most violent period of sectarian warfare in post-2003 Iraq, whether an American intervention in Syria could have the same sectarianising effects as in Iraq, he replied: “I hope that this will not be repeated in any Arab country. But it is very likely, because it is the occupier himself who basically feeds the sectarian trend.”
LA: Funnily enough, Habash later recalled that period of imprisonment in Syria as having been crucial for his political development, because when he was in solitary confinement for several months, he read Marx, Engels and Lenin the whole time.
But to return to the present era, in recent years, there’s been an enormous amount of effort exerted and propaganda produced in order to isolate Syria from the anti-war movement generally and the Palestine solidarity movement specifically, misrepresent what has happened in the country since 2011, and obscure the nature of its role regionally under Bashar al-Assad. In tandem with that campaign there’s also been a sustained effort to shame, discredit and isolate anyone who has pushed back against this propagandistic narrative. Therefore, although I was not surprised by it, I have nevertheless been saddened and disappointed by the inability of so many supporters of the Palestinian cause to stop and consider what the implications of the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government are actually going to be, primarily for Syria itself, but also for Palestine, Lebanon and all those in the region who resist Zionist-imperialist designs against it. Instead, we have seen outright celebration or ‘cautious optimism’ as though Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani are somehow unknown entities who might ‘surprise’ us and – of course – the predictable accusations of ‘Assadist’ etc used against those who have expressed sadness or fear about the future of Syria and the potential consequences of its fall regionally.
What do you make of the general reaction to these events and the at times profound disconnect between large swathes of the Palestine solidarity movement and those forces, such as Syria, that actually materially supported the cause?
PH: In your question, you put forth three general issues regarding the response of segments of the Palestine solidarity movement; I’ll expand on those points a bit. The first issue you mentioned exists at the level of knowledge production, analysis, ideology, propaganda, etc. The Palestine solidarity movement in the Global North is for a variety of reasons not in a position to contribute materially to the military capabilities of the national liberation forces in West Asia. They are, at the time being, only capable of obstructing the maneuvers of the imperialist states under which they reside. For that reason, consciousness-raising and agitation are of utmost importance. By offering celebratory gestures at the overthrow of the Syrian government, solidarity organisations help to shape a consciousness either ignorant of or outright enthusiastic about the long-term efforts of imperialist states to destroy the sovereignty of a Global South country, in turn weakening the sovereignty of other countries in the Global South and hampering the ability of those forces that are capable of providing material support to do just that. The objective result is a solidarity movement at risk of serving as a force multiplier for imperialism’s war objectives.
The second issue you mention is the “wait-and-see” attitude towards Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as if their regional and global orientation were a question mark – as if we didn’t have years of evidence from which to draw based on their occupation of Idlib. Their materiel and mercenary personnel come from, or through, Turkey, a NATO base area and one of the major launch points for the covert war against the Syrian Arab Republic beginning in 2011 (the other launch point having been Jordan). Turkey’s sordid role in Syria goes back quite a ways – limiting ourselves to the 20th century and afterwards, their seizure of Iskanderun in 1939 was a prelude to their HTS-fronted capture of Damascus in December, and they’ve fueled their covert war in Syria with an ideological injection of rank bigotry against Armenians, Kurds, ‘Alawis, Christians, and so on. The takfiri political current that lends these otherwise mercenary Turkish-backed outfits some semblance of coherence does not hold the liberation of Palestine as an urgent priority, despite their occasional rhetorical asides; they philosophically oppose the very concept of national liberation. They prioritise the creation of an anti-Iranian bulwark over any substantive form of anti-Zionism.
I noticed, by the way, that some supporters of the war on Syria claimed that it is a fear of HTS which explains why the Zionist entity launched an air blitz attack on Syrian military installations and research centers after the fall of the SAR. To that I offer two retorts. First, the repositories of military knowledge Israel destroyed were perhaps more devastating a blow than the destruction of the weapons systems themselves, because the knowledge accumulated therein was collected through decades of the Syrian Arab Republic’s encounters in the field against Israel, both directly and by proxy. Second, the reason Israel moved so quickly to destroy Syria’s military infrastructure comprehensively is because they knew they had the opportunity to do so. Israel’s air force, while dominant in the region, is actually quite risk averse; its “Qualitative Military Edge” doctrine aims to project shock-and-awe on the region’s peoples. In fact, one reason Israel’s response to the Al Aqsa Flood operation was genocidal was its strategic need to restore the perception of Zionist military might and omnipotence after major weaknesses were exposed. Before the SAR was overthrown, Israel’s attacks on resistance areas and infrastructure in Syria, while cumulatively numerous since 2011, were always limited and accompanied by rapid retreats. Under the SAR, air defense systems were still guarding Syrian sovereignty, even amid imperialism’s attritional erosion of the state.
The third issue to which you bring attention is the “false regionalism,” to use a phrase of the DFLP, exhibited by such celebratory statements, by which I mean the tendency to act and talk as if Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria somehow operate within their own self-contained universes. Such “coincidence theory,” to borrow a phrase from Michael Parenti, does not suffice. Let’s review the sequence of events. In November of 2024, despite the heavy, grave losses Hezbollah absorbed alongside the popular cradle of South Lebanon, the Zionist entity’s operations in Lebanon were confronting the specter of failure, wherein they had inflicted whatever damage they could using their superior air power, but still proved incapable of destroying all of Hezbollah’s arsenal or routing Hezbollah north of the Litani River. The IDF therefore launched a land invasion that ended up going nowhere amid Hezbollah infantry’s relentless ambushes. On November 26, Amos Hochstein, US envoy to Lebanon (born to Israeli parents in Jerusalem, by the way), brokered a ceasefire arrangement around the terms of UN Resolution 1701. The very next day, on November 27, HTS and the Syrian National Army launched a blitzkrieg attack against the Syrian government. On December 8, the HTS took Homs, closing the last publicly known land bridge for weapons transport from Iraq, through Syria, to South Lebanon. By nightfall, they overthrew the government in Damascus. That same day, Israel launched its offensive to create a “buffer zone” which included a northward advance past Qatana, besieging major border areas between Syria and South Lebanon. Clearly, the US coordinated the Lebanon “ceasefire” deal in conjunction with plans for the offensive on Syria as a way to compensate for Israel’s loss in Lebanon. Many observers understood as much, but many public organisational statements excluded mention of these obvious connections, thus burying the headline about the strategic advance the US and Israel made against resistance regionally. I recommend people read Ghassan Kanafani’s article from 1964 titled “Yemen and Iraq: One Story or Two?” In this piece, Kanafani argued that seemingly disparate events unfolding in Yemen and Iraq were actually intimately connected; and that the region could only be analysed holistically. As he wrote: “it is unacceptable to attribute such things to coincidences when a coherent analytical line is at hand.”
LA: If I recall correctly, it was around ten years ago that you and I first became friendly as we were both writing and talking about Syria at a time when the propaganda around it in the media, academia and beyond was unbelievably intense, maybe even worse than now. You were encouraging and supportive when I faced a lot of bad faith criticism and often ad hominem attacks after I wrote an article about the way in which the imperialist narrative was enforced through a number of tactics including intimidation and bullying.
As I noted at the time, some of the most egregious behaviour and despicable rhetoric and analysis was coming from people ostensibly on ‘the left’ like Robin Yassin-Kassab and Gilbert Achcar to name just two. It infuriates me that those very same individuals are still being given platforms and many of the lies they propagate remain largely accepted. Looking back over the last decade of misinformation, what do you see as some of the most damaging myths that figures like them have spread?
PH: The most damaging claims that these obfuscators advanced pertained to the empirical record. They sowed confusion by laying assault to reality. They did so specifically by claiming the United States and Israel were not interested in attacking the Syrian government headquartered in Damascus. Sometimes these commentators asserted that the main role of the US early on was merely to limit or prevent the Gulf states from delivering arms to opposition militias. The debates about Al Assad’s or the Syrian Arab Republic’s legacies are quite distinct from the issue of what exactly the United States, Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf States were doing in Syria, and that is the point on which the most blatant lies were told. Even on the purely theoretical level, the explanations offered made little sense. We were told that the US and Israel supported Assad because they valued stability on the Golan front. But what about Syria’s essential role in supporting Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance factions–did the Second Intifada and the July 2006 War, neither of which would have been possible without Syria, bring Israel “stability”? And since when is “stability” something that the US prizes at all costs – how was it possible to make such a claim after the wars on Iraq and Libya and Yemen? No, the US prizes stability on its own terms, but where the terms aren’t favorable, it destabilises, and destabilisation precedes de-development, which, as Ali Kadri and others have persuasively argued, is becoming an increasingly essential form of accumulation fueling US capital. Whereas Samir Amin theorised about accumulation by dependent development, wherein Third World laborers work themselves to death producing luxury goods for First World consumer markets, Kadri advances the idea that the global class relation between core and periphery increasingly takes the form of waste production, the preeminent example of which is wars of depopulation. More concretely, where modern police states fail to crack down on Third World unions and thus keep labour costs down, war becomes the primary means by which imperialism disorients, scatters, and destroys labour, both materially and ideologically. It is impossible for a labourer to organise against their exploitation if they are constantly remade as a refugee, or worse, dead.
These claims about the US and Israel’s intention in Syria were only possible because their war’s initial phases were covert. I believe such statements receded in frequency and volume in tandem with the expansion of the US’s open occupation of Syria. Eventually, Trump’s ambassador, James Jeffrey, openly stated that the point of the occupation was to hold Syria’s oil reserves hostage to blackmail the leadership into severing ties with the Axis of Resistance. The fact that the Yassin-Kassabs and Achcars succeeded to a degree in sowing confusion tells us that we need more rigorous anti-imperialist researchers on the subject of deep politics. There was a generational gap at play in the early 2010s, wherein younger activists and organisers were not well enough aware of the experiences and lessons of the US’s covert wars in Central America in the 1980s; we find that generational continuity and the accumulation of lessons for the future, what many Palestinians refer to as “tarakum,” is very important.
If the basic empirical information had not been so muddied, some debates around Syria might have looked very different, which might have then produced very different imperatives and actions among organisers. For instance, opponents of the war on Syria were often derided for exhibiting an “anti-imperialism of fools” that denied the agency of the Syrian people. Which is likelier to deny such agency in point of fact: the rhetoric of Western anti-imperialists or the guns of the Central Intelligence Agency? Actually, an honest summary of concrete US and Zionist actions and intentions in Syria – accounting for investments, weapons flows, and personnel – might have opened the opportunity for more honest assessments of the agency of various actors, which also might have compelled people to be clear about their political allegiances. Everybody should read William Van Wagenan’s work on the early phases of the war starting in 2011, the best documentary record of evidence I have come across on the logistics of Operation Timber Sycamore. If you combine those essays with a reading of my article “The War on Syria” in Jacobin from 2015, which details a bit of the history of sectarian takfiri movements within Syria itself, a phenomenon dating back to the early resentments fueled among landowners and merchants by the very founding of the Syrian Arab Republic, it becomes undeniable that global mercenary networks linked up with long-gestating sectarian groupings inside Syria under the aegis of various intelligence agencies that gave guns, money, and direction. We are speaking here of forms of counterrevolutionary organisation, and it is organisation, not kind gestures or sentiments, that ultimately enables agency. You can’t just moralise imperial or reactionary agency away by calling anti-imperialists mean or callous for having the clarity and honesty to bring those realities up.
There were a number of other specious claims forwarded that I felt my own research simply did not bear out, and of which I’ve written refutations. To address one more, I was not persuaded by histories that dated the dawn of “dictatorship” in Syria to the beginning of the socialist wave in the 1950s and 60s, whether it was in 1958, or 1963, or 1966. Pre-socialist Syria, like the pre-socialist world at large, was beset by the brute dictatorship of land barons over peasants, and of men over women, forms of exploitation elided with ease by those who venerate the era of notables or the liberal Nahda. This is not to say that Pan Arab socialism extirpated class alienation, neglect, and oppression entirely from Syria, and actually those things returned to the countryside – at one time the base of support for the Syrian Ba’ath Party – in increasingly devastating ways in the 1990s and afterwards. But I must say, the resurrection of a pre-socialist flag, originally flown at a time when ‘Alawis lived disproportionately in crushing poverty, does not lend itself to the most generous possible reading as we witness an explicitly revanchist Sunni sectarianism capture the state.
LA: In March 2023, both of us spoke at the Syria hearing of the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism: Sanctions and Coercive Economic Measures. I think sanctions and how the US uses them to hollow out enemy states from the inside are generally a misunderstood and underestimated aspect of imperialist warfare. Those of us paying attention and in contact with people inside Syria knew how – by design – the sanctions programme imposed on Syria was immiserating its people and making post-war recovery an impossibility, but I wonder if even we had underestimated just how damaging it had been over several years. How significant of a role do you think they have played in this context?
PH: We should follow Ghassan Kanafani’s lead and “shed light on that exacting principle: know your enemy.” This means to take seriously the resources, machinations, and strategies of imperialism. There is a danger in defeatism, in treating imperialism as omnipotent, as it is not; there is conversely a danger in treating imperialism’s defeat as a foregone conclusion, a simple matter of secular trends that require only time to eventuate. I believe a sober assessment views the fall of Syria as a victory of US hybrid warfare and its sanctions regime. Only with clarity on this thesis can the peoples of the Global South then draw up the necessary lessons from Syria, to avoid repeating the SAR’s pitfalls in the quest to protect their sovereignty. In undertaking such an assessment, it is not enough to point to the savagery of imperialism, savage though it is. We have to look to the internal development model of the targeted country to understand what weaknesses the imperialist powers seized upon. Would, for example, the covert war the United States and Arab reactionary states launched against Syria have been possible against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)? It seems to me there is more consolidation around the primacy of imperialism in the latter country than existed in Syria leading up to 2011. We have to ask what the differences might be.
US intelligence studied the weaknesses of Syrian social development very closely. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Syria without a major trading partner. As the USSR was truncated into smaller statelets, with even the largest among its former republics, Russia, drained of state funds and cut off from essential industrial bases, Syria found itself deprived of essential inputs. This need for investment strengthened the internal position of those advocating for access to US and Gulf finance capital. The influx of investment created a “new bourgeoisie” of which figures such as Rami Makhlouf were emblematic. What did Makhlouf do? What does any bourgeoisie do? He sets himself as an intermediary between outside corporations and Syria, drawing up contracts to demand a certain percentage of any new projects opened up in Syria in whatever the industry might be, whether communications, construction, oil, or banking. He is strictly a middle man in search of rent, and once he captures that rent he sends it to off-shore bank accounts. As his fortune mounts, he becomes ever more interested in funding a shadow police apparatus dedicated to protecting the fortune of his inner circle rather than the national defense. This appropriation of private capital, combined with the competitive pressure placed on the state run bank by the growth of black currency markets, further shrank the national share directed into the agricultural cooperatives in the countryside. Agricultural workers were forced to move into mid-size growing cities as a new proletariat to sell their labor or join the reserve army of the unemployed, and the growth of urbanisation, combined with the Zionist settler-colony’s theft of freshwater resources, worsened the growth conditions of Syria’s most precious agricultural lands. It was in these areas, where the ideological influence of the Ba’athist state was waning, that sectarian takfiri propaganda networks from Saudi Arabia and Egypt and elsewhere, began to penetrate more and more.
US intelligence agents expressed in internal memos going back to the 1980s, even before the official fall of the USSR, that Syria was dependent on ever-depleting reserves of the US dollar – the reserve currency of global trade, possession of which stipulates countries’ access to the global market. Syria had discovered oil reserves on which it increasingly depended to replenish reserve currency. These were the exact oil fields US troops moved to occupy and hold hostage, closing any sources of revenue for war reconstruction projects. In this context, the sanctions provided additional heavy pressure to create a kind of economic pincer movement that affected both the Syrian bourgeoisie and the Syrian popular classes, though obviously in different ways. Of course, Syria had been subject to sanctions since 1979 for being a “state-sponsor of terrorism,” i.e., opening up training bases for Palestinian feday’in; but the severity of the sanctions grew more extreme with each new round: in 2004, 2011, and then in 2020, the Caesar Act sanctions, the most extreme of all.
Let’s begin with what happened to the bourgeoisie. The US Treasury ordered banks in Europe not to do business with Makhlouf. At the same time, the Syrian state treasury was dwindling. To maintain their own class existence, the Assads turned to the only available money piles left in the vicinity and placed heavy taxes on Rami Makhlouf – right when the Caesar Act sanctions were getting going in 2020, the Syrian state seized his assets. Asma al-Assad took over direct management of his businesses, like the mobile network Syriatel and a charity foundation that had been used to pay the families of government supporters killed in the war. Undoubtedly, this affected morale among government supporters, who viewed the Assads as presiding more directly over Makhlouf’s corruption. With everything that has transpired since December, I would put it like this: as the sanctions intensified, the inner ruling circle consumed the state; imperialism consumed the ruling circle; and now imperialism is consuming all of the assets of the state, land and people, taking all the spoils of its war.
Syria’s allies, Russia and Iran, provided extensive military support, but they did not provide, and likely could not have provided, the investment needed to reconstruct the country. Assad did not want to drop ties with the Axis of Resistance entirely because they provided military support that alternative alliances would not. So he turned to the United Arab Emirates for investment, perhaps hoping they could provide an escape hatch, or terms of investment that would not require total divestment from the Axis of Resistance. This balancing act, which saw Assad closing doors on Ansar Allah for example, clearly created deep distrust within the Axis, and he found himself isolated internationally. Thus, this “national bourgeoisie,” initially created via imperialist investment the Syrian state perhaps embraced for rational reasons of developmental necessity, accelerated domestic inequality and became a weakness in the defense of the whole country against imperialism. Kim Il Sung’s “Theses on the Socialist Rural Question in Our Country” comes to my mind for its prescient warnings about the danger of abandoning the countryside; he argued that the contradiction between city and country must be kept minimal, and that agricultural workers’ participation in the socialist project must be maintained through consistent, intensive ideological work in the countryside led by the party.
Of course, the effects of these sanctions on the Syrian people more broadly was something else entirely. The vast majority had no bourgeois class status to lose – only their access to food, shelter, and heat. The Caesar Sanctions were billed as the “Civilian Protect Act,” but they attacked the energy sector and basic industry with specifically civilian uses. There was remarkably – I would even say creepily – little written in English about the actual effects of these sanctions on average Syrians. The only exception of which I am aware is Chris Ray’s 2020 report from Syria, published in Monthly Review. Through eye-witness observations and interviews, he described how these sanctions were denying people’s access to heating fuel, and to construction materials to repair the war-torn holes in their homes and ceilings, making winters unbearable. Syria couldn’t source parts in Europe for dialysis machines, and its medical sector almost collapsed into irrelevancy, unable to distribute a variety of medicines the state once subsidised. Although the government continued to subsidise fuel, bread, and rice, the public budget was shrinking into collapse. The currency itself collapsed into nothing. This was total encirclement of a population on par with the post-2007 siege of Gaza. Syria’s fall will embolden the US architects of the sanctions who likely view them now as a whopping success and thus will continue to expand their application elsewhere.
LA: I won’t ask you to predict anything with certainty because as I am sure you would agree, much remains unclear and uncertain at this stage, but as we have briefly discussed, some people – including some that we both like and respect – have responded to the fall of Syria in a way we both felt is underestimating its significance and likely impact. Among other lametable developments, we have already seen the new rulers of Syria order the closure of Palestinian factions’ training camps, offer no opposition to Israel’s expanded occupation of Syrian territory, announce ‘free market’ reforms and dissolve the National Progressive Front (a long-standing coalition of Syrian Communist, Socialist and Arab Nationalist parties). In that context, could you elaborate a little here on why you think people may be downplaying the impact of the end of the Syrian Arab Republic and how its loss could impact things going forward, notably with regards to Syria’s sovereignty and the regional liberation movement?
PH: Syria acted as much more than a rhetorical support beam for the Axis of Resistance. It even acted as more than a land bridge, although even that point should not be downplayed: to open up sovereign land and water through which to transport goods is a major achievement under world imperialism, requiring time and struggle. Ideologically, Syria functioned as the bridge between the secular leftist and Islamic Resistance movements; it connected the Islamic Republic of Iran to a number of Palestinian resistance factions, to which Syria provided extensive training. The reason we are now seeing an ongoing tide of assassinations in Syria targeting scientists, is because the state system employed researchers on an anti-Zionist basis. Syria has been effectively at war with Israel for decades, creating a repository of expertise that must be evaporated. Whether it is the Zionists or the takfiris, or both, carrying out these assassinations, the imperialist de-development of Syria continues apace.
Sectarian atrocities are taking place across “post-liberation” Syria. Sectarianism is the enemy of national liberation because it inherently excludes the skills and abilities and knowledge of significant portions of the nation. For that very reason, HTS will not be able to rule the whole of Syria without a fight; nascent formations are already springing up to resist it. Continued civil war will neutralise Syria as a regional actor capable of consolidating and directing resources towards the confrontation with Zionism and imperialism. Yet, the victory of reaction would simply consolidate and direct resources towards accommodation with Zionism and imperialism. The Syrian people have proven again and again that they will not accept the Zionist entity’s occupation of its lands, or its continued border threats. But they will need organisation and sovereignty to actualise those sentiments. The future of Syria will determine what is possible in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. The struggle for Syria is the struggle for the region, and for that matter, the world.
LA: Perfectly put, Patrick. Thank you very much for your time and these considered, informative answers.
(Ebb) by Patrick Higgins and Louis Allday
