Broken & Bleeding: Syria under Al-Jolani

Syria has been an important pillar in the regional opposition to the Zionist project. Syrian soldiers have directly fought against the IOF in 1948, 1962, 1967, 1973, and in Lebanon in the 1980s. Many of the Palestinian resistance factions have had headquarters in Damascus, and there has been close cooperation between the Syrian Arab Republic and Hezbollah.

Now, in 2025, the new Syrian regime has gone cap in hand to Israel, seeking normalisation. It has been met with bombing, invasion, and balkanisation that the state is helpless to resist. How did this transformation happen? In the 1980s/1990s Syria began to move away from a state-led, albeit not socialist, Ba’athist economic model. When Bashar al-Assad took over in 2000, he accelerated this process with what he called a “social market economy”. This term was never properly defined, but in practice what it meant was austerity; pushing many Syrians into poverty. He oversaw a decline in the trade unions, peasant associations, and state capacity, leading to the emergence of a stronger Syrian bourgeoisie tied closely to the state, and the degeneration of the previous social base of the Ba’ath party, particularly in rural areas where the reforms were felt most keenly.

Protests first broke out in March 2011 after the arrest and reported torture of a group of teenagers for anti government graffiti. As the Summer wore on, these protests escalated, and grew more violent. By the end of the Summer, hundreds were dead, and within a year fighting had spread, splitting the country between the government and opposition forces. In the predominantly Kurdish areas in the North and around Sheikh Maqsud in Aleppo, government forces withdrew and the YPG/J took over. The civil war wouldn’t end until the lightning fast advance of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2024, 14 years later.

Al-Jolani, leader of HTS, was born in 1982 with the name Ahmed al-Sharaa. He grew up in Damascus, to a family of refugees who had fled the Golan Heights after the Zionist invasion in 1967. This is where he got the nom-de-guerre “al-Jolani”. Two weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, at the age of 21, he moved to Baghdad, where he would soon join the insurgency led by Zarqawi, the future leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Jolani rose to leadership in his cell, until his arrest and imprisonment by the American occupation. He spent 5 years in Camp Buca, where he wrote a 50 page research paper about taking jihad to Syria. After his release, he became a commander of Al-Qaeda in Mosul.

As the civil war began in Syria, al-Jolani sent his research paper to al-Baghdadi, who would go on to be the leader of ISIS. Clearly impressed, al-Baghdadi agreed to a meeting with him, where he pledged “$50,000 - $60,000 a month” to start an al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. Here he formed a front group called Jabhat al-Nusra, to obscure the connection with al-Qaeda out of fear it would alienate the people of Syria. This group would be supported by the Gulf States, Turkey, and ultimately, the USA.

They quickly proved to be one of the most effective opposition groups in Syria. They made extensive use of suicide bombings, kidnappings, and torture. They stoked hatred of both Alawites (the sect the Assad family belong to) and Christians, with one statement reading: “The blessed operations will continue until the land of Syria is purified from the filth of the nusayris (a slur for Alawites) and the Sunnis are relieved of their oppression”.

There was an uneasy stalemate between the government and the HTS opposition in Idlib following the Turkish Operation ‘Spring Shield’, when Turkey launched drone strikes against government forces and stationed troops between the two. The government was in control of most of the rest of the country and its major cities, but was under a brutal sanction regime known as the “Caesar sanctions”, and became increasingly dependent on trade with Iran and Russia. This left the state significantly weakened and increasingly unable to respond to the devastating effects of the war on the Syrian people and the country’s infrastructure.

The process of balkanisation was by then well underway. The “Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria” (AANES) held most of the country’s oil fields, while in the desert in the East a US army base controlled the area around the Conoco oil field. In the North, Turkey had established a buffer zone along sections of the border.

Geopolitically, Syria was an important part of the so-called “Axis of Resistance”, serving as the supply route linking Hezbollah in Lebanon with Iran and the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. Now however, the imperialist forces that had decisively intervened before were becoming increasingly committed elsewhere. Russia was locked into its invasion of Ukraine, Iran was busy preparing for their confrontation with Israel, while Iran’s Lebanese allies, Hezbollah, were already fighting a devastating Israeli invasion. The imperialist bloc that had saved Assad before would not do so again.

Syria had gone from a constant threat to the Israeli occupation in its own right, to now being a fragile yet vital link in a wider coalition, while market reforms prevented them from rebuilding. After 14 years of civil war, on 27th November 2024 HTS launched a surprise offensive, quickly seizing Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and, on 8th December, Damascus itself, ending the war within two weeks. Immediately afterwards Israel invaded, expanding their occupation past the Golan Heights, and bombing and destroying military equipment left behind by the Assad government.

It remains in dispute whether or not the Syrian opposition actually used the phrase “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave”. Either way, since coming to power Al-Jolani (now once again going by Al-Sharaa) and HTS have committed or facilitated numerous atrocities against religious minorities in Syria. In March and April, massacres were carried out against the Alawites in Latakia, with reports that men were made to crawl on their hands and knees and bark before being executed.

On the 22nd June, 25 people were killed in a suicide bombing of a church in Damascus. Clashes have broken out between the Druze, supported by Israel, local Arab tribes, and HTS government forces around the city of Suweida. This should not be understood as an organised, top down dictum of al-Sharaa or the new HTS government. Nor should what is now HTS be understood as a single organisation, rather it is a coalition of extremist groups around a kernel of forces loyal to al-Sharaa. Even if al-Sharaa was willing, he is incapable of stopping this coalition from committing atrocities, not that there is much evidence his new woke jihadi image is sincere.

It is impossible to talk about Syria without examining the role of Turkey, and their dual goal of suppressing Kurdish forces and installing a loyal government in Damascus. They conducted several invasions, mainly aimed at weakening the Kurdish led AANES, launched strikes against government forces, even stationing troops in Idlib to protect HTS territory. This territory lies on the border with Turkey, allowing a steady stream of supplies from Ankara. Turkey’s goals now are to strengthen the new government to protect an extremely profitable export market for its capital.

Turning South, when al-Sharaa went to Israel to try and negotiate normalisation, what had been for decades one of the most important geopolitical goals of the Zionist project, he was turned down. Israel instead opted to launch another invasion, in the attempt to establish a Druze buffer state between the occupied Golan and the rest of Syria. What is Israel’s goal if not normalisation? This becomes obvious when we look at the outcome of the dirty war. In the North and East, a Kurdish led state is completely dependent on US military protection from Turkey and Damascus, and controls the majority of Syria’s oil. Turkey remains in control of a strip of land along the border. The US still occupies the Conoco oil fields in the East around its military base. The Alawite homeland in Latakia on the coast is under nominal HTS control, with reports of an ongoing Alawite insurgency. In the South the Suweyda Druze factions control the area around the city, and Israel occupies an expanded Golan heights. HTS only has nominal control over the rest of the country. Since HTS took power and “ended” the Civil War, 10,000 people have been killed in fighting.

Syria has been balkanised, and no longer poses a threat to the genocidal Zionist project. The imperial designs of the US are similar. On the one hand they have provided HTS with significant support and diplomatic cover throughout the conflict, they have lifted the sanctions, and have removed HTS from their terror list. On the other hand they have stood by passively and allowed Israel to carry out its balkanisation mission in the country. In this new balkanised Syria every statelet is in no position to interfere with the interests of US monopoly capital. The US, therefore, seeks to prop them up, and keep them stable enough to protect US investments and their local geo-strategic interests. It does not matter how many have to die in aid of this goal.

This has always been the goal of the Western imperialist bloc. They were never interested in “bringing democracy to Syria”. This is why they poured so much funding, so much money, and so many weapons into groups like HTS and their ilk, groups that would never actually be able to govern a country as religiously diverse as Syria. They have succeeded. Syria stands as yet another victim of competition within the imperialist system, in the constant struggle for supremacy between imperialist blocs. Syria lies broken, bleeding, and helpless.