Syria: Is An End To The War In Sight?

The military victory in Aleppo by Assad’s regime and its foreign backers was a turning point in the war in Syria. It has put the Syrian government once more in formal control of the country’s main urban centres. Serge Jordan of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) examines if this is the prelude to a broader peace settlement that could end the horrors inflicted on the Syrian people.

- Serge Jordan

Following the revolutionary uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, Syria was witness to a mass popular revolt against the brutal and corrupt dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. The counter-revolutionary responses to that uprising started a chain of tragedies that unfold in Syria today.

The absence of independent workers’ organisations able to harness this movement along class lines, and to overcome the religious and ethnic divisions upon which the Assad dynasty had consolidated its power, created multiple openings: for the regime to carry out savage repression; for various sectarian groups to usurp the anti-Assad movement; and for foreign capitalist forces to intervene on both sides in order to exploit the conflict.

Diverse counter-revolutionary forces have fed each other in a devastating war for supremacy which has displaced more than half of the country’s population, killed hundreds of thousands of people and reduced this once beautiful country to a gigantic pile of rubble.

An important turn of events came last December when the regime and its foreign allies recaptured Aleppo, the country’s most populous city before the war and its economic powerhouse. It allowed them to come back to the negotiating table this year with significantly more leverage than during the previous, largely token, international peace negotiations.

These developments are taking place in the context of new shifts in the Middle East’s ever-changing power relations - regional alliances rendered even more volatile in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, that unsettled the ruling elites’ long-standing political arrangements.