Assad's fall is a victory in the struggle for human liberation

Assad was no anti-imperialist fighter, but a mass murdering gangster who collaborated with Western power when it suited him.

Anyone who believes in universal human emancipation should welcome the fall of tyranny. Almost no Syrian can remember when their state wasn’t ruled by Ba’athist dictatorship and then - just like that - it’s gone. Six decades of Ba’athism, the vast majority under the al-Assads, seemingly suddenly evaporates after a 10 day lightning offensive. The wider context, of course, is a 13-year-civil war which followed the Assad’s regime decision to militarise its response to protests for democracy and freedom in 2011, and then - aided by Iran and Russia - to use barrel bombs and poison gas to try and exterminate not just active resistance, but the sprit of resistance.

There was never anything progressive to salvage from Assadism. This was a kleptocratic, mafia state which used the banner of Arab nationalism - which it had no practical commitment to - and anti-imperialism - when it suited - for political legitimacy and nothing else. Alongside his eloquent British-Syrian wife - a former JP Morgan banker - Assad pushed privatisation and neoliberal economics, in partnership with the World Bank and International Montetary Fund. As a 2018 paper put it:

Neoliberal policies benefitted the Syrian upper class and foreign investors (particularly from the Gulf Monarchies and Turkey) at the expense of the vast majority of Syrians, who were hit by inflation and the rising cost of living.

Taxes were slashed on businesses, the share of wages in the economy shrank, social security was cut, education and health were privatised, prices rose. And chief amongst the beneficiaries of privatisation, of course, were Assad relatives and cronies.

When the US launched the so-called ‘war on terror’, this supposed anti-imperialist fighter collaborated with George W. Bush. In the policy of ‘rendition’, terror suspects were deported to various human rights-abusing dictatorships: one of these destinations was Syria.

When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 - and Arab peoples demanded freedom and democracy, including under Western stooges like Egypt and Tunisia’s dictatorships - the Syrian regime responded with hideous slaughter. In the resulting civil war, an average of 84 civilians were killed each day for the next decade. The civilian death toll alone - over 300,000 - in the first decade represented 1.5% of Syria’s pre-war population. The vast majority of those civilians were murdered by the Assad regime, not least thanks to the use of ‘barrel bombs’ - described by Amnesty International as “oil drums, fuel tanks or gas cylinders filled with explosives and metal fragments, plunged from helicopters”. And then there were the Assad regime’s chemical attacks against its own civilians, atrocities as heinous as it is possible to imagine.

Thousands of Palestinians were massacred and imprisoned by the Assad regime. According to Action Group for Palestinians of Syria, of those violently killed, at least 631 Palestinian refuges were tortured to death by the Syrian regime, “among them minors and elderly people”. Notably, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are now being released. For Israel itself, a weakened Assad regime which remained in power was the ideal status quo. No wonder, then, that polling found that 83% of Palestinians backed the Syrian Revolution, with just 9% backing Assad; that they overwhelmingly had a very unfavourable opinion of Assad, particularly in Gaza; and indeed showed more hostility towards him than almost any other foreign leader.

On social media, it’s not just Syrians rejoicing, but Arab and Muslim voices around the world - many of whom have been the most vocal opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza since it began. Alas, some self-styled Western ‘anti-imperialists’ have taken a rather different approach. They are not representative of the Western left, but they do exist. As I wrote about them eight years ago:

It is possible, and right, to oppose the consistent calamity of Western military intervention in Arab and Muslim lands without apologism for murderous dictatorships. We know about the rampant racism of those who cheerlead for Israeli barbarism and Western imperialism. But those who strip Arab people of any agency, who see their lands as nothing more than chessboards or a game of Risk, who implicitly regard them as incapable of achieving self-determination and democratic freedoms: that, too, is racism.

That is not to say there aren’t very real concerns which should be brushed away by a tidal wave of triumphalism. That the key group behind the toppling of Assad is Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) - an al-Qaeda offshoot - led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is hardly something to be ignored, whatever the talk of its moderation since Western powers themselves proscribed it as a terrorist organisation. Anyone who has studied the history of Afghanistan from the 1970s onwards knows, the let’s say, complicated relationship between US power and Islamist insurgency.

There is the question about the territorial integrity of Syria and the plight of its minorities. Many point to the fate of Libya after Western intervention and the subsequent chaos. That is entirely legitimate - although the hideous fate of Libya was nowhere near as grave as that of Syria since 2011 - and some natural diehard Syrian opponents of Assad will undoubtedly be deeply nervous.

And of course there is the question of further foreign intervention. Israel has now invaded Syria, supposedly to protect the Golan Heights which is - under international law - illegally annexed Syrian land. It is bombarding what it describes as ‘strategic weapons systems’ to prevent them falling into the hands of rebels: rather trashing claims they’re working alongside the insurgents, given it has waited until Assad fell to attack them.

Clearly, many defenders of the Israeli state are rather anxious about what happens next. They should be, because the real universal lesson from the fall of Assad is that all tyrannies fall eventually.