Ghouta, rural district of Damasco’s surroundings, has been under siege for 52 months. For the last 2 years, its 350.000 inhabitants survive among the rubble, basically from smuggling through tunnels. The situation is extreme, beyond imagination: deaths by starvation and easily healable diseases that spread like an epidemy. Over the last days, Assad’s regime, supported by Putin, unleashed a brutal wave of massive air-strikes, preannouncing a final hit.
By Juan P.
The numbers are horrifying. In the first 4 days of air-strikes, 322 people died, including 76 children. The best summary was made by an inhabitant in a simple way, in an interview with Reuters: “We are waiting our turn to die.”
Sadly, this is a movie that we have seen many times in Syria over the last 6 years – as in Aleppo, Homs and Daraa. Assad is bending every region that freed from his control after the Revolution through a real holocaust, with hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, and the complete destruction of the country.
The so-called “International Community” is allowing this, as it has done from the beginning – with its Diplomats and NGOs a few kilometers away from Ghouta literally watching the air-strikes. The hypocrisy and impotence become evident just by mentioning that Ghouta was one of the international zones to be “pacified”.
The Stalinist left shamefully supports the regime because of an alleged “US intervention against Assad,” despite time has made it evident that the only US intervention was against Daesh, tolerating the massacre of the Syrian people.
Meanwhile, in Syria, there are only remains of what the so-called “Islamic State” once was, but the war did not stop. In Idlib, the regime unleashes its fury against the last great region in hands of the opposition, and Turkey enters the Kurdish canton of Afrin –autnonomous in fact since the Revolution – militarily.
Despite the crossed wars in Syrian territory, there is an undeniable counterrevolutionary consensus: “The popular and multi-ethnic uprise for democracy and social justice must be crushed.” Assad, Putin, the US, Saudi Arabia, Daesh, Iran and Israel, they all agree on that.
Unfortunately, the main Kurdish and opposition forces did not develop an independent policy, and they bet their success on being the minor partners in the counter-revolutionary agenda of the different actors. Like this, they end up playing a reactionary role, suffocating the popular demands. An example is how the most conservative and liberal Islamist forces confront the popular, revolutionary mobilization on the base, or how the Kurdish PYD collaborates with the regime.
The drama of the Syrian revolution is the absence of a broad movement or organization to present a multi-ethnic alternative in both political and military fields, with a program of structuration and democratic development from below (through popular councils, for example,) to link the process to the expropriation of wealth of the multimillionaire pro-regime ones and to [the fight against] the interests of foreign powers.
