By KD Tait A recent Open Letter (Speak Out on Syria) correctly calls on Jeremy Corbyn to “say clearly and unequivocally that the actions of Assad and Russia in Syria are barbaric war crimes and that [he] will seek to end them and hold their perpetrators to account”. We agree with this, and believe that […]

The brutal attack on Eastern Aleppo by Russian and Syrian warplanes, bombing with bunker buster, incendiary and barrel bombs, has already killed hundreds of civilians, creating a landscape many have likened to Stalingrad in 1942, Warsaw in 1944 or better, perhaps, given the same perpetrator is involved, the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 2000. The Syrian […]

AS WE go to press, the ceasefire in Syria agreed in Geneva on 9 September between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov seems to have taken hold on some fronts, though the bombardment of eastern Aleppo seems to be continuing. If the truce lasts for seven consecutive days and humanitarian […]

Beneath the rubble ordinary Syrians defend the democratic ideals of the revolution as western governments remain complicit in Russian bombing By Marcus Halaby Syrians in the rebel-held “liberated zones” marked the beginning of the US and Russian-brokered “cessation of hostilities” by coming out onto the streets in their tens of thousands, with anti-Assad rallies reported […]

Ceasefire will bring neither a just nor a lasting end to the civil war By Marcus Halaby RUSSIA’S bombing campaign in support of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship has created a new wave of refugees, with 35,000 stranded on the border with Turkey. Its purpose was to encircle Syria’s largest city Aleppo, before a US-Russian brokered “ceasefire” […]

By Marcus Halaby For all David Cameron’s boasting that he has 70,000 “moderate” Syrian oppositionists ready to act as boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS, there is precious little sign of them being brought into action. It now seems that they will only be usable after a “political process” has engineered a […]

LIKE Putin’s strategy in Syria, Britain’s and the USA’s also involves double-crossing old allies and co-opting new ones. The case that Cameron made for war included a reference to 70,000 “moderate opposition” fighters, whose existence many have been far too quick to dismiss, given the likely far larger size of the Syrian armed opposition. Cameron […]

BY crushing the Syrian revolutionaries and leaving only Assad and ISIS standing, Putin hopes to force the West to accept that Assad’s regime (with or without Assad at the top of it) is their least worst option. Putin’s claim to stand for the “unity of the Syrian state” actually means restoring the rule of the […]

By Marcus Halaby A COMMON view in the anti-war movement is that the current war in Syria is effectively a repeat of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with Syria’s as-yet undefeated revolution against the Assad dictatorship simply the product of a US-led attempt at “regime change”. But in some ways it more closely resembles the […]

At 10pm Parliament will vote on whether to send British planes to join the US-led bombing of Syria. David Cameron’s drive to war has nothing to do with protecting civilians and everything to do with maintaining Britain’s status as the USA’s principal ally. A vote to bomb Syria will mean RAF jets killing civilians they […]

ONE of the most important factors in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign was his opposition to the war in Iraq, and to any future wars in the Middle East. The lies and spin that took us to war in Iraq under Tony Blair still weigh heavily on the minds of millions. Ed Miliband’s refusal to give […]

DAVID Cameron is threatening to put a series of votes to the Commons that would radically up the tempo of the war drums. First there is his stated aim to expand the UK’s theatre of operations in the Middle East to include bombing Syria. Labour has already, two years ago, thwarted this aim, when the intended […]

By Marcus Halaby and Sam Copley 11 August 2015 A large part of the Western left and radical media have written off the struggle against the totalitarian Assad regime in Syria as irretrievably lost. Effectively, for them, the counterrevolution has triumphed. And alongside them, there are also those who never supported the revolutionary uprising against […]

By Marcus Halaby As the Western powers bomb Iraq and Syria under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State, attention has been drawn to the struggle of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to defend the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Kobane. On the border with Turkey, Kobane has been besieged by the ultra-reactionary IS for […]

By Marcus Halaby The liberated zones of the Syrian Kurds in Rojava have inspired debate and praise, but now hundreds of thousands are fleeing Islamic State terror. Marcus Halaby examines their role in the Syrian revolution and the ideology of their leading party Much of the international left has hailed the emergence of autonomous Kurdish […]

By Marcus Halaby US President Barack Obama took office in 2009 promising to end the US occupation of Iraq. Today US warplanes are bombing Iraq and Syria with the aim of “degrading and destroying” the Islamic State. Pentagon press secretary Adm. John Kirby said. “We know we are at war with ISIL [ISIS or Islamic […]

  By Marcus Halaby Three years ago this month, 15 schoolchildren in Daraa – encouraged by events in Egypt and Tunisia – were arrested and tortured for painting anti-regime graffiti on the wall of their school. Their treatment would be the spark for demonstrations of at first a few hundred and then a few thousand […]

By KD Tait  We are now approaching the third anniversary of the Syrian people’s revolution for dignity and democratic rights, rights that every people in the world deserves. Syria In The Context of the Arab Spring, a conference held in London on 15 February, was therefore an event that was long overdue. This conference drew […]

In the first part of a two part article, Marcus Halaby examines the regional and international context of the Arab Revolutions, the role played by the crisis of leadership, and the need for working class political independence in the form of a revolutionary workers’ party, making the case for the strategy of permanent revolution.   […]

By Martin Suchanek, Gruppe Arbeitermacht “A huge victory for the international community” – that is what US President Barack Obama called the 27 September United Nations Security Council Resolution 2118 on chemical weapons in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also praised the document to the skies, while German Foreign […]

By Dave Stockton   The defeat of the Cameron-Clegg coalition in the House of Commons on Thursday 29 August by 285 votes to 272 was a historic occasion: the first time a British government was defeated on the issue of making war in over three centuries. It was also the first time the Parliamentary Labour […]