Statement on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war on Syria

The following slightly edited statement was released on March 12, 2021 by the Syria Solidarity Movement — including the International Action Center — on the 10th anniversary of the continuing U.S. war on Syria. Workers World Party has participated in three solidarity delegations to Syria during this 10-year period. Contact information: syriasolidaritymovement.org/; facebook.com/SyriaSolidarityMovementIntl and solidarity@syriasolidaritymovement.org.

Since March 2011, Washington has led a coalition of NATO countries, Arab monarchies and Israel, in a proxy regime-change war, using terrorist mercenaries as foot soldiers. Today, U.S. troops illegally occupy nearly a third of Syria, containing much of Syria’s oil and gas and some of its best farmland. 

In addition, the U.S. maintains a proxy army of Kurdish separatists in Syria’s north that seeks to dismember the country by carving out a Kurdish state where the population was overwhelmingly Arab prior to U.S. intervention. The February 25th, 2021, U.S. bombing of Syria signaled the Biden government’s intention to continue the U.S. war of attrition on Syria.

Syria has defiantly resisted for ten years, in the face of illegal U.S. attempts to dismember their sovereign state. These included false flag gas attacks by terrorists to blame the Syrian government — with the help of OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-U.N.); attempts by the International Criminal Court to indict President Assad; propaganda constructs like the White Helmets to support western military intervention; increasingly severe economic sanctions which devalued Syria’s currency, created widespread unemployment, impoverished millions and created huge shortages in the midst of a pandemic; spurious propaganda like the “Caesar photos”; and covert operations to buy the support of western mainstream media.

With allies Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah and Palestinian militias, support of Venezuela and Cuba to North Korea, and supporters in the global peace movement, the Syrian government has frustrated most of the above schemes and avoided becoming a Libya-style failed state.

Syria has paid a great price: nearly half a million dead; 6.6 million internally displaced persons; 5.6 million refugees across the Middle East, Europe and North America; enormous civilian infrastructure destruction; looting of archeological treasures; physical and psychological trauma to its citizens; and much, much more. All these cry out for an international accounting with reparations from those responsible.

The wide portrayal of the conflict as a “revolution” or popular uprising ignores Wikileaks revelations that the U.S. has been promoting destabilization and sectarianism inside Syria since 2005. The Syrian people have shown great courage and endured great sacrifices in order to preserve their secular, pluralistic and Arab socialist state, with universal free education and medical care.

The Syria Solidarity Movement seeks to end the criminal war on Syria, and we call upon others to join this effort. In particular, we ask you to put pressure on your elected officials to:

• Stop the war against Syria;
• Resume diplomatic relations with Damascus;
• End the coercive economic measures against Syria and Syrians; and
• Support the reconstruction of Syria.