Western media celebrate the terrorist they supported as Syria’s savior. Syria’s new U.S.-backed rulers have erased anti-colonial history, enacted neo-liberal policies, and welcomed Israeli occupation, fulfilling the goals of the regime change project.
At the end of November 2024, the news began circulating that the Turkish and US backed rebels were hastily encroaching onto the capital of Syria, Damascus. As the government forces were losing ground, mainstream media, both Arab and Western, were coupling the ground offensive with a media campaign to whitewash the terrorists who were launching the attack. On the 8th of December, the long sitting government of Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown, ending more than 50 years of Baath Party rule and beginning a new era for Syria.
What the various obscurantist forces fighting against the government wanted was not just to overthrow Bashar Al-Assad, but to dismantle the last sitting government in the region that was ideologically and materially fighting for national liberation, sovereignty and development as espoused in its Baathist doctrine. And just like any political project, it was mired with contradictions that the Syrian Arab Republic was not immune to (as I pointed out a year ago). So, what has happened to Syria since the overthrow of Baathism by the one and only, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, now known as Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa or what the pipers of western imperialism called “Jihadist, Rebel, Statesman: The Many Faces of Syria’s Leader”?
Since the fall of Syria last year, the social fabric of the diverse society has been shattered. Lest we forget, Syria is a multi-religious, multi-sect, pluralist country that houses various ethnic and religious groups. This very diversity was used by the imperialists to dismantle Syria. Türkiye and Qatar backed terrorists who beheaded Syrians and Iraqis for nearly a decade, while the US furtively backed Kurdish forces, all to serve Syria on a golden platter to the genocidal entity of Israel. What happened to Syria since 2024 has been ethnic cleansing against the local Druze population and against the Alawite (Shia) and Christians, while these terrorists, camouflaged in suits-and-ties, are celebrated in the Oval Office and luxurious conference halls of the numerous reactionary Arab regimes. The larger political project of the current terrorists spearheading Syria has been the complete De-Baathification, that is the erasure of anything that the old Syria stood for. Yet, what is most unfortunate is that the pipers of western imperialism were warned by the consequences of backing such a reactionary leadership, only to be called “Dictator-Loving”, “Al-Assad Apologists”, “Bloodthirsty” and “Campist”. What has been predicted by those who ground their analysis in anti-imperialist Marxism has been achieved in the De-Baathified Syria and we draw lessons from other imperialist interventions to better fend for ourselves and prevent our analysis from being transformed into imperialist talking points.
The Economic, Military and Ideological De-Baathification of Syria
When the US invaded Iraq, the ultimate objective was to De-Baathify the country, that is to rewrite its history and ban any modicum of thinking favorably about the Baath era and its achievements. It removed Baathism from the textbooks, privatized social services and opened up the country to exploitation. Religiously-motivated killings followed, with the provisional government being dominated by Shia, leading to tensions for the many years that followed. When we study the case of Iraq, the attack on Libya became foreseeable. Following the NATO-led imperialist intervention in Libya, the local functionaries of imperialism ethnically cleansed the largely Black town of Tawergha in 2011 and attacked Bani Walid in 2012 — a town known for its ideological support to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (or as those who love personifying the state call them Qaddafi loyalists). The Jamahiriya has been completely erased from public political discourse and even national, anti-colonial holidays have ceased to be commemorated (e.g., June 11th, the day of expulsion of American troops in the Wheelus Airbase, is no longer celebrated), indicating the servility of the western-backed authorities in Libya.
Syria is no different. What western commentators fixating on liberalism and the so-called clash of civilizations tend to miss is that imperialism is the primary contradiction. For example, it surprises them that the US and its imperialist puppets would support a ‘diversity-friendly’ terrorist to run the country. The goal for imperialism is always economic dominance. In a region targeted by Western policies to allegedly combat terrorism and fundamentalism while promoting tolerance, how do we explain the West’s support for rulers who embody the very values it purportedly opposes? The Western-backed leader of Syria — the “reformed” terrorist Abu Mohammed Jolani who once had a $10 million bounty on his head that has been removed since taking power — has negated the values the West has promoted since 9/11. The anomaly is that while this new ruler is socially illiberal, he is pro-capital and pro-West, unlike the anti-Western Baathists he replaced. In other words, while it is preferable to have a socially and economically liberal leader to take power, given the conjunctural forces at play in Syria’s 14-year proxy war, Jolani was supported because he enables at least economic liberalism, which he promised since taking over. An indication of culturalism will always be eclipsed by geopolitical and economic interests.
Since taking power, the economic situation has deteriorated despite the temporary lifting of sanctions on the country. First, this is an indication that sanctions are a weapon of war against the people and not the government. The logic goes that the masses must starve first, and then push them to overthrow their government, so that sanctions can be lifted. Second, many had hoped that democracy and development would ensue, but the new leaders of Syria are neoliberal. They have cut off subsidies on bread and other social services and raised electricity prices. This goes against the very slogans of “revolution for the people” that many western Marxists regurgitated as they were court jestering imperialism. As the staunchly principled anti-imperialist, Michael Parenti would teach us, it is a revolution if people have something to eat after the upheaval. What is transpiring from Syria is far from it.
Militarily, the Zionist entity is the most jubilant in the region as it has long supported factions to topple the Baathist government. Since December 2024, the Zionists have expanded their presence in Syria, taking over numerous towns, while the reformed, diversity-friendly terrorists are busy committing sectarian killings faraway from the Zionist occupation. After the government was overthrown, the Zionist entity went on a bombing campaign of all the hardware left by the government forces, while the reformed terrorists just sat and watched, and their leader promised to enter negotiations with occupying forces and allow the US to continue stationing troops in the country. In fact, Syria even allowed the Zionist forces to use its airspace to attack Iran in June 2025, during the so-called 12 Day War. Despite the complete loss of sovereignty, the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to formalize a buffer zone stretching from the suburbs of Damascus to Jabal al-Sheikh (roughly 50k apart), which the Zionists occupy.
Lastly, as the late Samir Amin taught us, imperialism walks on two legs, financial and military, which are backed heavily by ideological subjugation and information warfare. The new leaders had the ideological project that promotes pro-Ottoman narratives, and erases anti-imperialism and religious diversity. The liberal Zionist think-tank, The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), published a report about the changes in Syria’s textbooks since December 2024. In 2018, the think-tank acknowledged how socially and economically progressive Syria’s textbooks were, yet they criticized them for their anti-Zionism, which was equated with antisemitism (the usual Zionist talking point). The same think-tank published another report in February 2025 showing how the textbooks have changed from their anti-Zionist perspective. What the report won’t tell the readers is the level of reactionism pervasive in the textbooks, since reactionism, imperialism and Zionism are co-dependent triplets.
Since there are intimate ties between the “reformed jihadists” and Türkiye, the textbooks truly manifested what was expected. Whereas the old textbooks were critical of the Ottoman crimes in the region and calling them colonialists, such anti-Ottoman rhetoric was erased. Religious pluralism contradicts these Islamists’ view on religion and so they removed traces of the existence of pre-islamic deities and civilizations in the country and region — replacing loyalty to the nation with loyalty to God. Their parochialism was seen also in the removal of the Chinese philosophy of the Yin and Yang theory – essentially, a theory that two opposites do not negate one another, but that they define themselves through their negatory relation with the other, which together create a self-perpetuating cycle. They also removed Civic Education from the curriculum— Civic Education being the subject that addresses Palestine the most, such that their 9th Grade textbook reads, “The UN General Assembly Resolution No. 3246 adopted December 14, 1974, reaffirmed the legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle”. The reactionism does not end here. Recently, the new regime’s militias destroyed Salah al-Ali statue in Tartous. Salah led a revolt against the French occupation of Syria and is a symbol of Syria’s long-history of anti-imperialism. The national holidays in the country no longer celebrate the Arab victory against the Zionists in 1973. Remarkably showing their appeasement to Türkiye, they removed National Martyrs Holiday (6th of May), the day when an anti-Ottoman Syrian revolution was stifled and its masterminds were executed in 1916.
The grim transformation of Syria confirms a brutal and consistent imperialist blueprint: the violent dismantling of sovereign, anti-imperialist states under the pretext of “liberation” only to install pliant, reactionary regimes that facilitate economic plunder and regional domination. The project of “De-Baathification 2.0” is not an aberration but a deliberate strategy, mirroring the disasters inflicted upon Iraq and Libya, where national cohesion, progressive ideology, and economic sovereignty are systematically erased to serve foreign capital and its regional gendarmes. The celebration of sectarian terrorists in suits, the erasure of anti-colonial history from textbooks, the neoliberal assault on the populace, and the surrender of national territory to Zionist expansion all expose the core truth—imperialism’s only consistent product is death, fragmentation, and servitude. Syria’s fate stands as a harrowing testament and an urgent summons: our solidarity must be unbreakable, our analysis clear-eyed, and our resolve fixed on defeating imperialism in all its forms, lest this cycle of carnage and subjugation claim yet another people fighting for their right to sovereignty and national liberation.