No Disengagement Here

Ricky Hale and Council Estate Media write:

The corporate media hasn’t bothered telling you that Israel is at war with Syria. This probably has something to do with the fact they spent weeks insisting Syria had, in fact, been “liberated”. Media outlets did puff pieces on Al Golani while he was on the US most wanted list with a $10 million price on his head. They dressed him up like Zelensky and humanised him in a way they don’t for kids in Gaza.

The narrative was that Al Qaida and ISIS are woke now and have saved Syria from Assad. Anyone who disagreed with this narrative was obviously an Assadist who loved siding with dictators.

The empire had pushed this narrative since rebranding Al Qaida and ISIS to HTS, providing terrorists with training and equipment, and fuelling the Syrian war while placing the blame entirely on Assad. It’s safe to say this intervention has gone as well as the ones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

The liberation of Syria went so well that HTS started kidnapping female academics, chopping their fingers off and torturing them to death. HTS is now only allowing women to go out with a male guardian, having established a morality police force. Syrian women can only undertake domestic roles and are arrested for challenging this. In other words, women’s rights have dramatically worsened.

By attacking Syria, Israel has violated the 1974 Disengagement Agreement after claiming without basis that it had “collapsed”. This is despite Syria’s interim president saying his government would respect the agreement. Israel’s violation of the agreement has been condemned by the United Nations, but Israel doesn’t care about international law.

Israel is denying Syrians sovereignty over their land and plans to balkanise it, presumably so Syria’s resources can be looted with minimum fuss. If you cheered this on, well done. You have that illness called “opposing every war apart from the current one”. You’re the person the war propaganda works on every damn time. You’re part of the reason this type of thing keeps happening.

A few days ago, Israel launched a massive attack on areas around Damascus after HTS dared ask Israel to withdraw from Syrian land. Israel Katz said that if the Syrian army ventures south of Damascus, it will be “met with fire”.

The IDF is saying it will bomb any weapons depot or military assets across the country and that is what it has been doing, while also attacking its other neighbours. Ironically, Israel says it is bombing sites in Syria to stop weapons falling into the hands of extremists. Who put those weapons into the hands of extremists in the first place, please?

Netanyahu has stated: “We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border.” What he means is Syria is to be demilitarised in one of the most volatile regions on earth. Syria is not going to be allowed to function as a country. It is not going to have any sort of stability or economic recovery.

Syrians are so incensed, they’re holding up placards describing Israel as their greatest enemy. Israel will no doubt use this anger to justify further aggression. It will hold this up as proof that Syrians are dangerous neighbours, just like Palestinians are dangerous neighbours. Imagine being gullible enough to believe this conflict was all about Assad.

When Assad was bombing Syria in a brutal fight for survival against jihadists, this was considered proof that he must be overthrown by HTS. If we applied the same logic today, we would be arming and training HTS to overthrow Netanyahu, but we don’t. See how the logic reverses when it comes to our team? War crimes only count when a leader we don’t like does them.

Israel has spent 2025 building illegal military sites in what was supposed to be a “temporary buffer zone” in southern Syria. It’s a matter of time until Jihadists attack these military sites and westerners are arrested for “supporting terrorism” if they applaud them. That’s how all over the place the empire is right now. You can only cheer for Schrödinger’s liberators/terrorists when we say you can.

People across Syria are facing similar problems to those in Gaza with huge numbers living in tents with little or no access to food, water and electricity. Israel is setting up check points in southern Syria, closing roads, raiding houses and making arrests. When it is not abusing human rights, Israel is using Syrians as cheap labour. Southern Syria is the new West Bank. This is what your western liberation looks like. Can neoliberals point to an example of our interventions working out for the local population?

For all I despise the Israeli government and don’t remotely support their actions, they knew it was a stupid idea to let HTS control Syria. The group was never a “puppet” of Israel, it was just a means to an end and is now being removed from power. This is despite HTS not attacking Israel, not threatening to attack Israel, and not being in a position to attack Israel.

Ordinary Syrians must pay the price for HTS’ removal same as they did with Assad’s, and none of this will be our fault, yet the empire knew it was arming terrorists. It knew Jihadists were flowing into Syria in their tens of thousands and was quite happy to back them in this fake war of liberation.

Many of those who thought it was clever to arm jihadists now want to send our troops to Ukraine where the scope for things to go wrong is dramatically greater. I am literally begging you to stop listening to their propaganda. How many times are you going to fall for imperialist lies?