New Plans for the Partition of Syria

Israel’s attack on Syrian military power centers in Damascus is nothing more than a new move to divide regional power in the complex Middle Eastern chessboard. Israel struck several buildings near the Ministry of Defense and other strategic targets, formally justifying this action with the need to defend the Druze community. Yet this masks much broader strategic interests, tied to territorial control and the emerging political order in Syria after the fall of the Assad dynasty. The attack on Damascus is one of the pieces in a broader strategy aimed at consolidating Israel’s control over a strategically crucial strip of Syrian territory.

Israel’s goal is to maintain control over the entire southwestern part of Syria. This region borders southern Lebanon and northern Israel. The control over it is part of a broader plan to secure Israel’s northern and northeastern borders through a series of buffer zones, or outright territorial acquisition. The occupation of Syrian territory is part of an even broader strategy, namely maintaining explicit control over Syrian airspace and territory, extending as far as Iran.

Bashar al-Assad’s power finally collapsed on December 8th, 2024, marking the end of the Baathist regime after half a century of unchallenged rule. Since that very day, Israel has conducted hundreds of raids that destroyed all of the Syrian army’s Soviet-era air defenses. This prepared a land and air corridor that was later used to bomb Iran, without having to cross other airspaces.

New agreements to partition Syria among various regional and global actors are emerging on the horizon. Israel controls southwestern Syria, Turkey has influence over northwestern, central, and part of southern Syria. Turkey maintains a rhetoric of hostility toward Israel, but shares with it and the United States a substantial division of influence in Syria. Meanwhile, the United States maintains a presence in the northeast in the Kurdish areas. Northeastern Syria is rich in resources like water, oil, gas, and phosphates, and has a strategic position on the border with Iraq and Turkey.

Syria’s new central power, made up of conservative Islamists, is trying to juggle things. It’s attempting to maintain its balance like a tightrope walker, but at the same time seek to equip itself with an effective safety net in case it falls.

Ahmad Shara, the self-proclaimed Syrian president, has changed sides several times in his now countless attempts to climb the ladder of power. As a good representative of the bourgeoisie, he has stripped himself of his previous ideology each time. From a young jihadist fighting against the United States and Britain in Iraq, he underwent various transformations. He was a founding member of the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda, then formally broke away from this organization to create a new coalition, and finally came to power in Idlib with Turkish support. The new regime is now attempting to extend and strengthen its control over territories that were never completely under Damascus’s control during the long civil war that began between 2011 and 2012. In addition to the Suwayda region, unresolved issues remain in the Alawite-majority coastal area and in areas controlled by Kurdish-Syrian forces in the northeast of the country.

From February to the present, there have been bloody clashes and massacres by government and pro-government forces. The coastal area saw the killing of around 1,500 civilians, including women and children. The Alawites are identified with the previous regime and suffered particularly atrocious and systematic violence. While still significant, violence against the Druze was relatively less widespread and severe.

To date, the new power in Syria has been dealing with the Druze in accordance with historical Syrian tradition. It uses force to push them to give up part of their autonomy, simultaneously, it tries to negotiate so as to maintain effective control of the territory.

The Druze mostly populate the Suwayda region in southwestern Syria. Essentially, they aim to maintain a form of quasi-federal autonomy. advancing their right to a monopoly on the management of resources and services in a territory they consider their own. It is obvious that managing services and resources is a fundamental aspect of maintaining political control.

Meanwhile, the new regime in Damascus seeks to consolidate control over all the lucrative aspects of state management. Therefore, Druze autonomy is nothing more than an obstacle. The regime also wants to impose its control through new financial companies for the distribution of services such as electricity, water, and banking. Israel could not have found a better excuse to continue its expansion project—now indispensable to a capitalism that is no longer young and needs war and destruction to regenerate itself. Reconstruction and a new cycle of accumulation will follow, prolonging capitalism’s agonizing existence.

However, it is only the working class that pays for this agony, and it is therefore up to them to rise up first and foremost against their own bourgeoisie and its state. The proletariat, led by the International Communist Party, the only real instrument of class struggle, must rise above national flags and fight for its liberation from the rotten capitalist system and its ephemeral reforms. It must look towards the realization of the only type of society in which man can fulfill himself as a truly free being. It is communism, the dream and need of the human race. Communist man will enjoy the rebirth of nature. The development of science and technology will be regained for the happiness of mankind and not for the needs of the individual of bourgeois memory.