Syria’s Left: from death to resurrection!

The first communist party in Syria was founded in 1924 under the name Hizb al-Shaab (the People’s Party). A year later it re-emerged as the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, and in 1928 became known as the Communist Party of Syria – Comintern Branch after being accepted into the Communist International. 

From the moment he joined this party, one man would dominate its history for nearly six decades: Khalid Bakkdash. Born in Damascus in 1912 to a Kurdish family, he trained in law, broke with the bourgeois National Bloc in 1930 and rose to the party secretariat within three years. 

Bakkdash travelled to Moscow for the 1935 world congress of communist parties and enrolled in the “Communist University for the Toilers of the East”. Returning to Syria in 1937, he was appointed Secretary-General – a post he retained until his death in 1995. His wife, Wissal, and later their son, Ammar, succeeded him.

Buoyed by Soviet victories in the Second World War and the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the left surged to the forefront of Syrian politics in the 1950s. 

Bakkdash’s election to parliament in 1954 and the appointment of the communist Afif Bizri as Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army (1957–1959) signalled this ascent. The party expanded in the cities and grew popular among university students as well as among workers, Christians, and ethnic minorities such as Circassians and Kurds. 

Despite a broader Arab turn towards Marxism after the 1967 defeat, Bakkdash’s party adopted controversial stances on key national and regional questions. It endorsed the Soviet Union’s recognition of Israel, opposed union with Egypt, and stood against a return to democratic life. These tensions exploded at the 1970 congress, which elected a Central Committee and Political Bureau not controlled by Bakkdash.

A major schism followed in 1972, with nearly two-thirds of the membership following Riyad al-Turk in breaking away to form the “Syrian Communist Party – Political Bureau.” The new party embraced democratic principles and called for the military’s withdrawal from politics. 

The result was a succession of security crackdowns and mass imprisonment. In 2003 the Political Bureau abandoned Marxism altogether, rebranding itself as the Syrian Democratic People’s Party and later joining the uprising against the Assad regime after 2011.

Meanwhile, the Bakkdash wing continued its descent into regime dependency, fracturing repeatedly — most notably with the defection of Yusuf Faisal’s bloc in 1986, and later the 2014 break led by Qadri Jamil (Khalid Bakkdash’s son-in-law) who formed the People’s Will Party and fronted what became known as the “Moscow Platform.”

Under the stern gaze of their founding leader and the old slogan “Workers of the World, Unite”, the Syrian Communist Party announced the death of its Secretary-General, Ammar Khalid Bakkdash, on its website on 12 July this year. 

He had died in Athens. The notice promised that he would be laid to rest at the foot of Damascus’ Mount Qasioun, “once the black cloud lifts from the skies of the homeland.”

The Greek Communist Party released its own statement, speaking of Bakkdash’s “sudden death” and claiming he had become “a target for jihadists who have unleashed a campaign of persecution and massacres against political opponents and ethnic and religious minorities”. The dramatic tone suggested he had died as a result of this alleged pursuit — though the statement then hedged, noting merely that Bakkdash had “found himself and his family in Athens”, a phrase that all but concedes he neither fled under duress nor faced any immediate threat.

In a move that undercut both the Greek and Syrian statements, a group describing themselves as “comrades of the existing organisational current and heirs to the historical experience” in the Syrian Workers’ Communist Party issued a declaration on 17 November 2025 containing the striking phrase: the “resurrection” of the party. The religious metaphor implicitly acknowledged that their former party had died — and that these twelve signatories (as many as Christ’s Apostles) intended to resurrect it.

By contrast, the Syrian Democratic People’s Party released a statement the day after Assad’s fall declaring that the country had “entered a new life”, later warning of attempts to inflame communal strife “to prevent the birth of a new Syria”.

The June edition of al-Massar, a magazine published by the Syrian Communist Party – Political Bureau, employed the same imagery as its former parent organisation, headlining its editorial: “Awaiting ‘Peace’ and ‘Justice’: Six Months into the Re-Birth.”

From “sudden death” to “re-birth” to “resurrection”, the Syrian Left has chosen a distinctly figurative vocabulary to capture its position vis-à-vis the change of regime of 8 December 2024.

It is likely that any new leftist re-birth or revival, perhaps inspired by the historic successes of the 1950s and 1960s, will depend on the ability of Syrian political parties and civil currents in general to develop the tools of peaceful struggle now opening up in the country. 

It will also depend on the capacity of leftists who, for decades, tried to reconcile the weight of ideology with the social conditions of Syria: its history, culture, and politics. While some of them shattered into fragments still awaiting a resurrection to piece them back together, others managed, through a harsh version of survival of the fittest, to endure, at a cost no less than sending Marx to the morgue.