NEW SOCIALIST WEBZINE

We are extremely sad to report that Ali Mustafa, an editorial associate of New Socialist Webzine from Toronto, was killed today along with at least nine other people in an air strike by forces of the Assad regime on the neighborhood of Hadariya in Aleppo. Ali was for a time one of the editors of NSW, and continued to do administrative work for the publication while doing journalism in Egypt, Palestine and Syria.

Ali was a very principled and thoughtful comrade. He was inspiring to work with on the Editorial Collective for the NS Webzine, advocating for an open, accessible and creative approach that would attract newly politicizing youth – and pushing us to maintain an ambitious pace in publishing to build our readership. Ali made a significant contribution to the webzine as a writer and photographer, with a range of contributions including interviews, book reviews, analysis of middle east politics, and critical reflections on his own experience as an activist.

Ali had a rare understanding of the complex interactions of imperialism and the internal forces of reaction in middle eastern politics. He would have agreed with Khalil Habash’s observation in his 2012 article for NS that “A free, progressive, democratic and truly independent Egypt and Syria are infinitely more dangerous to the Zionist apartheid state and its occupied territories than the repressive Syrian and Islamic Republic.”

Ali was a genial friend, a very human radical activist who understood the value in engaging with people outside the organised left. He always sought to reach wider audiences through the popular media, with published photos showing the carnage in Aleppo as recently as February 26.

The brutality of his death and the more than 100,000 others who have died, the more than four million who have been displaced, and the tens of thousands facing death by starvation as a result of the corrupt Assad regime’s desperate effort to maintain power – and the courage and commitment of those who continue to risk their lives signal a grave responsibility for the international left to carry forward the struggle for justice.

The NS Webzine published a series on the Syrian uprising by Khalil Habash in 2012. See for example http://www.newsocialist.org/611-syria-understanding-the, or click on Syria in the Tag Cloud at www.newsocialist.org.

Ali’s most recent publication in NS Webzine was an interview with Toronto NS member David McNally http://www.newsocialist.org/…/665-monsters-of-the…. For more writings by Ali, type his name into the search box at the top right of our website www.newsocialist.org.