Kurdistan

Syria: the return of US “world policing”

During the US election Trump’s advice to Obama was, “do not attack Syria... if you do many very bad things will happen and from that fight the US gets nothing.” Therefore Trump was not heeding his own advice when he gave the go-ahead for 59 missiles to be fired at an Assad military airfield on 6 April. Trump’s non-interventionist stance had been based on an assessment that the Syrian opposition is dominated by various strands of Islamism, while Assad is a known quantity. In October 2016 Trump said: “If they ever did overthrow Assad... you may very well end up with worse than Assad.” While...

Nottingham protest against crackdown in Turkey

Hundreds marched through the centre of Nottingham on Friday 4 November to protest against the arrest of at least 12 MPs from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). The protestors marched to local BBC offices to try to get Kurds voice heard as political freedoms in Turkey are drastically curtailed including the crackdown on the press and social media. The editors and staff of Cumhuriyet, the main opposition newspaper in the country, were also recently arrested. HDP arrests came after a car bombing killed nine people in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish south east — this has been used as an...

Daesh stages murderous fightback in Mosul

With the assault on Mosul advancing quickly, Daesh have mounted a last ditch fightback. Seven eastern districts of Mosul have been lost; fighters who remain are hiding amongst the civilian population and launching repeated smaller guerilla style attacks on the approaching troops. 34,000 people have now fled the city. Daesh leader and supposed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has called unremitting opposition to the army, militias and Kurdish forces that are retaking Mosul. A spokesman for the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service told Reuters: “Sometimes they climb to the rooftops of houses where...

Sectarian dangers in Mosul

The progress of Iraqi forces in their effort to re-take Mosul has gathered pace. Many Daesh fighters have been pulled out of the city to consolidate their power back in the rest of the terrain they control. Daesh have used suicide attacks, carried out a diversionary operation in Kirkuk, and tried to halt Iraqi forces with clouds of toxic smoke from a burning sulphur plant; but it still seems unlikely that their fighters will be able to resist the combined forces of Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi army, backed by US and UK airstrikes. Several Christian villages have now been taken on the east...

Aid needed for civilians in Mosul battle

The United Nations has appealed for an additional £50m to cope with an expected flood of refugees as the Iraqi government starts its operation to re-take the city of Mosul from Daesh. UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’ Brien has said: “I am extremely concerned for the safety of up to 1.5 million people living in Mosul who may be impacted.” The UN reckons over 700,000 people could flee the city, but tents are available for only tens of thousands. Average daily temperature lows around Mosul will drop to 4º in December and 2º in January. We can hope that the people of Mosul will be able to make use...

Syria: risk of aid stopping

The ceasefire in Syria had already appeared to be on the verge of collapse following a US-led attack on Syrian troops, who, so Russia has said, were fighting Daesh. Then came an air attack on UN aid convoys near Aleppo. Russia and Syria have both denied responsibility, but are suspected of being involved. The US has said the ceasefire is not dead. The US said its attack on Deir al-Zour was aimed at Daesh, and it was unaware Syrian government troops were present. The Russians declared it was a “display of heavy handedness” by the US. Russia has called on the US to coordinate airstrikes...

Big-power jockeying over Syria

Chemical weapons have been used by both Daesh and (on a much bigger scale) the Assad government in the Syrian civil war. The verdict is from a final report by the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) of the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The Syrian government promised in 2013 to give up its chemical weapons under a deal negotiated by the Russian government, but has continued to use them. The committee recorded four uses of VX nerve gas, 13 uses of sarin, 12 of mustard gas, 41 of chlorine and 61 of other chemical agents, and named Daesh as having...

Turkey: reaction grows

Last November, the Turkish Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party won a victory at the polls. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s thin-skinned Islamist president, and an increasingly intolerant persecutor of his many critics, had refused to accept losing the AK majority in the June general election. He ramped up the war on the Kurds in the Turkish south east and then ran on a platform of defending the security that he himself had undermined. Recently, in May, Can Dündar and Erdem Gül of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet got five year prison sentences for writing about the Turkish security service...

The Kurds, Aleppo, Russia, and the USA

Michael Karadjis of the Australian Socialist Alliance has written a long and informative analysis of what he reckons to have been a U-turn by the Kurdish nationalist movement in Syria, the PYD, under the title " The Kurdish PYD’s alliance with Russia against Free Aleppo: Evidence and analysis of a disaster " . He criticises PYD clashes with other rebel groups in Syria, and the PYD's project of a reunification of Rojava (the Kurdish-claimed area of northern Syria) against the wishes of Arabs and Turkmen and other minorities within its declared borders. Several reports indicate that the PYD, and...

The Kurds and Turkey’s ambitions

Aso Kamal, a member of the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan, spoke to Solidarity . This is the second part of the interview. We published the first last week. There is no stability in the Middle East. Kurdistan stretches across different countries — Turkey, Iraq, Syria. There is conflict between the big powers: Russia and US. In the region there are two poles: on the one hand, Iran and Assad, and on the other, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Political parties and powers are divided between those two poles in the region. Erdogan sees the local administration of the Kurdish people in Syria as a...

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