Kurdistan

Torn by war

A bit more than a year ago, ISIL [Daesh] came to Iraq. When they came to Mosul, there were only 300 Daesh fighters. Mosul is a big city, with thousands of soldiers and police. Within hours they all left the city. Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, said it was a chance for the Kurds to enlarge the Kurdish state. Areas like Kirkuk had been in dispute between the central Iraqi government and the regional Kurdish government. Barzani said he would show the Iraqi government a surprise they had never expected, and took over Kirkuk. So some people think that there was...

Daesh consolidates, Kurdish opposition divides

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates around 5,000 people from all sides and including fighters and civilians died in Syria during August. The shocking recent death toll in Syria is just the latest reasons why hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled the country. The total number of Syrian refugees displaced across the Middle East, Europe and North Africa now stands at over four million. The Jerusalem Post reported that among those who have fled to Europe are 100,000 Palestinian refugees that have previously been living in refugee camps across Syria, but had never had the right...

Erdogan turns to repression as he loses support

In the last week of July, Turkey began its bombing of Kurdish forces of the PKK in Syria and Iraq. The cover given for the bombings was Turkish President Erdogan’s eventual agreement to take action against Daesh (ISIS) and support the US’s bombing of them. But the truth is very different. The bombings began as the two year truce broke down between Turkish armed forces and the Kurdish PKK — the militia, primarily based in Turkey, which has had an on-off war with Turkey for 30 years. It also followed the massacre of young pro-Kurdish socialist activists in the town of Suruc who had gathered...

Turkey breaks ceasefire with PKK

The bomb attack on the youth wing of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed, the SGDF, as their members travelled to Suruc on the Turkey–Syria border to help reconstruct Kobane, has provoked a wide ranging response from the Turkish state. The SGDF according to official accounts were attacked by a suicide bomber from Daesh (ISIS), with over 30 of their members killed. The SGDF is part of a coalition of groups with close links to the People’s Democratic Party. Press reports from across the region quote their members and supporters who are sceptical of the official claims and believe they were...

How to fight Daesh

The killing of at least 39 people by a gunman in Sousse, Tunisia, along with the destruction of a Shia mosque in Kuwait, on Friday 26 June, may signal a shift in strategy for Daesh (ISIS). Until now, their declared aim was the establishment of a caliphate in Iraq-Syria. This latest development could be the start of a new global jihad. The targeting of tourists is a move away from the targeting of religious minorities and non Sunni Muslims. The flow of foreign fighters to Daesh’s capital in Raqqa, Syria, is another alarming trend. Tunisian nationals now make up the largest proportion of foreign...

Where did ISIS come from?

It is true that ISIS is a dangerous force that has started a devastating war in the Middle East in which the results are beheading, raping and ruining the traces of civilisation. It is true that ISIS wants to drag civilised societies into the same primitive Sharia reign of Islam. But the worst and most dangerous thing is that it tries to drown the civilised world in blood, terror and killings, as a means to grab the power and wealth of society. ISIS is a black spectre overwhelming human society. As a bourgeois force carrying the banner of Islam, ISIS has a strategy for the world-wide political...

NUS conference: students speak out for the struggle in Kurdistan

Workers' Liberty students wrote a motion for the upcoming NUS conference (21-23 April, Liverpool) on Kurdistan, and left activists we work with at Bristol University successfully proposed that their student union send it to the conference. This is the only motion submitted on this very important issue. Unfortunately there is a reasonable chance it will fall off the agenda. It is therefore very positive that a wide range of NUS activists have signed a statement in support of it - particularly after some of the arguments about Kurdistan in NUS in the recent past. Below is the statement of...

Release Shilan Ozcelik!

On Friday 12 March, around 50 Kurdish solidarity activists held a demonstration outside Holloway Prison in north London to demand the release of Shilan Ozcelik. Ozcelik was arrested earlier this year at Stansted Airport, and has recently been charged with a terrorist offence for allegedly trying to join the YPJ's women's protection units in Rojava. The YPJ are linked to the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria, an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). According to the Guardian "...the charges against Ozcelik are understood to relate to the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), which is...

Daesh has pushed women back decades

Omar Raii spoke to Gona Saed from the Kurdish and Middle Eastern Women's Organisation. Daesh (Islamic State) has been strategically defeated and driven away in Kobane, and in major areas in Shangal, but they still exist in some surrounding villages and are still a big threat. They occupy many cities in Syria and Iraq, they launch attacks here and there; recently they attacked the city of Kirkuk in north Iraq. They were defeated, but there are reports of them putting together forces to attack again. Not many [independent] reports have come out, but we have seen how Daesh behave in their own...

The British student movement and the Kurdish struggle

January brought good news from Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), as ISIS was driven away from the city of Kobane. The fight to drive the killers out of Rojava completely continues, but this is a big victory. Six months ago, the fall of Kobane looked certain. The basic reason for the turnaround is the heroic resistance put up by the people of the area and by the Kurdish fighters. International solidarity also played a role. Unfortunately the National Union of Students, on whose national executive committee I sit, was no part of this. Many hundreds, or at the height of protests maybe thousands, of...

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