Workers Vanguard No. 1109
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7 April 2017
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Raqqa, Mosul
U.S. Slaughter in Near East
The long list of U.S. imperialist war crimes in Iraq and Syria is growing by the day. On March 17, a U.S. airstrike in the Iraqi city of Mosul killed over 100 men, women and children taking shelter in the basement of a house. That week, some 240 civilians were killed by the U.S. in that neighborhood as part of the battle by the imperialists and Iraqi government forces to drive out the Islamic State (ISIS) from the city. An estimated 400,000 civilians are trapped in the war zone in the densely populated areas of western Mosul, having been set up for wanton slaughter after the Iraqi government directed them not to flee.
In Syria, a U.S. drone fired missiles and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a religious gathering at a mosque in a town near Aleppo on March 16, massacring more than 45 people. Less than a week later, a U.S. airstrike killed at least 33 people who had taken shelter in a school near the Syrian city of Raqqa. In March alone, the coalition of U.S. and other imperialist forces together with local proxies butchered over 1,400 civilians in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, in Yemen the U.S. stepped up its military strikes against alleged al Qaeda targets and increased military aid to the Sunni theocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which is waging a reactionary war against Houthi-led forces. Last month, the U.S. launched more airstrikes in Yemen than in all of last year. Down with U.S. imperialism! All U.S. troops out of the Near East now!
Apologists for the capitalist Democratic Party claim that the Trump administration has lifted Obama-era restrictions supposedly aimed at minimizing civilian casualties. In fact, the recent carnage is a direct continuation of Obama’s murderous wars, and the rules of engagement had already been loosened on his watch. Since August 2014, the U.S. coalition has carried out over 19,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria with more than 72,000 bombs and missiles. Working people should have no illusions that the Democrats are any less a party of racist U.S. imperialism than the Republicans. The only way out of the perpetual cycle of imperialist wars, occupations and bloodletting is the fight to end the capitalist system through workers revolution.
In its campaign against ISIS in Iraq, the U.S. has enlisted the forces of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government together with Shia militias and Kurdish pesh merga fighters. Imperialist machinations have sharply intensified the conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The war against the Sunni-based ISIS has served as a pretext for Shia forces to ethnically cleanse majority Sunni cities in Iraq, with Kirkuk province alone receiving some 500,000 displaced Sunni Arabs. The heavily Sunni Arab population of Mosul faces a similar fate. In Syria, Kurdish forces that took over ISIS-controlled villages carried out a campaign of collective punishment and communalist expulsions of Arabs and Turkmen. ISIS, of course, is infamous for its own communalist slaughter and expulsion of Shias, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians and others.
As Marxists, we have no side in the intercommunal conflict in Iraq nor in Syria’s squalid civil war between the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad and various Islamist-dominated rebels. But we do have a side against the U.S. imperialists—the main enemy not only of the Syrian and Iraqi peoples but of working and oppressed masses around the world.
The gruesome crimes of ISIS pale in comparison to those of the world’s biggest terrorists—the U.S. imperialists, who are responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions. We are implacable opponents of everything the ISIS cutthroats stand for. But we recognize that when they inflict blows against the U.S. occupiers and their proxies—the Iraqi army, Shia militias and Kurdish armed forces in Iraq and Syria—such acts coincide with the interests of the international working class, including in the U.S. At the same time, we do not imbue these repugnant forces with “anti-imperialist” credentials. While our main opposition is to the U.S. and other imperialists, we also oppose the capitalist regional powers (Russia, Iran, Turkey) that have become involved in the conflict and demand that they, too, get out.
The Assault on Raqqa
As in Mosul, in Raqqa some 300,000 people are trapped; U.S. coalition forces have dropped leaflets threatening residents with airstrikes if they flee the city by crossing the Euphrates River. Coalition airstrikes hit the northern neighborhoods of Raqqa almost daily. In early March, the U.S. deployed hundreds of troops to Syria, joining the several hundred Special Operations forces who have been there for months. The U.S. also recently deployed a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System trained on Raqqa. In addition to the 6,000 troops currently stationed in Iraq and Syria, backed by thousands of private military contractors (i.e., mercenaries), the U.S. is sending 2,500 troops to a staging base in Kuwait from which they can join the assaults on the ISIS strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa.
Raqqa is a historic city. It served as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty during the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809 A.D.), who ruled over an empire that stretched from northwest Africa to Persia. He was best known for establishing the legendary Baghdad library Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom). Under al-Rashid’s rule the city enjoyed a high degree of urban development, where palaces, mosques and a water management system were constructed. His time was marked by the flourishing of Islamic arts, culture, science and music. Harun al-Rashid is also remembered for his love of wine and his lavish lifestyle, which inspired many of the salacious tales in The Arabian Nights. Today Raqqa is the self-proclaimed capital of the abhorrent ISIS and faces massive destruction in the multisided conflict in Syria, with every major power involved in the war competing for its capture.
Assad’s forces, supported by Russia, are positioned on the outskirts of Raqqa. Turkey is backing the Syrian Islamist opponents of Assad, the Free Syrian Army, to take the city. To Turkey’s chagrin, the U.S. is relying on the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in its assault on ISIS positions near Raqqa. The SDF is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Committees (YPG) and includes smaller non-Kurdish forces. The YPG is the military wing of the Syrian-based Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is allied to the petty-bourgeois nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey.
The Turkish government, along with the U.S., considers the PKK a “terrorist” organization and escalated its campaign to crush the organization in 2015, when Turkish forces launched a furious assault on Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey. In August 2016, the Turkish military moved into Syria—ostensibly to fight ISIS—in order to prevent PYD/YPG fighters from linking the two semiautonomous Kurdish regions in northeast and northwest Syria, which border the Kurdish regions of Turkey. The U.S. imperialists, committed enemies of Kurdish independence, agree with Turkey that Kurdish-held regions should remain noncontiguous, even as they continue to use the PYD/YPG as their ground troops in Syria.
The Fight for Kurdish Self-Determination
The Kurdish people, whose homeland is the mountainous area straddling the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have long suffered murderous national oppression at the hands of the capitalist regimes in these countries as well as the imperialist rulers. Through years of struggle, the Kurds have clearly demonstrated their desire for independence. We of the International Communist League call for a united, independent Kurdistan. We also support Kurdish independence from individual capitalist states—e.g., the right of Kurds in Turkey to secede. However, in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish nationalist leaders have subordinated the just fight for self-determination to their alliance with U.S. imperialism. In so doing, they help perpetuate the divide-and-rule stratagems that inevitably inflame communal, national and religious tensions and serve to reinforce the oppression of the Kurdish masses.
In Turkey, where Kurds form a sizable component of the proletariat, it is vital for the working class to fight against Kurdish oppression, which is a key prop of Turkish nationalism and capitalist rule. If the proletariat of Turkey is ever to liberate itself from capitalist exploitation, it must take up the struggle for Kurdish self-determination. Essential to this perspective is the forging of a binational Turkish-Kurdish revolutionary workers party committed to the struggle for working-class rule.
Indeed, it is in the interest of the working classes of the Near East to champion the fight for Kurdish self-determination. In taking up this struggle, the proletariat of the region would strike a blow for its own emancipation from its capitalist exploiters and would undercut U.S. imperialism’s capacity to manipulate the Kurds’ grievances in order to further dominate the Near East. It would also go a long way toward breaking Kurdish militants from the nationalist politics of reliance on imperialist and regional bourgeois patrons, which invariably lead to disaster for the Kurdish people, and winning them to a revolutionary proletarian internationalist program. We seek to build Marxist workers parties throughout the region that fight for the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East that would include a socialist republic of united Kurdistan.
Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!
The U.S. working class must be won to the understanding that its enemy is its “own” ruling class and that it needs to oppose imperialist aggression abroad. The same ruling class that is raining death and destruction on the neocolonial masses is also waging war on the livelihoods of working people and the oppressed at home. What is desperately needed is class struggle against the capitalist rulers, both to defend the interests of workers at home and to hinder the ambitions of U.S. imperialism abroad. The Spartacist League aims to win the most conscious layers of the working class to the understanding that what is necessary to put an end to exploitation, racial oppression and endless imperialist slaughter is the overturn of the U.S. capitalist order through socialist revolution.
That means tapping into the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American capitalist society: the anger of the oppressed black and minority populations who face mass incarceration and are gunned down by the police on America’s streets; the glaring disparity in wealth between the many at the bottom and the few at the top; the fear of joblessness, homelessness, loss of health insurance and pensions that plagues tens of millions of American workers. To harness this anger into a struggle against the capitalist system, it is necessary to forge a revolutionary multiracial workers party—section of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International. Built in opposition to all capitalist parties, such a party would lead the struggle for working-class rule in the belly of the imperialist beast. Only victorious workers revolutions on an international scale can end imperialist slaughter and ethnic bloodletting and open the road to eliminating material scarcity and building an egalitarian socialist society.
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