Kurdistan

Help the Kurds defeat ISIS

Fighting has continued across Syria and Iraq between ISIS (“Islamic State”) forces and Kurdish militia and Iraqi military. Airstrikes around the town Kobane (in Syria near the Turkish border) of by the US-led military coalition have intensified, and the march of ISIS has been slowed. However the airstrikes have not forced back ISIS in either Iraq or Syria. The prospect of a drawn-out conflict remains. Four hundred ISIS fighters are reported to have entered the Iraqi towns of Fallujah and nearby Karma. The town of Hit, 80 miles from Baghdad, has also been claimed by ISIS. While ISIS has been...

Students and solidarity with the Kurds!

The National Union of Students, compared to recent years, has a stronger base of “left-wing” activists and full time officers on its National Executive Committee. This makes it hard to see why they recently voted down a motion to make solidarity with the Kurdish people. That motion was written by activists in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (including NEC member Daniel Cooper) and by Roza Salih, a member of the Scottish executive committee of NUS. A similar motion had been passed by NUS Scotland before the NEC meeting. Roza is a left-wing Iraqi-Kurdish woman, who has been campaigning to make...

Solidarity with the Kurds!

SHEFFIELD Around 300 Kurds from across Kurdish territory in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria demonstrated outside City Hall on 12th October. The rally was lively and, whilst there were few speeches, protestors engaged passers-by with leaflets and with clear demands on Turkey to allow fighters, aid and weapons in to Kobane through a corridor across the Syrian border. This rally followed a demonstration the week before in which 3 Kurdish protestors were arrested by South Yorkshire Police under the Terrorism Act, for vocal support of the PKK, before being released. Feminist and leftist Kurdish...

Anti-Islamophobia, genuine and cynical: a reply to Aaron Kiely on Kurdistan (and Bosnia and Kosova and Afghanistan and Chechnya)

During the recent row in the student movement about Kurdistan, five members of NUS national executive who are active in NUS’s Black Students’ Campaign issued a statement . This article is not a response to that statement as such. What pushed me to write this was who one of the five signatories was: Aaron Kiely, a member of the "Student Broad Left" group, a front for Socialist Action . In the context of the rise of ISIS, the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and Western intervention, the statement talks about “blatant Islamophobia” and “the demonisation of Muslim peoples”. To put it bluntly, this is...

Help the Kurds against ISIS!

Kurds and their supporters demand that the Kurdish Peshmerga, YPG (People’s Protection Units) and other militia be armed with heavy weapons, armour-piercing bullets and tanks in order to resist the ISIS ultra-Islamists who threaten them with massacre in Kobane (near Syria's border with Turkey) and elsewhere. Masrour Barzani of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq told the BBC: “We have not asked for any ground forces. Our Peshmergas are here, they are giving their lives, and all we need from the rest of the world is to help us with effective weapons to protect these people”. Kobane remains...

"It is the Kurdish people fighting, but this is a much bigger issue": interview with Roza Salih

Roza Salih, who is Vice President Diversity & Advocacy at University of Strathclyde Students' Association in Glasgow and NUS Scotland's International Students' Officer, has been organising protests in solidarity with the Kurdish struggle. She spoke to Solidarity . This battle is now focused on Kobane, but it is a much bigger issue, bigger than Kurdistan. If Kobane falls “Islamic State” will increase their power and strength; the war will escalate; there will be more battles and massacres. It is the Kurdish people fighting now, but this an issue for the entire international community. If we can...

Solidarity with the Kurds is our first concern

As fighters from “Islamic State” (IS) enter the besieged Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, Kurds abroad have been demonstratiing in several major European cities. In a conflict between the democratic, secular Kurdish forces and the fascistic barbarism of IS, Kurds should expect the support and solidarity of the UK left. Over the summer, British socialist organisations were rightly a dynamic force in building demonstrations against Israel’s murderous attacks on Gaza, with up to 150,000 marching in London alone. Like the Palestinians, the Kurds are an oppressed nation struggling for self...

Syrian Kurds face ISIS massacre

Tuesday 7 October: Forces of the “Islamic State” movement (ISIS) have entered the Kurdish city of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border. After taking a hill commanding the city on 5 October, ISIS has now begun to enter at ground level. Kobani had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees and was touted at one time as a safe haven for those escaping IS. Previous incursions of IS members into Kobani had been quashed by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), but it looks like street by street fighting will now see the city taken, leading to a massacre of Kurds and other minorities who have...

Syrian Kurds under threat of ISIS massacre

Tens of thousands of Syrian Kurdish refugees poured into Turkey at the end of September, fleeing an attack by ISIS on the city of Kobani. Kobani is one of Syria’s major Kurdish cities. It is close to the border, in an area which from 2012 until now has been controlled by Syrian-Kurdish forces. Al Jazeera reported a total of 138,000 refugees from Kobani up to 29 September. At least 105 villages around Kobani have already been captured by ISIS. The Iraqi Kurdish website Rudaw reports: “Large numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants withdrew from [the traditionally Yezidi] Shingal region [of Iraq]...

Help Kurds and Iraqi left resist ISIS

The ultra-Islamist group ISIS is a threat to all the people of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Syria, as well as to the people who live in the territory where it currently rules. It openly declares itself a “caliphate”, hostile to democracy as a “western” idea. It represses and persecutes religious minorities — Christians, Yazidis, others — and Sunni Muslim Arabs who dissent. Summary killing of people who refuse to pledge allegiance to ISIS has been common across Iraq and Syria. So have been persecution of non-Sunni religious groups and a special tax on Christians The coalition of states assembled...

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