Iraq

The Stop The War Coalition enjoyed its heyday around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but has regained some prominence since David Cameron’s government first proposed the bombing of Syria in August 2013. Feeding on perceptions that UK involvement in the Middle East has led to prolonged campaigns of bombing, loss of life, and the creation of unstable regimes, with very little of the humanity supposed to exist in “humanitarian intervention”, the STWC has called a number of demonstrations and got some media coverage for its opposition to the UK and US involvement in coalition bombing of...

Jeremy Corbyn was right in his response to the Chilcot report on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, published on 6 July. The invasion was “an act of military aggression launched on a false pretext... [which] led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions of refugees. It devastated Iraq’s infrastructure and society. The occupation fostered a lethal sectarianism... that turned into a civil war... “While the governing class got it so horrifically wrong — many of our people actually got it right. “It wasn’t that we those of us who opposed the war underestimated the...

The vote in the 23 June referendum that Britain should leave the European Union was a victory for the forces of reaction and historical regression. It has fed the fires of reactionary nationalism and chauvinism in other EU countries, people who want to go back to a Europe of competing, and possibly warring, nation-states, to what degree and with what consequences remains to be seen. In Britain, it has triggered a wave of attacks on migrants. The move to unite Europe economically and then, more slowly, politically, began with the Coal and Steel Community of the initial six countries in 1951 and...

Richard Nixon famously told a press conference that he was “not a crook”. And in the sense that the late US president was never found guilty of anything whatsoever, the statement is factually incontestable. Likewise, Tony Blair is not a war criminal, even though contention to the contrary is a longstanding commonplace among anti-war campaigners, repeated endlessly on social media to this day. Britain’s former prime minister finds the very suggestion deeply offensive, as one supposes anyone might. He genuinely cannot see why he has ended up as the guy whose face is on the placard, as he put it...

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...

Aso Kamal, Kurdish socialist activist, spoke to Solidarity about class struggle in Iraqi Kurdistan. There is a recession in Iraqi Kurdistan, and there are strikes and demonstrations happening all the time. Since 2006, Kurdistan has had a share in the world oil market. From 2013, the oil price fell and the budget of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has fallen. The price was $100/barrel but now it is more like $30/barrel. So there is a currency crisis and an economic crisis. Now the KRG is $22 billion in debt. They are selling one million barrels of oil a day, from Suleimaniya, Kirkuk...

Across areas in south-eastern Turkey, areas that are overwhelmingly ethnically Kurdish, a virtual civil war is going on. The right wing Turkish AKP government’s response has been what they describe as “security operations”. These were first launched in the Sur district of Diyarbakır and the Cizre and Silopi districts of Şırnak in mid-December. The alleged target of this offensive is the Kurdish PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), which had an on-off ceasefire with the Turkish government in the last few years, whilst Kurds increasingly turned to legal political campaigning through their party, the HDP...

Following attacks in Paris and Beirut in November last year, along with the shooting down of a Russian passenger jet, Daesh has stepped up its deadly operations outside of the claimed borders of its “Caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. Reflecting tactics that have long been the preferred method of Al Qaeda, Daesh claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Sarinah shopping mall in Jakarta Indonesia on 14 January. The attack, which killed four and injured many others, took place near foreign embassies and the UN and hotels used by foreign tourists. Indonesia is not the most fertile recruiting...

Daesh has since its evolution from Al Qaeda in Iraq concentrated on the “near enemy”, on sectarian killing of Shia Muslims, non-compliant Sunnis, and other minorities, and conquest of contiguous territory to form its “Islamic State”. The “far enemy” was not a priority for Daesh. Now there is a shift in the style and type of attack that Daesh and its supporters carry out. The downing of a Russian plane, the bombing of Beirut, and the bombings and mass shootings in Paris, are more like Al Qaeda attacks such as the 2004 Madrid bombing. Daesh do not follow the guidance issued by Al Qaeda in 2013...

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...