Iraq

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...

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...

Workers' Liberty has worked with Iraqi Kurdish socialists active in the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees to produce a bulletin for the 18 October TUC demo, appealing for solidarity with our sisters and brothers in the Middle East. It includes details of upcoming solidarity meetings and actions, campaign info, model motions for unions and campaign groups, an IFIR appeal for funds for aid, and political background on the Kurdish struggle. Click to download here .

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...

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...

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...

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...

The IS (“Islamic State” movement), originally ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), has now eclipsed Al-Qaeda in ferocity and publicity. How? ISIS has been written off as a product of Western and Syrian intelligence agencies managing to pull together a number of disenfranchised senior military figures who have had expert training. Much of that narrative just isn’t true. The most important figure in the rise of ISIS died five years before it came into being. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. who would lead the proto-ISIS group until he was killed by a US airstrike in 2006, travelled as young...

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...

Six and a half million Syrians are now internally displaced. Two and a half million have fled to Turkey, Jordan and the Lebanon. After up to 200,000 deaths since mass protests against the regime began in 2011, the use of chemical weapons against his own people, and the attempted starvation of civilians in opposition controlled areas, Assad still remains relatively firmly in control of a rump Syrian state. Some politicians in the USA and Europe are even starting to recommend an alliance with Assad to stop ISIS (the “Islamic State” movement). However, direct links are unlikely to begin anytime...