Vol. 79/No. 29      August 17, 2015

Turkish bombing — with Washington’s full support — of fighters for Kurdish rights was met with protests last week in Paris, London, Berlin, New York and Turkey. These actions should be applauded, repeated and emulated.

The airstrikes continue and the situation is critical. Hundreds have been killed or injured and more than 1,000 arrested in Turkey.

Kurdish fighters have shown time after time that they are the most effective force combating the advance of the reactionary Islamic State. While the Kurds fight for their homeland — denied them by the imperialist powers and capitalist governments in the region for a century — and for a civil society where national minorities are respected and women’s rights valued, Islamic State jihadists carry out attacks on civilians and promote a repressive society based on Sharia law where women are treated at best as chattels and non-Sunni Muslims and Christians are killed or enslaved.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bloody bombing offensive against camps of the Kurdistan Workers Party has the green light from the U.S. rulers. Like the Turkish capitalists, Washington wants at all costs to stop or slow down the march toward the formation of an independent, united and sovereign Kurdish homeland.

The Kurdish people are the largest nationality in the world without their own state. Every step toward the formation of an independent Kurdistan is an advance for the working class and a blow against imperialist domination in the region.

Ankara and Washington are threatened by advances made by the increasingly confident Kurdish people recapturing Syrian towns taken by Islamic State. And the gains of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party in the recent Turkish elections, which won support from non-Kurds and set back Erdogan’s ambitions to consolidate more power in his own hands, demonstrated growing solidarity with the Kurdish struggle in Turkey.

Defending the Kurds is in the interests of steelworkers and communications workers fighting boss concession demands in the U.S., of people fighting police brutality and insisting that Black lives matter, and of supporters of women’s rights defending the right to choose abortion. The same dictatorship of capital we are fighting here is attacking and undermining the Kurdish struggle in the Mideast.

We urge Militant readers to contact Kurdish organizations in your area and join protests. If there are no such actions planned, join with others to organize demonstrations, speak-outs and forums demanding Washington and Ankara stop their attacks on the Kurdish people.
 
 
Related articles:
Stop the murderous assault on Kurds!
Washington, NATO back Turkish gov’t bombings
NY protest condemns bombing of Kurds
 
 
 
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