Vol. 79/No. 40      November 9, 2015

Despite strong objections from Washington, Baghdad has invited Moscow to conduct airstrikes in Iraq. Washington insists that Assad must eventually go, but its bombing campaign has been aimed against Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. The bulk of the U.S.-led coalition’s 7,300 bombings over the past year have occurred in Iraq.

More than 3,300 U.S. troops are stationed as “advisers” to the Iraqi military. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Oct. 23 that U.S. special operations forces will conduct more aggressive raids against Islamic State in Iraq.

The crisis in Syria and Iraq stems from imperialist domination of the region. After the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, London and Paris carved out new, artificial national boundaries and divided control between themselves. The imperialist rulers split up territory populated by the Kurdish people between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, denying the Kurds their own state.

After World War II, a new “world order” was put into place by Washington, the new dominant imperialist power. That “order” is now coming apart.

Paving the way for Moscow’s intervention in Syria and the emergence of the Islamic State was the political exhaustion of the bourgeois nationalist forces that rose throughout the Mideast after World War II, combined with betrayals of worker and peasant struggles by Stalinist parties in the region. With radical-sounding rhetoric, the Arab Baath Socialist Party came to power in Syria in a coup. The Assad family took control in 1970, imposing a brutal capitalist regime backed by Moscow and often the Syrian Communist Party.

In 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians took part in mobilizations demanding political rights and an end to the regime. Assad crushed the protests, using bombs, chemical weapons and bloody repression.

Islamic State, a terrorist split from al-Qaeda backed by military commanders who previously served Saddam Hussein in Iraq, stepped into the political vacuum this created. They seized a sizable piece of Syria and then parts of western Iraq.

While targeting opposition fighters, the Russian government’s so-called precision bombing has taken a heavy toll on civilians. At least 120,000 people living in Aleppo, Hama and Idlib provinces have been displaced this month, the United Nations reports, adding to the more than 11 million already driven from their homes by nearly five years of civil war.

A report released by Human Rights Watch said Russian airstrikes Oct. 15 killed at least 59 civilians in Ter Ma’aleh, a village in northern Homs. At least seven medical facilities have been hit since Russian airstrikes began, according to Physicians for Human Rights, including Sarmin hospital in Idlib province, killing at least 15.

Some of the heaviest fighting has been around Aleppo, where armed opposition forces took control after Assad’s assaults crushed the public protest movement. But intensive Russian airstrikes combined with ground attacks have pushed them back from a number of surrounding towns and villages. At the same time, Islamic State has been able to take advantage of the situation to deal blows against these forces as well as seize several areas around southern and eastern Aleppo from pro-Syrian regime forces.

Washington, Moscow confer

That same day Moscow reached agreement with the government of Jordan, which receives about $1 billion in U.S. aid each year, to coordinate military actions in Syria. “We have no problem whatsoever with this,” Kerry said, “and it may even help make certain that the targets are the targets that they ought to be.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the media Oct. 24 that Moscow is willing to cooperate with “patriotic” opposition groups like the Free Syrian Army. “Their words are not like their actions,” Issam al-Rayyes, spokesman for the Southern Front of the FSA, told Reuters. “How can we talk to them while they are hitting us?”

Moscow began operating an intelligence center out of Baghdad at the end of September that the Iranian and Syrian governments also participate in. On Oct. 23 the Iraqi government authorized Russian airstrikes against Islamic State within its borders. The decision came days after Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Baghdad to seek assurances that only U.S.-led bombardments would be maintained.

Turkish rulers attack Kurds

Turkish army units carried out attacks against Kurdish forces in Syria fighting IS and the Assad regime, shelling People’s Protection Units (YPG) positions in Tal Abyad near the border Oct. 24.  
 
 
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