Working people everywhere have a stake in backing Kurds defending Afrin from the Turkish rulers’ invasion and bombardment. The capitalist rulers in the U.S., EU and Russia, and in countries across the region, have stood aside while Ankara has unleashed its assault, whose goal is to crush the struggle for Kurdish national rights. Join or help organize protests to demand an immediate halt to the bombings and the withdrawal of all Turkish forces.
The propertied rulers in Ankara — like their counterparts throughout the region — fear the heroic struggle by Kurds in Syria for their national rights will infect their own people.
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad abandoned Afrin in 2012. After crushing the 2011 popular uprising against his rule, Assad unleashed a seven-year-long war against those who sought to resist. Thousands of refugees seeking protection from attacks by his forces, backed by Moscow’s airstrikes and Tehran-backed ground troops, have fled to Afrin.
Kurds — the largest nationality in the world without their own country — have faced repression from the capitalist rulers in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, who keep them divided and without a homeland. Washington was complicit with the Iraqi rulers’ assaults after Kurds there voted overwhelmingly for independence last October.
“The Kurdish people have come to the center stage of world politics as never before, not primarily as victims, but as courageous and determined fighters for national rights,” explains Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary, in his article “Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq” in New International no. 7.
The U.S. rulers have a long record of using, then abandoning the Kurds and will do so again whenever it serves their interests.
The U.S. government continues its deployment of troops in Syria. This does not advance the interests of working people there, but defends the prerogatives of the U.S. propertied owners, the most powerful capitalist ruling class in the world. Today they are trying to counter the rising influence of their capitalist rivals in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.
When working people in the region seek to fight for their class interests — from the Kurds in Syria and Iraq to working people in Iran protesting the deaths and misery inflicted by Tehran’s clerical rulers and their counterrevolutionary wars abroad — they deserve working-class solidarity.
Halt Ankara’s assaults on Afrin! End all sanctions imposed by Baghdad on the Kurdistan Regional Government! U.S. out of the Middle East!