Syrian Kurds under threat of ISIS massacre

Submitted by AWL on 30 September, 2014 - 5:13 Author: Simon Nelson

Tens of thousands of Syrian Kurdish refugees poured into Turkey at the end of September, fleeing an attack by ISIS on the city of Kobani.

Kobani is one of Syria’s major Kurdish cities. It is close to the border, in an area which from 2012 until now has been controlled by Syrian-Kurdish forces.

Al Jazeera reported a total of 138,000 refugees from Kobani up to 29 September. At least 105 villages around Kobani have already been captured by ISIS.

The Iraqi Kurdish website Rudaw reports: “Large numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants withdrew from [the traditionally Yezidi] Shingal region [of Iraq] (29 September) and headed to the Syrian border”.

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said that Turkey’s troops could join battle against ISIS. He demands from the USA that it declare and protect a safe-haven zone on the Syrian side of the Syria-Turkey border, impose of a no-fly zone to protect the refugees there, and organise for Turkish participation in training and equipping the Syrian opposition.

So far the Pentagon has said that safe havens and no-fly zones are no part of its plans.

The resistance to the ISIS attack for now depends solely on the Kurdish nationalist forces of the YPG (linked to the PKK in Turkey). A decisive issue is the arming of the Kurdish forces, who do not have the military firepower of ISIS.

Following the vote in the House of Commons on 26 September the UK has joined, the US, France, and others in air strikes on ISIS targets in Iraq.

The US is continuing, with the support of the Gulf Arab states, also to bomb targets in Syria which it identifies with ISIS or other groups akin to Al Qaeda.

The stated aim of the bombing is to destroy ISIS infrastructure, weapons, and capacities.

The record of the USA’s bombing against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the political fact that the USA enters this conflict as the assistant-from-the-air of the Shia-sectarian Iraqi government in Baghdad and of corrupt despotisms like Saudi Arabia, mandates no confidence in the campaign.

A stance like that of Socialist Worker of 27 September — describing the bombing as “the imperial powers... reimpos[ing] their hegemony over the region”, and denouncing it under the headline “Say No To War”, as if there would be no war without the bombing — amounts to backhanded complaisance towards ISIS.

However, the bombing so far has come nowhere near to destroying ISIS’s capacities. ISIS has not even been driven onto the defensive, but continues to seek to extend its murderous sectarian rule, as around Kobani.

At Amariya al-Falluja, a town 25 miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi army is reported to be just about stalling an ISIS advance towards Baghdad from Falluja, the first city in Iraq to fall into ISIS control. Air strikes have supported the Iraqi army.

We can have no confidence in the air strikes, or in the political thieves’-kitchen coalition which underpins them, as the effective way to destroy IS. But lead slogans like “Stop the bombing” are wrong.

They put the focus on negative opposition to the US-led coalition rather than on positive support for the people at immediate risk from ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

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