No to the Assad regime in Syria!
Yes to Kurdish national self determination!
Many decades of imperialist intervention, primarily but only by the USA, have turned the Middle East into a permanent war zone . Iraq has been effectively destroyed with hundreds of thousands of casualties, followed by an avalanche of sectarian conflict. Israel, imperialism’s principle agent in the area, has been given carte blanche to construct an apartheid regime and slaughter the Palestinians. The other key US ally, Saudi Arabia, is destroying Yemen and threatening millions with starvation. We have to learn from this disastrous experience and oppose all calls for US, British or other imperialist intervention, including under the guise of the UN, and oppose our own government’s complicity with imperialism via Shannon.
Opposition to imperialism, does not however, mean support for barbaric local regimes in the area or turning a blind eye to their atrocities on their own people. The Assad regime in Syria, which was always a brutal dictatorship, responded to a mass people’s revolt in 2013 with horrible repression plunging the country into civil war, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. Assad was assisted in this mass murder by Russian imperialism which is also trying to carve out spaces for itself in the area. We condemn the Assad regime and look forward to its overthrow by the Syrian people.
Another major victim of imperialism in the Middle East are the Kurdish people. One of the main national groupings in the area their territory was carved up by imperialism and divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The Kurdish people have long been brutally oppressed by all these regimes. Moreover, they have continually been used to by the various big powers to serve their respective imperialist and sub-imperialist interests. Socialists should strongly support the right of Kurdish people to self-determination and to a free and independent Kurdistan. We also think that achieving this is most likely to occur in the context of mass people’s revolt from below across the Middle East.