U.S. Imperialism Out of Syria!

Turkish Forces Invade Syrian Kurdistan

Bitter Fruits of Kurdish Alliance with U.S.

OCTOBER 15—At least 160,000 people displaced; hundreds of Kurdish fighters and civilians slaughtered; whole cities besieged, bombarded by Turkish warplanes and artillery, surrounded by Turkish troops and their Arab allies. While the bloodbath currently taking place in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) is at the hands of the regime of Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the carnage is at bottom a consequence of U.S. imperialist intervention in the Near East. It was the U.S. that upended the region with its bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq starting in 2003 and that stoked the fires of the devastating Syrian civil war beginning in 2011. That in turn laid the groundwork for the growth of Islamist forces in the area, including the cutthroats of the Islamic State (ISIS). Responsibility for the current situation also lies with the Kurdish nationalist leaders of the People’s Protection Committees (YPG), the military arm of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which have acted as tools of the U.S. imperialists.

These Kurdish misleaders subordinated the interests of the Kurdish masses to those of U.S. imperialism, a staunch enemy of the working and oppressed peoples of the Near East and of Kurdish self-determination. In late 2014, the “leftist” PYD/YPG entered into a military alliance with Washington, serving as ground troops for the U.S. in Syria and tying the fortunes of the Kurdish population to the American war against ISIS.

The Turkish assault began on October 9, shortly after the Trump administration gave it the nod by announcing the withdrawal of a small contingent of U.S. troops from northern Syria. The declared purpose of the Turkish offensive is to drive the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from the region. The YPG and PYD are allied to the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), labeled “terrorist” by Ankara, Washington and the European powers and a constant target of savage repression by the Turkish state. Turkey seeks to establish a 30-kilometer-deep “safe zone” across most of Rojava. The Erdogan regime’s stated aim is to use this “safe zone” to resettle most of the 3.5 million overwhelmingly Arab Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, which threatens to evict untold numbers of Kurds from their own homeland.

Trump’s decision, together with his announcement that nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers would be redeployed out of Syria to other parts of the Near East, elicited a furious reaction from the political establishment, including the Pentagon and elements of the State Department. From “progressive” Democrat Bernie Sanders, who called the troop removal an “outrage,” to Trump loyalist, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a bipartisan chorus is beating the drums in support of continued U.S. military involvement in Syria.

Behind the capitalist politicians’ cynical cries against the “betrayal” of the Kurds is the realpolitik concern that an American pullback in Syria would work to the benefit of Russia, the object of U.S. foreign policy hysterics. Russia, which backs the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, has called the Turkish assault “unacceptable” and has brokered a deal between the Assad regime and the YPG. As a result, Assad, supported by Russian forces, has deployed troops to the northern region where the Kurds are fighting against the Turkish incursion.

As we have repeatedly asserted in the past, we have no side in the Syrian civil war, which is reactionary on all sides. We do, however, have a side against U.S. imperialism, the greatest force for organized terror on the planet. Working people in the U.S. must demand: All U.S. troops and bases out of Syria and the Near East now! Having for years imposed a crippling embargo on the Syrian regime, Washington has now imposed sanctions on Turkey, including increased tariffs on steel. As Marxist opponents of American imperialist depredation, we oppose these sanctions. We also demand the immediate withdrawal from Syria of the regional powers Turkey, Russia and Iran.

In the 2016 and 2018 Turkish incursions into Syria, we did not take a side between Washington’s NATO partner, Turkey, and Washington’s proxies, the YPG. This position was based on the fact that the Kurdish nationalists subordinated themselves to the U.S. Today, the situation is fluid and uncertain. Notwithstanding declarations by the imperialists that the Turkish invasion will “revive” ISIS, the reality is that ISIS has been defeated, its “caliphate” turned to dust and its remaining supporters reduced mostly to terror cells. Under these circumstances, Trump views the pact with the YPG as a losing proposition for the U.S., while other sections of the ruling class still see it as an advantage to further American interests.

The fact that the U.S. left the Kurds in northern Syria to the mercies of the Turkish military, combined with the agreement between the YPG and the Assad regime, indicates that the U.S.-Kurdish alliance may be unraveling. As we wrote in WV No. 1127 (9 February 2018), the last time Turkey invaded Syria, “Once the imperialists decide they no longer need their Kurdish nationalist stooges, they will discard them, as they have repeatedly done before.” Nonetheless, it is still unclear, especially given the intense division within the American ruling class, whether the U.S. has definitively ended the alliance. For example, several prominent Democrats in Congress, with some Republican support, are proposing a resolution to reverse Trump’s troop withdrawal from Syria. Thus, we do not as yet have a basis to take a position on whether we have a side with the PYD/YPG against Turkey.

What is clear is that the necessary prerequisite for Kurdish national liberation is uncompromising opposition to imperialism. The national liberation of the Kurds, who are divided among and oppressed by Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, is a just cause. We call for a united, independent Kurdistan, and would also support Kurdish independence from individual states. The struggle for Kurdish self-determination is a crucial part of our perspective to mobilize the proletariat in the region in the revolutionary fight for a socialist federation of the Near East that would include a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan.

Today, reformists like the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), formerly including Socialist Alternative in the U.S., wax eloquent about how “the YPG’s ill-fated alliance with the US shows” that “reliance on imperialist powers will not bring peace, prosperity or security, let alone lead to genuine self-determination for Kurds” (socialistworld.net, 12 October). Previously, the CWI downplayed and certainly did not oppose this alliance. And neither the CWI statement nor a similar one on Socialist Alternative’s website (10 October) even hints that the U.S. should get out of Syria. This fits neatly with the stance of liberals in the U.S. and abroad who decry the American “betrayal” of the Kurds and seek to keep the alliance going.

The real betrayal of the Kurdish masses was carried out by the PYD/YPG leadership. As we warned in WV No. 1055 (31 October 2014) after they announced their unholy alliance with the U.S.: “By selling their souls to the imperialists as well as to various regional bourgeois regimes, Kurdish leaders help perpetuate the divide-and-rule stratagems that inevitably inflame communal, national and religious tensions and serve to reinforce the oppression of the Kurdish masses.” A glaring example was the 2017 U.S. military assault on Raqqa, in which Kurdish fighters took the Syrian Sunni-Arab city as American warplanes destroyed 80 percent of it, displaced over 250,000 civilians and killed nearly 2,000. With the Turkish-led bloodletting in Rojava today, the long dispossessed Kurdish people are once again being made to pay the price for the crimes of the nationalist misleaders.

In a London protest against the Turkish incursion, demonstrators told our comrades that the PYD, faced with ISIS, had no choice but to ally with the U.S. In a 13 October op-ed in Foreign Policy, the commander of the SDF makes it crystal clear that the Kurdish nationalists in Syria not only welcomed Washington’s “generous support” but also continue to appeal to the U.S. to achieve “a political solution for Syria.” His conclusion says it all: “Is the United States still our ally?”

In fact, the real potential allies of the Kurdish toiling masses are the working people of the Near East. The struggle for Kurdish national liberation, together with the fight against imperialist occupation, could powerfully cut against ethnic and national division and point in the direction of a proletarian perspective. By championing Kurdish self-determination, the working masses of the Near East would be taking a stand against their own capitalist exploiters and helping to undercut U.S. imperialism’s capacity to manipulate the suffering of the Kurdish masses to further its interests. The key task for Marxists is to build multiethnic and multinational revolutionary workers parties that champion the cause of all the oppressed. The perspective of the International Communist League is to win class-conscious militants to build such parties as sections of a reforged Fourth International.

In Turkey, anti-Kurdish chauvinism is a defining element of Turkish nationalism and a key prop of capitalist rule. Faced with growing discontent over the declining economy, Erdogan launched the anti-Kurdish assault to shore up his position. If the proletariat in Turkey is to ever liberate itself from capitalist exploitation, it must take up the fight for Kurdish self-determination, which includes defending the PKK against Turkish state repression.

The fight for the genuine emancipation of the exploited and oppressed in the Near East also requires a perspective for socialist revolution in the imperialist centers. In Germany, Kurds and Turks represent an important component of the working class, and can constitute a bridge between the struggles of workers there and in the Near East. In the U.S., the multiracial working class has every interest in opposing the crimes of its exploiters. The capitalist rulers’ drive to assert their domination of the oil-rich Near East goes hand in hand with their insatiable drive to wrest ever-more profit out of the labor of workers at home. As the U.S. section of the ICL, the Spartacist League dedicates itself to building a multiracial workers party committed to proletarian rule.