Daily Times

From Gaza to Kobane, the devastation being caused by Zionist and Islamist reactionaries shows the crisis of capitalism plunging the whole region into an abyss of bloodshed, mayhem and barbarism. The Islamic State’s hordes are closing in on the besieged town of Kobane on the Turkish-Syrian border. Thousands of terrified Kurds have fled to Turkey in a desperate attempt to bring supplies and reinforcements but find themselves blocked by the Turkish army, which is preventing reinforcements, arms and supplies from crossing the frontier. Turkish tanks are lined up along the border, and there is a heavy police and military presence. Demonstrations of mainly Kurds across Turkey have faced brutal police repression, killing more than 20 protesters.

Despite all the media obfuscation, Turkey is giving direct support to Islamic State killers. Erdoðan is very happy to see the YPG (People’s Protection Units) crushed by Islamic State and if the people of Kobane are massacred in the process, that is only collateral damage. Islamist bigots have been freely transiting Turkey to join the militant group. Erdoðan’s ‘moderate’ Islamist regime has supplied tanks, weapons and ammunition to Islamic State gangs and sold oil for them from the captured fields in northern Syria. When the Turkish parliament authorised the Turkish government to attack “terrorists” in Syria, it was not about Islamic State or al Nusra, or any other jihadist group but a ploy to seize Syrian territory and the crushing of the YPG.

The counterrevolutionary Islamic State gangs are the enemies of the working class and of all progressive elements. Under the black flag of reaction, they are hell-bent on eradicating all traces of civilisation and culture. But this does not mean that the imperialists and NATO really want to defeat this menace. The attitude of the imperialists reeks of hypocrisy. It was imperialism and their despotic reactionary friends the Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and Kuwaitis who armed, encouraged and financed these jihadi gangs in their attempt to overthrow the Assad regime. This has backfired; the imperialists have conjured up terrifying forces they cannot control. This is what they did with al Qaeda and bin Laden who were armed, backed and financed by the CIA in their fight against communism in Afghanistan. The truth is that, even now, Islamic State continues to receive generous supplies of arms and money from the Saudi monarchy and other wealthy Gulf States although in theory they are part of the US-led coalition to fight Islamic State.

It was naïve in the extreme on the part of Öcalan and the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) leaders to imagine that Erdoðan could be relied upon to act in good faith. This treacherous bourgeois politician has designs on the oil fields in northern Iraq, effectively turning this Kurdish enclave into a puppet state of Turkey and annexing Syrian Kurd territory.

Erdogan desires the fall of Kobane and the victory of his de facto allies in Islamic State. The massacre of civilians and the resulting chorus of hypocritical outrage from western capitals will then provide him with the perfect excuse for doing what he intended to do all along: send the Turkish army to seize Kobane and the surrounding area, and set up a so-called buffer zone under Turkish control. This would amount to a Turkish invasion of Syrian territory. The seasoned hypocrites in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin are terrified to be seen as weak. They have backed a half-war they have no capacity to end and will not complain too much about Erdogan’s indiscretion. Of course, it will be a clear violation of Syria’s national sovereignty. But such minor issues never prevented the imperialists from invading Iraq or Afghanistan, so it will not bother them now. By throwing Turkey a bone, they hope to have Turkish boots on the ground inside Syria. These boots are not meant to liberate Syrians or Kurds but to stamp out all traces of Kurdish autonomy. They will be placed on the neck of the people of Syria who will find themselves at the tender mercies of a new Islamist tyranny.

With the cynical connivance of the Turkish government and the deliberate inactivity of NATO, the black flag of reaction has already been hoisted in the city. The real fight against this reaction is being waged on the ground by the YPG, PKK and their allies. The imperialist powers do not want to help the Kurds in any way. The Islamic State may be a headache for Washington and its allies but a real people’s revolution is a far greater threat and this explains why the YPG and PKK still remain on the US’s and European Union’s lists of ‘terrorist’ organisations. If the Islamic State forces succeed in crushing the heroic resistance of the Kurdish fighters, they will extract a bloody revenge on the population and responsibility for this must be placed firmly on the shoulders of the gangsters in Ankara and their backers in the so-called international community. The Turkish government and the US-led coalition are content to stand by and allow the Islamic State butchers to unleash a bloodbath in the city. This is exactly what US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters at a news conference with UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond: “Preventing the fall of Kobane to Islamic State is not a strategic US objective.”

Not an iota of trust can be placed on the criminal Turkish ruling clique that specialises in murder, torture and the oppression of the working class and the Kurds. Only the Kurdish people themselves can be trusted to fight and win their just demands. They will have to cast aside crocodile tears in the western media and capitals, and reach out to the exploited masses of Turkey and the international working class. As a direct result of the imperialist ambitions of Erdoðan and his meddling in Syria, the bloody civil war in that country can easily spill over into Turkey. The violent demonstrations in Turkey are a warning of what the future holds. The collapse of the peace process and the explosion of Kurdish outrage over the massacre of their fellow Kurds in Syria will be expressed in new and bloody explosions.

The mass demonstrations that shook the regime last summer, and which have been erupting periodically ever since, show that the working class in Turkey is striving to overthrow this corrupt and rapacious ruling clique. The corrupt and rapacious Erdoðan regime is in cohorts with US imperialism and Israeli Zionist rulers. Occasionally, they flaunt being Islamists with duplicitous protest statements against Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Actually this regime has imperialist designs of its own in the region. In the final analysis, the solution to the national question in Turkey is directly linked to the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism itself. The explosion of the seething anger in society against the ruling classes will ignite a new wave of class struggle in the whole region and far beyond. Its socialist victory is the only means to end the bloodshed, tyranny, national oppression, class exploitation and despotic regimes.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com