https://socialistaction.org/2018/03/17/syrian-kurds-begin-break-with-u-s-imperialism/
Syrian Kurds begin break with U.S. imperialism
/ 1 day ago
March 2018 Trump Erdogan
U.S. President Trump discussed the situation in Syria with Turkish
President Recep Erdogan in November 2017.
By JEFF MACKLER
The U.S. imperialist war against the Syrian government and people stood
exposed as never before when the fighters it had backed to the hilt in
the name of fighting the Islamic State (ISIS), the Kurdish-led Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF), essentially switched sides and signed a pact
with the Bashar Assad government. The objective? To join forces against
Turkey’s invasion of northwestern Syria.
Last month, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) stated, “After a
month of our forces’ epic resistance to the Turkish invasion and the
terrorist organization allied with it,” the YPG asked the “Syrian
government and its army to perform its duty by participating in
defending Afrin and protecting the Syrian borders. The Syrian government
has answered our call … and sent military units on Tuesday, February
20th, to be stationed along the borders and to help in defending the
unity of the Syrian territories and its borders.”
A Feb. 28 New York Times article confirmed the dramatic shift in the
relationship of forces that had been largely concealed or minimized by
the warmongering corporate media over the past few weeks. The Times
wrote, “Thousands of Kurdish fighters and commanders who make up the
backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces in recent weeks have diverted
[defected] to defend Afrin, in Syria’s northwest, where other Kurdish
militia are facing sharp attacks from Turkish troops.” These “Turkish
troops” include the so-called Free Syrian Army, organized and funded by
U.S. imperialism to overthrow the Syrian government. Thus, the world
became witness to the spectacle of NATO-allied Turkish jets raining
death and destruction on the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian Army while “Free
Syrian Army” troops slaughtered both on the ground in the same Afrin region.
The Times, referring to the escalated fighting in Syria as akin in
intensity to World War II, reported that U.S. jets attacked
Syrian-allied Russian forces and Syrian government troops seeking to
retake parts of Syria from ISIS in the Euphrates River region to the
west. To complete the U.S.-led onslaught on Syria, Israeli jets, using
the pretext of a stray drone over its territory, mercilessly bombed
Syria. The Zionist settler state news media claimed to have taken out
one-third of Syria’s air defenses.
The now open rift between the Kurds and U.S. imperialism had its origins
in Afrin during the past two months when U.S. officials assured its NATO
ally, Turkey, of its long-term intentions in Syria. Former U.S.
ambassador to Turkey and Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, bluntly stated, “We
told the Turks that the Kurds were temporary, tactical, and
transactional to defeat ISIS. Now we need them to contain Iran. The
whole purpose of this is to split the Russians from the Syrians by
saying we’re going to stay on to force a political solution in Syria”
(The New York Times, Jan. 22, 2018).
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made U.S. objectives clear in a Jan. 17
Stanford University speech, in which he proclaimed that the U.S. was
preparing a permanent U.S.-orchestrated Syria occupation force of 30,000
troops aimed at partitioning close to one-third of Syria in the north
(see “U.S. seeks Syria partition,” February 2018 Socialist Action).
Assuaging Turkish fears that the U.S. will abandon Turkey’s ongoing
efforts to destroy Kurdish forces in northern Syria, on the one hand,
while convincing the increasingly wary Kurds to remain in the so-called
fight against ISIS on the other, is no easy task. To this end Secretary
of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, and Lt.
Gen. H.R. McMaster (the White House national security adviser) have all
met with Turkish officials in efforts to convince them, with little
success, to refrain from attacking their now-wavering U.S. Kurdish allies.
Maj. Gen. Jamie Jarrard, Special Operations commander for the
American-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, boasted in early February that
the elimination of the entire [ISIS] caliphate was “very close.” Jarrard
added, “Anything that disrupts us or takes our eye off that prize is not
good.” In truth, the U.S. focus today is qualitatively less on ISIS,
whose growth and influence was largely tolerated as long as its guns and
weapons—provided by the U.S. and the Arab State monarchies—were trained
on the Syrian government. Today, President Trump repeatedly states that
the so-called U.S. war against ISIS is all but over. But ISIS’s defeat
was qualitatively more the product of the Syrian government forces and
its invited allies—Russia, Iran, and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah—than it
was to selective U.S. bombings.
Syria’s right to self-determination
A sovereign and historically oppressed Syria exercised its right to
self-determination when it requested military aid from Russia and
others. In point of fact, were it not for Syria’s allies, there is no
doubt that uninvited U.S.-backed imperialist troops and the U.S. itself
would be occupying Damascus today as neo-colonial conquerors.
The seven years of war in Syria clearly demonstrates that whenever ISIS
and its associated reactionary forces, al-Qaeda and other imperialist
coalition-backed mercenaries, headed south toward Damascus, they were
allowed to proceed unhindered. Today, less than 400 ISIS forces remain
in Syria. Those that previously occupied and exploited northern Syrian
oil fields and used them to finance their goal of overthrowing the
Bashar Assad government were allowed to proceed with impunity.
Today, these same oil fields are under direct U.S. control, as is the
northern region in general, where the U.S. oil magnates hope to
construct pipelines across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. In the
meantime, the U.S. occupation of Syria, as with Iraq, will undoubtedly
see U.S. corporations stealing Syrian oil to pay for the costs of the
U.S. war!
The Syrian Democratic Forces are reported to consist of 50,000 Kurdish
and Arab fighters based in eastern and northern Syria. While the Kurdish
fighters are said to be only 40 percent of the SDF, they are the most
effective anti-ISIS fighters and are overwhelming based in northern
Syria along the Turkish border where the Kurdish population is the
largest. In only rare and exceptional instances have they been arrayed
against Syrian government troops.
Today, 20,000 Kurds have rallied to Afrin to join forces with Syrian
government troops. This Kurdish force originated from the U.S.-held Deir
al-Zour region, where ISIS forces were allowed to relocate after their
defeats in Raqqa and elsewhere. Once in the Deir al-Zour region,
however, U.S. warplanes attacked both Syrian Army and their
Russian-allied forces when they sought to liberate this area and its
environs.
Commenting on the fracturing of the SDF, which consists of Kurds and
regional Arab forces, with the latter recruited by the U.S. to either
overthrow the Syrian government or otherwise support U.S. imperialist
interests in the region, Jennifer Cafarella, a senior intelligence
planner with the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, noted,
“The SDF is unlikely to clear remaining ISIS-held areas of the Euphrates
River and could even begin to take losses due to the shift in Syrian
Kurds’ main effort.”
Cafarella here suggests that the Russian/Syrian government advances
toward Deir al-Zour also provided the Kurdish fighters’ safe transit to
Afrin across government-controlled territory and exploited their
departure to strike the less experienced Arab partners in the SDF.
Muhammed Abu Adel, a top Kurdish commander and a leader in Manbij (a
city in northern Syria with a large Kurdish population and home to a
contingent of U.S. Special Operations troops), expressed the now widely
held distain for U.S. imperialism’s supporting Turkey’s attacks on his
city. He exclaimed, “We sacrificed thousands of lives of our soldiers,
we sacrificed so many to finish ISIS and now this, while fighting the
most terrible terrorist group, and suddenly there is a state member of
NATO come to fight you.”
Ghouta: pretext for intervention
In early March, U.S.-backed forces in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta,
along with a host of Qaeda and related terrorist forces, found
themselves near defeat at the hands of the Syrian Army. The U.S.-allied
terrorists there had been shelling downtown Damascus and other highly
populated areas in this capital city for most of the past seven years.
Today, on the verge of defeat, these “rebels” sought United Nations
support in the form of a “humanitarian relief” resolution aimed at
allowing the U.S. and its allies to “legally” intervene as it did in
Libya in 2009-10, when U.S. jets and offshore bombings destroyed Libya’s
infrastructure based on the now-discredited pretext that the Libyan
government was poised to slaughter some 80,000 civilians in Benghazi.
The same version of “humanitarian relief” was employed in Iraq under the
similarly discredited pretext that the Iraqi government was poised to
use “weapons of mass destruction.
On the suggestion of the Syrian government, Russia’s UN Security Council
representative vetoed the U.S.’s thinly disguised effort to secure
support for yet another imperialist slaughter.
U.S. to remain in Syria
A Feb. 22 New York Times headline read: “U.S. Says Troops Can Stay in
Syria Without New Authorization.” The article opened as follows: “The
Trump administration has decided that it needs no new legal authority
from Congress to indefinitely keep American military forces deployed in
Syria and Iraq, even in territory that has been cleared of Islamic State
fighters, according to Pentagon and State Department officials.”
Today, estimates vary widely and change daily as to how many troops
these are. Last month, Trump administration officials put the number at
5,000, not counting the troops stationed in Qatar to oversee the U.S.
bombing of Syria or the additional thousands on board U.S. warships in
the Mediterranean. Add to this the usual covert privatized mercenary
forces, the “Special Operation” CIA death squad forces, the drone
operations and now three permanent military bases in northern Syria, and
it’s clear that the U.S. imperialist beast is in Syria to stay, even if
its entire “coalition of the willing” isn’t, and even if Kurdish forces
are departing.
In the U.S. a new and critical factor is emerging to challenge all U.S.
wars—at home and abroad. The April 14-15 nationwide regional
mobilizations initiated by the United National Antiwar Coalition and the
Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Bases are the perfect starting point to
mobilize mass opposition to U.S. imperial war policy. Join the struggle!
Self-determination for Syria and all oppressed nations! U.S. Out Now!
Contact: SpringAction2018.org.
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March 17, 2018 in Anti-War, Middle East. Tags: Syria
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