The Foreign Relations Committee of the Indian Socialist Party has issued a press statement regarding the attacks in Rojava. The statement noted that recent developments in Syria have once again brought the ongoing suffering of the Kurdish people to the forefront. It emphasised that the Kurds, who have been fighting for self-determination for more than a century, continue to face both oppression and conflict as a people dispersed across several countries.
The statement stressed that despite their crucial role in the struggle against ISIS, Western powers – particularly the United States – have repeatedly abandoned the Kurds. It further highlighted that part of Rojava is currently under attack and that the Kurds now need international solidarity more than ever, grounded in the universal right to self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter. Special attention was drawn to the urgent need to protect women.
Representatives of the Indian Socialist Party called for support of the Kurds’ struggle for freedom and underscored the importance of principled global solidarity in the face of the West’s hypocritical policies.
The statement by the Indian Socialist Party Spokesperson Basant Hetamsaria and Mohammad Shamsuzzoha Zoha, in charge of International Affairs, reads as follows:
“The ongoing renewed plight of the Kurdish people – catapulted by recent news of events in Syria – has in recent days come to the attention of the socialist forces worldwide again. The background is now familiar to most people but is worth recapturing briefly. The Kurds – an ethnic minority – are spread mainly over Iran and Azerbaijan-Armenia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey and a significant diaspora in the West. They cohere together in a large, loosely diffuse area – Kurdistan. The Kurdish people speak a handful of related dialects under an umbrella linguistic language ‘Kurdish’ while being bilingual with Arabic or the predominant language in the countries they reside in. What unites them is that they’ve been seeking self-determination for decades now, since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century. One thing noteworthy about their culture is the impact of Zoroastrianism into their contemporary life – they celebrate Nowroz along with other Iranian peoples in West Asia.
The Kurds drive for autonomy is a long-running struggle and sprang into public attention with Turkey’s 1999 abduction and lifelong imprisonment of the charismatic Abdullah Ocalan – who headed the PKK – a group that sought to overthrow the Turkish stranglehold over Kurdistan. The Kurds are everyone’s favourite enemy – and Turkey in particular has bombed their mountainous camps and villages thousands of times over the past 3 decades. In recent times, Iranian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds, and Turkish Kurds have tried their own approaches to extract various degrees of autonomy. The Kurds in Iraq notably allied with the US’s first Gulf War in 1991 against President Saddam Hussen and then with GW Bush in the decade-long so-called “War on Terror”. Still, they found that they were only rebuffed repeatedly for subsequent American assistance in their quest to get full freedom and recognition.
Today’s situation connects to the rise of ISIS – the radical Islamic group – that emerged in the mid 2000s from the ashes of post-war Iraq and which spread its barbaric operations over Syria, when the latter faced its own internal Arab Spring protests. This followed US and Israel’s hypocritical support of ISIS, Al Nusra groups as they banded together in an insurgency against President Assad’s government forces, which the US was keen to remove. Hypocritical because even as the US bad-mouthed ISIS, they secretly helped arm the same group to fight Syrian armies. The Kurds, being naturally aligned against radical Islam, were instrumental in this war against ISIS. They took the brunt of ISIS’s megalomaniacal ground assaults against a hapless civilian population, fighting them with their deep knowledge of local terrain and finding allies in kindred groups such as the Yazidis. Almost all of such groups recall the horror scenes from the mid-2000s as scores of women from these groups fell prey to ISIS’s horrifying beheading and enslavement practices. We watched in horror the 2019 video of Ms Hevrin Khalaf – a Syrian Kurdish politician – as her vehicle was intercepted and she was killed by ISIS forces. Still later, Rojava – a smallish enclave – was liberated from ISIS by YPG Kurdish People’s Protection Units, led by women.
Given all this, one would imagine that western governments, in particular the US would be grateful to the Kurds to keep regions free of radical Islamists. However, that is the exact opposite of what actually happened. The US is a geopolitical double-mouthed hegemon. It says one thing while doing much of the exact inverse. With President Assad “regime-changed”, the US stepped up to install its former enemy-number-one Abu Mohammad al-Julani, aka Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the new head of Syria. That fellow quickly abandoned his turban for a suit and was recognized by the west as Mr Jolani. In doing so, the US unravelled decades of secular societies in Syria – Alawites, Druze, Sunni, Shia, Kurds living together. And the Kurds are now paying a price for their belief in the USA.
A part of Rojava which has been under Kurdish control finds itself today under assault by Julani’s crazed soldiers. And the USA? They are hypocritically advising the Kurds to be on their own. And just like that, like countless times, once again, the Kurds find themselves abandoned by the very same great western powers which sought their help in their times of need.
The Kurds need our support, based on simple universal self-determination principles, under the UN Charter. Their women need active real protection from the marauding soldiers of Mr Julani. The Kurds’ approach to their freedom struggle over five decades now has again met with great challenges, and is now worthy of international solidarity more than ever. The peoples of the world, including the Kurds, know very well that US imperialism cannot be trusted. The go-forward strategy after the latest developments is for Kurdish society themselves to revisit and readjust if necessary. India should issue a statement in their support. Because when the time comes, as the Americans expand their hegemony over territories far from their shores – Venezuela, Greenaland, Gaza and now Diego Garcia (Chagos Islands), we will benefit from being principled global citizens, unlike the west who abandoned their Kurdish friends in their times of need.”