Tuesday, December 23, 2014

A People's History of Syria--Epilogue: July to December 2014 Period


Between July and December 2014, the Democratic Obama Administration intervened militarily in Syria in a more overt and direct way. As the secular left Syrian Communist Party noted in a Sept. 24, 2014 statement, “in the early morning of Sept. 23, 2014,” the U.S. war machine “with its allies and agents began…armed actions on the territories of Syrian Arab Republic.” According to this same Syrian Communist Party statement:

“…These actions are flagrant violation of international law that prevents the violation of independent state national sovereignty…All pretexts of US imperialism, even the fighting of terrorism, cannot justify national sovereignty violation….”

A Dec. 17, 2014 Reuters article also noted that between late September and Dec. 15, 2014, “the United States carried out 488 air strikes in Syria…according to U.S. military data;” and although “Lieutenant General James Terry…told reporters that the strikes had hurt the Islamic State” (which armed foreign Islamist fighters are attempting to set up in Syrian territory they've occupied in recent years), Baath regime leader Bashar “Assad said this month the U.S.-led campaign had made no difference and Islamic State supporters in Syria say the air strikes have helped the group win support among residents and recruit fighters.” Between Sept. 23 and Nov. 21, 2014, however, more than 900 people, including around 50 civilians, were killed in Syria by the air strikes of the Pentagon and its allies, according to the data collected by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, that politically opposes Assad’s Baath regime.

The armed right-wing group of religiously sectarian Islamic fundamentalist fighters in Syria—ISIS--continued to attack the city of Kobane in the Kurdish-populated northwestern region of Syria between July and December 2014. But according to an Oct. 12, 2014 statement by the secular left Tudeh party of Iran, “the struggle of the Kobane people” was “not only against the ISIS’s professional murderers, but Kobane” was “also indirectly under attack from the reactionary regimes in region, and” was “paying for” the “refusal to align themselves with the policies of the Turkish government and the Arab Kingdoms in the Persian Gulf, led by the United States, for toppling the ruling government in Syria.” The Tudeh Party’s Oct. 12, 2014 also stated:

“Over the past few years, the people of Kobane have not cooperated with the global imperialism’s policy of `regime change’ in Syria. By keeping their relative sovereignty and as an autonomous community, in which green shoots of popular democratic currents could be found, and while advancing the struggle for democracy and national rights, the Kobane people had been opposing the United States’ plan for `regime change’ in Syria… Kobane’s militant women and men are single-handedly fighting a struggle for the survival of their community against the attacks of one of the most reactionary and destructive forces, which has been borne out of imperialist policies of aggression, and nurtured by the local reactionary regimes. The role of women in the resistance movement of the people of Kobane is significant and exemplary. The tragedy in Kobane exposes the inhumane role of those who claim to be the`champions of democracy and human rights’, and above all, the United States and Britain that in recent years, by using various forces in the spectrum of the so called `political Islam’, directly or indirectly have destroyed the popular movements… Erdogan, Turkey’s President, has…allowed the transportation and concentration of Salafist and Jihadist forces and ISIS terrorists through the border, and their bloody war against the Syrian government.

“On Oct. 2 [2014], the world’s media reported the United States Vice-President Joe Biden’s statement clearly indicating that the US allies, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have played an essential role in the creation and strengthening of ISIS by pouring billions of dollars of money, arms and equipment… Tudeh Party of Iran calls for the immediate and direct involvement of the United Nation in equipping, facilitating and transfer of international peace-keeping forces (instead of NATO) for saving Kobane, and replacing the NATO forces under American leadership by that of the United Nation’s…”

In a November 2014 speech, the Deputy General Secretary of the secular left Lebanese Communist Party, Marie Nassif-Debs also asserted that since September 2014 the U.S. war machine was actually “bombing the cities in Iraq and Syria not to defeat ISIS but to keep the two conflicting powers” in the Syrian conflict “ able to fight and destroy” and “at the same time the multinational petrol companies, on their head the American ones, buy petrol which is seized by the fascist religious forces in Iraq and Syria and big part of this petrol is smuggled through the Turkish system.”

Between July and December 2014, the total number of people in Syria who have been killed, wounded or compelled to become refugees since March 2011 (and since the U.S. government began to covertly train armed Syrian rebels in 2011) has continued to increase. As Reuters reported in a Dec. 17, 2014 article by Alexander Dziadosz:

“More than 120,000 fighters supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have been killed in the country's civil war since it began in 2011, a group monitoring the war said on Wednesday…In total, more than 200,000 people have been killed and millions more have fled their homes….Some 11,000 members of government forces and loyalist militias had been killed in the five months since Assad delivered an inauguration speech for a third presidential term [in July 2014]…The United Nations estimated in August [2014] more than 190,000 people had died in the conflict.”

In a Dec. 19, 2014 Reuters article, Oliver Holmes also noted that “one million people have been wounded during Syria’s civil war and diseases are spreading as regular supplies of medicine fail to reach patients, the World Health Organization’s Syria representative said;” and that “the United Nations” has recently “called…for more than $8.4 billion to help nearly 18 million people in need in Syria and across the region in 2015.”


(end of epilogue)

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