(Above: Kurdish fighters defending Afrin March 2018)
The fascist Erdogan regime in Turkey has all along aided and abetted the ISIS reactionaries in Syria. They have allowed free passage of ISIS recruits through Turkey to boost terrorist fighters and have facilitated arms shipments and other supplies to ISIS in Syria. The US imperialists hoped that ISIS would destabilise the Syrian government and make regime change there possible. Turkey shares that objective but has also seen in ISIS a formidable weapon against Kurds fighting for self-determination throughout the region.
Not content with supporting ISIS, the Erdogan regime has time and again intervened militarily in Syria in flagrant violation of that country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Throughout 2018 that has been a repeated pattern of Turkish aggression.
On January 20, Turkish troops entered northern Syria in a major offensive against Kurdish militia in Afrin. Faced with fierce fighting, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, called for support from the Syrian government. Syrian pro-government forces relieved Afrin on February 20. The victory was short-lived however, and fighting continued throughout March during which Turkish soldiers recaptured Afrin, engaging in widespread looting and pillage. They also started a “resettlement” program for soldiers of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA) in homes from which Kurds and Yazidis had fled. Since then, guerrilla operations against the Turkish occupation authorities have intensified, both by the YPG and other independent Kurdish militias such as the Afrin Falcons.
By mid-year, Turkish forces had also gained control of Aleppo and Idlib in the northeast of Syria, while 2000 US forces were in Syria providing support to the YPG in its fight against ISIS whom the US imperialists could no longer control. More and more of Syria was reclaimed by government troops, leading some to say that the Syrian conflict had entered its final phase.
In December, YPG forces had the terrorists on the run in the area around Rojava. With the defeat of their terrorist allies imminent, the Turks opened a new offensive against the Kurds, forcing them to split their forces into two fronts, one against ISIS and the other against the Turks. Nothing more clearly displays the alliance between Erdogan and ISIS than this attack on the Kurds.
We support the call of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party Turkey/Kurdistan (MLPK) to defend the Rojava revolution and defeat the colonialist, fascist occupation troops of the Erdogan regime.
For further reading, please see this statement of December 16, 2018 by the MLPK .
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