the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 20, 2017
On March 16, U.S. drones bombed a building in Al Jinah, a village in Syria. The U.S. military claimed Al Qaeda militants were meeting in the building and reported that “we’re not aware of any credible allegations of civilian casualties.”
But according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British monitoring group with a network of activists in Syria, the U.S. actually destroyed a mosque, killing at least 42 people. The White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group, posted a video of their members pulling bloody people and bodies out of the rubble. The U.S. submitted a satellite image showing a small mosque, largely unhurt, next to a flattened building, to show they hadn’t hit the mosque. But local residents say the flattened building was an expansion of the original mosque complex, recently constructed.
U.S. strikes like this continue the already disastrous war in Syria. Almost half a million Syrians have been killed, with many more severely wounded, and hundreds of thousands of children have been made orphans. Out of about 18 million people in the country, the UN estimates that 13.5 million need humanitarian help to survive. Five million people have been driven out of the country, of whom two million live in refugee camps in atrocious conditions. Another six million have been driven from their homes in Syria. That is, more than half the people in the country have been forced to flee for their lives!
Since the U.S. openly joined this war in mid-2014, supposedly to fight against the Islamic State, the Pentagon has carried out more than 18,900 air strikes in Syria and Iraq. Independent monitoring groups say these strikes have killed thousands of civilians.
Trump follows the Obama administration’s call for U.S. intervention in Syria to stop terrorism. These terrorist wars carried out by the U.S. around the world have created a deep anger against the U.S. And this is what’s behind the growth of individual terrorism everywhere.
The U.S. is not in this war to protect the Syrian population, or the U.S. population. It has no interest in stopping “terrorism”–the U.S. military is actually carrying out terrorist attacks in Syria every day, like the bombing of this mosque, all in order to retain its control over the oil-rich Middle East.