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
Sep 14, 2015
Since the U.S. began bombing Iraq on August 8, 2014 and Syria on September 23rd in the struggle against ISIS, it claimed the bombing was the “most precise and the most disciplined ... in the history of air war.” This statement recalls the U.S. bragging about “surgical strikes” during the 1991 Gulf War.
The reality was the opposite. A group of journalists called Airwars, collected a lot of data on the ground and had a very different assessment. It said there were between 489 and 624 civilian deaths due to the bombing.
But the catastrophic consequence for the civilian population of Iraq and Syria can’t be measured by the number of dead alone. The advance of the Jihadists of the Islamic State is the unintended consequence of the policy led by imperialism, which aims to impose by violence its hold over the region. The war the U.S. launched in 2003 against Iraq and the eight years of occupation that followed aggravated the poverty and suffering of the population and opened the way for the reign of the militias, including ISIS.
For years, the Iraqis lived in fear of terrorist attacks by car bombs and the extortions of militias of various affiliations. The interventions carried out by imperialism to extinguish the fires that it itself set can only lead to more deaths and fan the flames still more.