Mosul, Aleppo: Flashpoints for Bosses’ Oil Wars

The blood-soaked reports and images coming out of Mosul, Iraq, and Aleppo, Syria, make it clear that the working class needs a worldwide communist movement to escape the clutches of mass-murdering imperialist powers. Never-ending battles among small-time capitalists in Syria and Iraq, stateless would-be bosses in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and large-scale war-makers like the U.S. and Russia are turning these cities into graveyards for thousands of workers and their children. Only a renewed international communist movement offers an escape from these daily horrors. Progressive Labor Party aims to lead such a movement. We invite anyone filled with outrage, sadness or despair over the savagery and decay in the world today to read CHALLENGE—and join the fight to make capitalism a bad memory and no more.
Middle East Conflict a Quest for Oil
The Middle East has long been a battleground for imperialist powers, dating back to World War I. In the war’s aftermath, European powers punished the defeated Ottoman Empire by dividing it into smaller and more easily controlled territories (BBC, 12/14/13): Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. All of these modern nations were artificially created by Western imperialist powers to control the vast amounts of cheaply extracted oil discovered in the early 1900s. While contemporary anti-Muslim racism would have us believe that Shia and Sunni have always been fighting, the reality is very different. Before 1916, there was little of the sectarian violence we see today.
The imperialists of today are no less ruthless than those of a century ago. Middle East oil continues to feed their frenzy. The U.S., the dominant power in the region since the fall of the Soviet Union, finds itself increasingly challenged for control. The result is an accelerating death toll that troubles neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump nor Vladimir Putin nor Bashar al-Assad. Millions of refugees driven from their homes into a terrifying unknown; thousands upon thousands of workers and children slaughtered; the Mediterranean Sea choked with the corpses of workers who’d fled imperialist nightmares – for the ruling class and their political stooges, no price in workers’ lives is too high.
Aleppo: Workers Sacrificed in Proxy War
In Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the siege that began in 2012, Russia’s rulers are openly backing the brutal Assad regime in defiance of the U.S. Their aim is clear: to protect their naval base at Tartus, Russia’s only access to the Mediterranean Sea. On October 14, Russia and Syria ratified a treaty to guarantee Russia permanent access to Khmeimim Air Base, near the Mediterranean port, and to project military force throughout the Middle East and Europe. The sole Russian aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is currently steaming toward the Syrian coast (New York Times, 10/21). When the Kremlin issues a statement that “the entire territory of Syria must be liberated” (10/22) from U.S.-backed Syrian “rebels,” it is delivering a message to its imperialist rivals in the U.S. and Europe.
Meanwhile, U.S.-backed forces are in disarray. So-called “moderate” Syrian fighters are led by jihadist groups like Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra (Reuters, 9/29), even though the U.S. has classified the latter group as a terrorist organization. Both groups have targeted civilians with indiscriminate bombing and torture.  The most effective U.S.-aligned fighting force in Syria is the Kurdish military –which is bombed daily by the military of Turkey, another ostensible U.S. ally. While the U.S. protests Syrian and Russian aggression and war crimes, the European Union has failed to agree on any repercussions against Russia (The Guardian, 10/20).
Mosul: Chickens Home to Roost
Just over 300 miles to the east of Aleppo is Mosul, Iraq, an ongoing example of the willingness of U.S. bosses to create a monster and unleash it on the world. The 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq were designed to create a government friendly to the needs of U.S. oil companies. But the power vacuum created by Hussein’s overthrow, along with the purging of the Iraqi military leadership, opened the field to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which joined with groups in Syria in to become ISIS. By 2014, after splitting from al-Qaeda and declaring an independent caliphate, ISIS had become a powerful fighting force across the Middle East and North Africa. Early on, the U.S. rulers were willing to look the other way or even provide arms and funding. A 2012 intelligence report identifies ISIS as “one of the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” and that “western countries, the Gulf States and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria (The Guardian 6/3/2015).
Soon, however, ISIS turned on its creator and targeted U.S. interests in Iraq. Only when U.S. oil revenues in Kirkuk, Tikrit and Mosul were at stake did the U.S. bosses make ISIS’s brutality an issue. At present, the U.S. has approximately 6,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; it’s busy killing both its enemies and helpless civilians in bombing raids (Foreign Policy, 9/29). With disgusting cynicism, the U.S. plan appears to be to allow ISIS forces to leave Mosul to the west and enter Syria (BBC, 10/4), which would increase the pressure on Assad and his Russian-backed forces. In the process, many more civilians are certain to be sacrificed for the U.S. rulers’ profit system.
Workers in Iraq and Syria—workers anywhere—have absolutely no stake in these fights among imperialist war criminals. ISIS is a brutal small terrorist; the U.S. is a vicious big terrorist. While the Syrian and Russian militaries bomb civilians in Aleppo, the U.S. military and its allies do the same. The international working class is stalked by enemies on all sides. No boss, politician, military or religious leader has our class’s interest at heart. No imperialist will hesitate to spend workers’ lives in pursuit of profit. We have nothing to gain by supporting any ruling class. We have only one way out of this madness: communist revolution.