According to IraqSlogger, an Iraqi Marxist insurgent group, going by the name of the "Iraqi Armed Revolutionary Resistance" has been declared, apparently coming to light via the distribution of leaflets (carrying pictures of Che) in the areas around Najaf, Karbala and Hilla.
The leaflets call for “resistance against American, British and Zionist occupiers in order to liberate Iraq and form a free socialist, democratic alternative,” and condemned the “puppet government, the so-called Council of Representatives, terrorist Salafis, militias, the Interior Ministry, Iraqi traitors who came on American tanks, the American and British mercenaries, contractors, and their servants from the South Lebanese Army.”
They have also claimed responsibility for a recent attack on US forces in the Khan Al-Nus area (between Najaf and Karbala), and claimed that the car bombs and road-side bombs (described in the west as "sectarian violence") are essentially black-ops, designed to discredit the resistance.
If true, this is good news. It's been a while since Iraq had a decent-sized marxist resistance. While the Iraqi Communist Party was once the largest party in the country, and is still reasonably influential on the left, the Iraqi left has gone down-hill of late (the massacring of tens of thousands of communists by Saddam having been one key reason for their political demise), and, while the Communists have been involved in trade union struggles in Iraq, they have tended to be critical of the armed resistance, and have even participated in the various 'democratic' institutions of the puppet regime.
I wonder then which of the various (probably small) marxist and communists groups in Iraq make up this outfit, and what are the nature of their links with the rest of the resistance. The group describes itself as a “movement of Iraqi Communists and Marxists experienced in armed struggle, leftist Iraqi nationalists, and their supporters,” but what this means could be anyone's guess.
It will also be interesting to see what effect this has on certain western leftists who have been opposing the armed resistance...
One thing I did find curious, also, was that they published the leaflets in English and Arabic.
Meanwhile, Persian Journal carries a interesting piece by Scott Sullivan, trying to compare the current situation of the Kurdish struggle (or 'revolution' as he describes it) to that of the Bolsheviks at the time of the treaty of Bret-Litovsk.
He tries to find a parallel between what Lenin called a "robbers' peace" of that treaty (that cost Russia the Baltic states and Ukraine) and Turkey's demand that the Kurds relinquish Kirkuk.
Not sure if the analogy works entirely (in fact, it's a bit of a stretch), but an interesting take regardless.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment