IRAQ’S REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC protest movement, which started on October 1, 2019, is facing its biggest test yet, as interim Prime Minister Mohammad Allawi is set to announce his government, designed to end the uprising. High school and university students have led the movement with a wave of strikes, which threatened to lead to cancelling the […]

League for the Fifth International The assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad at the command of US President Donald Trump has opened a dangerous new chapter for the Middle East. As head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force, and strategic architect of Iran’s ever-growing network of international militias, allies and assets, Suleimani was […]

Iraq is once again the scene of massive protests. In the capital and in southern cities thousands-strong demonstrations have been dispersed with tear gas, and police snipers using live ammunition. A huge rally in Sadr City in Baghdad – a district with 3.5 million people, was savagely broken up. UN officials in the city have […]

The false friends of Kurdish independence are determined to keep Kurds divided and stateless. 

By Marcus Halaby As the Western powers bomb Iraq and Syria under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State, attention has been drawn to the struggle of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to defend the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Kobane. On the border with Turkey, Kobane has been besieged by the ultra-reactionary IS for […]

By Marcus Halaby US President Barack Obama took office in 2009 promising to end the US occupation of Iraq. Today US warplanes are bombing Iraq and Syria with the aim of “degrading and destroying” the Islamic State. Pentagon press secretary Adm. John Kirby said. “We know we are at war with ISIL [ISIS or Islamic […]

By Dave Stockton and Marcus Halaby The world was astonished on 10 June, when just a thousand or so fighters from ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (“Greater Syria” or “The Levant”), took Iraq’s second city Mosul with barely a shot being fired. Two Iraqi army divisions comprising nearly 30,000 soldiers fled, stripping […]

In the summer of 1994, when I was visiting my Iraqi cousins in Baghdad, I told them the story of the accidental death by hanging of Stephen Milligan MP in an auto-erotic incident involving self-strangulation and drugs. Their immediate response was to ask in disbelief: “Why did they kill him like that?” From then on, […]

George W Bush is set on war. He will not let anything get in his way. Not Iraq’s agreement to let weapons inspectors back. Not the United Nations meddlesome attempt to let diplomacy work to disarm Saddam Hussein. He will try to bully France, bribe Russia and berate China to get the UN Security Council […]