Portside

Responding to the July 20 bombing in Suruç, Turkey ended its standoff with the Islamic State (Isis), and attacked Isis positions in Syria. Then, apparently with U.S. acquiescence, Turkey launched air strikes against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) bases in Iraq and Syria, ending a two-year ceasefire. Many believe Turkey’s targeting of Isis is only a pretext for its efforts to suppress the PKK, and the Kurdish national movements in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria.

Backdrop to Turkey's elections: Turkish workers have seen their unions dismantled under the AKP government, and many have lost collective bargaining rights. The percentage of unionized workers fell from 57.5 in 2003 to just 9.68 percent today. The Syrian war is not popular with the average Turk. The Army opposes any involvement in Syria, because it sees nothing ahead but a quagmire that would ally Turkey with the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.

Gathering in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly crowned Saudi King Salman, and the organizer of the get-together, the emir of Qatar. The meeting was an opportunity for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bury a hatchet over Ankara’s support — which Riyadh’s opposes — to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to agree to cooperate in overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

While the Syrian opposition is understandably bitter that the YPG and YPJ withdrew most of their energy from the war with Assad, leftists worldwide should be watching the remarkable efforts being made by Syrian Kurds and their allies to build a liberated area where they can develop their ideas about socialism, democracy, women, and ecology in practice.

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All 550 candidates of the Communist Party (CP), Turkey that will be running in the upcoming elections in June are women. According to a recent statement released by the CP, the reason for choosing all women candidates is not simply about the active participation of women in the political struggle but because it is only women who can represent the rebellion against a social order that thrives on murdering and humiliating them on a daily basis.

In both resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts showing both willingness and capacity to fight as soldiers. However their principal objective in the mountains is not military. Rather, their most important task is to form new persons: men and women in a more equitable relationship to each other--a relationship that is also anti-capitalist. Theirs is a commitment to building democracy, socialism, ecology and feminism.

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