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The following article is from Communism #7, the April 1992 issue of the central review in English of the Internationalist Communist Group (see back page for their address). Throughout the course of the Iran-Iraq War, the I.C.G. has published news of the widespread violent resistance to the war effort by proletarians. Demonstrations and mass desertions, sabotage and strikes, widespread killings of cops and army officers, even attacks on forces loyal to the state by battalion-sized groups of armed deserters have occurred. The resistance to the Iran-Iraq War was perhaps the most extensive opposition to a war effort anywhere in the world since the wave of revolutions that ended World War I.
This article will be of special significance to those who came into the streets to oppose the Persian Gulf War. It details the unreported proletarian uprising that swept much of Iraq at the beginning of 1991, and the assistance the western powers provided to their nominal enemy Saddam Hussein against the insurgents.
Lied about by capital's international media apparatus, the movement in southern Iraq was characterized as an Islamic fundamentalist revolt, and in the north as a rebellion by Kurdish nationalists. This pattern of lies is similar to the way that the media describe the class war in South Africa and the United States solely in terms of race, and uprisings in South Korea and Burma are disparaged as "pro-democracy movements" or "student revolts". The revolt had nothing to do with religious leaders and the various Kurdish nationalist rackets have served as loyal cops for the Baathist and United Nations terror against the insurgent poor.
Readers will also want to obtain the other materials with information on the 1991 insurrection in Iraq: "10 Days that Shook Iraq" an article in Wildcat #15 - send $4 ppd. (or less for just that article) to BM Cat, London WC1N 3XX, UK. The Kurdish Uprising, a 30 page pamphlet containing excellent commentary and information (from which we took the graphics on page __ and the Street Hawkers' leaflet). $4 from BM Blob, London WC1N 3XX, UK. The June 1991 magazine Workers' Scud contains the article "The Class Struggle in Iraq - an interview with a veteran". $2 from Box 15, 138 Kingsland High Road, London E8 2NS, UK. And for those who read French, an anthology of all of these and more is available under the title Irak: les révoltes inconnues, from C.D.L., CP 5209, succ. C, Montréal, Québec H2X 32N, CANADA.
* A note on "Kurdistan": this name can have two meanings the place where people of Kurdish geneology live, or the territorial property of the Kurdish Nationalist State.