News:

Following what has been described as a humanitarian crisis, the Guardian newspaper reported on the 14th of August that the “UK prepares to supply arms directly to Kurdish forces fighting ISIS”.

Comment:

The spread of ISIS forces in Northern Iraq, coupled with reports of persecution of ethnic minorities and demands from the Christian communities to pay the Jizya, has generated international concern and the beginnings of a new phase of Western military intervention in Iraq after the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. The earlier withdrawal of US forces was necessitated by failure to reach an agreement with Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki, who after years of fomenting sectarian discord amongst the people of Iraq, has today announced his resignation to make way for Haider al-Abadi, who will be Obama’s new tool for reshaping the region; “We are modestly hopeful that the Iraqi government situation is moving in the right direction” said Obama.

Naturally, from the viewpoint of Western policy to solidify divisions in Iraq, that the “situation is moving in the right direction” as it has been before. Indeed, the dramatic retreat of Iraq’s military from Northern Iraq allowing Isis to take Mosul and threaten Baghdad is no less a part of this power play, as is the now deeply rooted mistrust between Iraq’s many religious and ethnic groupings that has culminated in a crisis on Mount Sinjar and the UK and US intervention to counter what Dan Friedman of The New York Daily Times called today: “the threat posed by murderous Sunni Jihadists”.

In addition to the cynical way that the UK and US are now posing as the deliverers of Iraq, after they have destroyed it, and what adds salt to the injury is that a hundred years after the UK first sent troops into Iraq, and machine gunned women and children in Kurdish villages, that the word humanitarian should be applied to the supposed treatment of the festering wounds created and nurtured by the West since the destruction of the Islamic Caliphate.

The UK announcement to join in supplying arms to the Kurds is driven by anything but a humanitarian motive, and only the re-implementation of Islam as a complete system of life over the region will end the division which decades of western meddling has inflamed. The communities that are now threatened by the deliberate instabilities sowed by the West lived in peace for over a thousand years under Islamic rule, and once this rule returns, in reality, rather than name, peace will return!

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by

Dr. Abdullah Robin