Iraq: Federal Government Drives Germany Deeper Into War
Today the federal parliament will vote on the prolongation of the Bundeswehr deployment in Turkey as well as sending soldiers to Northern Iraq. To this Christine Buchholz, member of the executive board of DIE LINKE, declares:
DIE LINKE rejects the foreign deployment of the Bundeswehr. According to a motion of the federal government the Bundeswehr shall not only train Kurdish Peshmerga but also the Iraqi army. Furthermore, the Bundeswehr sends officers to headquarters of the Iraqi army and the US-led war coalition in Kuwait. The Bundeswehr is supposed to counsel, train, lead, and prepare situation overviews by the military intelligence.
Step by step the federal government drives Germany deeper into a war whose end is not in sight. The training mission supports the corrupt structures in Iraqi Kurdistan and of the government in Bagdad. In Iraq no religious war rages but a struggle for power over resources along ethnic borders. Shiit, Sunnit, and Kurdish elites with all armed power aim for bringing more areas under control. The bagdad regime can only stay in power due to radical Shiit militia which carries out ethnic cleansing and massacres of Sunnit civilians. The Bundeswehr must not become the ally of this regime. The bombs of the US led air war inevitably kill civilians. This fuels more and more hate playing into the hands of the so called “Islamic State”.
The federal government considers the mandate as a carte blanche for further arms exports into Iraq. Even though the whereabouts of so far delivered military goods are unclear, they already consider sending new ones. The federal government ignores existing constitutional objections to further lowering the obstacles for foreign assignments of the Bundeswehr. This militarisation of German foreign policy needs to be stopped immediately. DIE LINKE campaigns for more humanitarian aid for the refugees in Iraq and Syria who suffer from the onset of winter.