Twenty years ago this month, twenty men were unloaded off a C-141 military transport plane at the US Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They stumbled off the plane in shackles, having been chained and hooded for the duration of the twenty-hour trip from Kandahar, Afghanistan. These were the first of the roughly 800 individuals who have been held in the various prison camps of Guantánamo. 
Established by the criminal Bush administration, “Gitmo” is one of the most visible edifices of the War on Terror that still is being perpetrated around the globe. Existing outside of the law, and hiding behind the manufactured category of “enemy combatant”, it has allowed the US to indefinitely imprison without trial, and to torture with impunity, anyone that it deems associated with the amorphous category of “terrorist”. 
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 86 percent of all individuals were turned over to the US in Afghanistan on the promise of bounty for “turning in terrorists”. Hundreds of Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs and Muslims were rounded up and endured years of torture that has rendered many physically, mentally, emotionally scarred, and severely traumatised. 
Most of them had no, or only very tenuous connections with the organisations categorised as terrorist by the US government. Of course, a verified connection to such an organisation still doesn’t justify extrajudicial internment and torture. But the innocence of most of those who have been brutalised at Guantánamo Bay only underscores the monstrousness of the War on Terror. Even by the US government’s own metrics, it is a brutal failure: of the 800 individuals imprisoned, only eight have been “convicted” by its illegitimate military courts.
Countless books have been written about the crimes the US government committed at Guantánamo Bay. And Guantánamo is just one facility in a web of dozens of other military prisons (Bagram, Abu Ghraib, etc.) and CIA black sites in which the same unspeakable violence was inflicted on countless others. 
But there is one story that has always haunted me that depicts the barbarity of the United States. In June 2006, it was reported that three men imprisoned at Gitmo had committed suicide by hanging themselves in a “suicide pact”. In an abominable display of callousness, the initial press statement by Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris stated that not only was it a suicide but “an act of asymmetrical warfare committed on us” by individuals who “have no regard for human life”. 
The military twisted three individuals taking their own lives in a six by eight foot cell, half a world away from home, into an act of warfare committed against those who were responsible for these conditions. Harris, then commander at Guantánamo, was later promoted by President Obama to command the Navy’s Pacific Fleet and then made ambassador to South Korea by Trump. He currently sits on the board of L3Harris, a military contractor.
However, in 2010, a joint Harpers/NBC news investigation uncovered that the three men had not committed suicide: they had been murdered, probably through torture, and their murder had been covered up. It appears that they were likely asphyxiated through a technique called “dry boarding” by the US military—stuffing rags in their throats while strapped in a chair. When their bodies were repatriated, it was found that the US military had removed the parts of their throats that were needed to determine the cause of death. The US took all correspondence from the three deceased men. It would later come to light that two of them were scheduled to be released.
Their names were Ali Abdullah Ahmed (also known as Salah Ahmed al-Salami), Talal al-Zahrani, and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi. Ahmed was Yemeni and al-Zahrani and al-Utaybi were Saudi. Talal al-Zahrani was captured by the US when he was sixteen years old and killed when he was 21, meaning that the period of life that his peers would spend in college he spent being tortured in extrajudicial indefinite imprisonment before he was killed and his throat torn out of his body. 
Al-Utaybi was 26 when he arrived in Afghanistan—not a child like al-Zahrani, but still a young man. According to his family, he went to Afghanistan for missionary work when he was turned over to the US for a bounty. Like most Gitmo inmates, he was denied legal representation partially because he was not included on lists of “detainees” because the US kept misspelling his name. 
Ali Abdullah Ahmed was 22 when he was brought to Gitmo and participated in many hunger strikes. According to the Washington Post acquisition of declassified government documents, the US military’s Criminal Investigation Task Force decided years before Ahmed’s death that he could never be prosecuted because “there was no credible information” linking Ahmed to a terrorist organisation. One can only speculate that he remained imprisoned because of his role in hunger strikes and his advocacy for the rights of his fellow inmates.
This story is but one grotesque episode in the litany of horrors of Guantánamo and sites like it around the globe. While Bush initiated the war, Obama professionalised and legalised it. Obama made a campaign promise to close the camp and in eight years did no such thing. Obama also refused to re-investigate the killing of Ahmed, al-Utaybi and al-Zahrani after the Harpers/NBC report came out. In fact, Obama released fewer individuals from Guantánamo than Bush did. Trump, of course, was Trump. Like Obama, Biden has promised to close the camp, which still holds 40 individuals, and to do so by the end of his term; but so far, he has made no movement in that direction. 
Of course, shuttering Guantánamo Bay would not even begin to address the crimes that have been committed there by the US government. It would be a beginning to acknowledge those crimes, to offer an official apology and, most importantly, to pay reparations to the victims and their families. But a full reckoning would require much more, like an end to the War on Terror and US imperialism. 
Today, as this dark anniversary today passes, the crimes of the War on Terror are still being committed while the wrongs remain unacknowledged, reparations unpaid.
First published at <a href="http://www.rampantmag.com/">Rampantmag.com</a>. Brian Bean is a member of the Rampant magazine editorial collective in Chicago and an editor and contributor to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction from Haymarket Books.

brian bean

Twenty years of torture at Guantánamo Bay

The political situation in the United States is one of intense polarisation, with traditional bourgeois politics shifting right amid sharp social upheaval from below. It is best illustrated by the juxtaposition of two political events: the recent presidential election and the earlier rebellion against anti-Black racism.
The backdrop to both events is the health crisis caused by the global pandemic. The US remains a hotspot for COVID-19, with 340,000 reported deaths—almost 20 percent of the global total, according to World Health Organization data. This morbid reality also underpins a serious economic crisis that is still unfolding. 
This summer, we saw what some have estimated to be the largest social movement in US history, when the country erupted in roughly two months of sustained protest, riots and rebellion. In a few weeks beginning at the end of May, up to 26 million people participated. Despair at government ineptitude during the pandemic, which hit Black communities especially hard, combined with the daily experience of racism and police terror. The movement began in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in response to the murder of George Floyd. Mass protests rapidly spread nationwide. 
This, the largest social explosion in at least 40 years, has had a profound effect on political consciousness, provoking widespread discussions about the need to defund bloated police budgets and debates about abolishing the police entirely. Police vehicles and stations in many cities were attacked and set on fire. Remarkably, half of Americans were in favour of these militant tactics in opinion polls. The uprising also became a focal point for a vast array of grievances against the system itself.
Through a combination of state repression, lack of organisation and savvy co-option by liberal forces, the scope of the uprising diminished after six weeks. But the rage against the police, and the confidence gained from and the legitimacy bestowed upon mass action, still resulted in minor rebellions which flared up locally over the following months. There were street battles against federal agents in Portland, Oregon; stand-offs between right-wing and Black militias in the streets of Kentucky after the murder of Breonna Taylor; weeks of riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the shooting of Jacob Black; days of <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/08/10/all-power-to-the-looters/">riots</a> in Chicago after the shooting of Latrell Allen; and an <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/11/10/theres-nothing-left-but-the-streets/">eruption</a> in Philadelphia just weeks before the presidential election in response to the police murder of Walter Wallace Jr.
Juxtaposed to this social upheaval was the miserable affair of the presidential election. Despite the largest <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/voter-turnout/">voter turnout</a> in 120 years, a record death toll from COVID-19 and the still simmering rage from the anti-racist protests, Democratic candidate Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by only a <a href="https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/mike-davis-trench-warfare">microscopic margin</a>. The results—again despite all that has transpired, not just this year after but after four years of the violent realities of the Trump presidency—were almost a mirror image of the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump was elected, despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots, only because of the bizarre <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/electoral-college-abolish-keyssar-trump-election">Electoral College</a> system. 
This is the contradictory moment that the US left needs to grapple with: that just a few short months after an intense nationwide rebellion against racism, more than 74 million people voted for a white supremacist. Trump received the largest vote of any losing candidate in US history. Yet just before the election, burning down a police station was <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/06/08/rebellions-get-results-a-list-so-far/">more popular</a> in opinion polls than either of the two candidates. These results on one hand point to the bankruptcy and lack of legitimacy of the political system. On the other hand, they point to an absence of any alternative on the level of traditional politics.
So, we have a president-elect, <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/05/07/joe-bidens-garbage-career-a-timeline/">Joe Biden</a>, who has <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/12/07/bidens-corporate-cabinet-a-breakdown/">signalled</a>, with a cabinet stuffed full of corporate interests, the reassertion of neoliberalism. He has also indicated his intent to <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-01-23/why-america-must-lead-again">reposition</a> the US “at the head of the table” in the global order—which means that <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/11/the-elephant-and-the-donkey-in-the-room/">we are entering a period</a> of intensified imperial conflict. This will be stark in the case of China, Biden having positioned himself to the right of Trump during the election. 
A Biden presidency will be just one part of a bipartisan attack on working-class living standards and will only temporarily paper over the crises and contradictions out of which recent social and political struggles emerged. However, there are political and organisational challenges. The US left faces a series of tremendous obstacles and sharp debates about how to overcome them. 
The most salient organisational form of the process of radicalisation, which began after the 2008 economic crisis, is the growth of Democratic Socialists of America. The group has about 85,000 members, making it probably the largest socialist organisation, on paper, since the <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/08/taking-the-wrong-lessons/">Socialist Party of America</a> in the early twentieth century. The existence and size of the DSA is a positive step for the socialist movement because it gives an organisational form to a new socialist sentiment and posits a political alternative. 
At the same time, the DSA is both incredibly bureaucratic and incredibly loose. Most national coordination and structures for initiative are tied up in top-down processes that make it incapable of intervening during moments of crisis (it being caught <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/08/socialists-and-the-uprising/">flat-footed</a> by this summer’s rebellion is an illustration of this). At the same time, it is ideologically heterogeneous—a “broad tent” organisation. 
Because of this looseness and the group’s size, it would be a political error to simply write off the DSA as a reformist organisation that can be worked around or leaped over in the process of building a revolutionary current or the nucleus of a new party or organisation. 
While being ideologically heterogenous, a number of currents—formalised as political caucuses—are highly influential nationally. The dominant one has a highly electoralist perspective, and believes that winning elections on the Democratic Party ticket is the way to accumulate elected socialists <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/09/taking-the-dirty-break-seriously/">either</a> to transform the Democratic Party or to create the conditions for some sort of break from it at an undefined point in the future.
This electoralist focus produced an overestimation and overinvestment in Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, which some argued was “close to seizing power”. The <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/04/02/the-capitalist-state-and-socialist-strategy/">state</a>—<a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/socialism-revolution-electoral-politics-mass-action">in their</a> approximation—could have been seized by electoral means and used to pass socialist reforms. This dramatically underplayed the class nature and undemocratic functioning of the Democratic Party and set the scene for a drift to supporting Biden. 
While certain leading figures in the DSA backed Biden, it is important to note that almost the entire US left took this unfortunate position. This perspective continues to be expressed by an overly optimistic assumption that unions and social movements will be able to win gains such as a Green New Deal easily under Biden. This runs counter to everything that Biden has done—he represents a reassertion of the general drift of US party politics to the right, which was what produced the Trump election in the first place. This perspective also results in publications such as Jacobin <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/joe-biden-presidential-campaign-democratic-party">offering</a> <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/anti-trump-republicans-2020-election-biden?fbclid=IwAR3ApHS9STtcmdLEQKpQSZ7In-jemrNbgLXuXhzPN8vNYXRVslO16yIlgQM">advice</a> <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/democratic-party-trump-medicare-for-all">to Biden</a> rather than attacking sharply the illusions that he is anything but out class enemy.
This perspective was a contributor to the DSA’s near absence as an organised force in the summer Black Lives Matter rebellion. It also fuels and is connected to a position that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zxmg5TA6II">downplay</a>s the strategic importance of highlighting struggles against oppression and suggests that only <a href="https://nonsite.org/policing-symposium/">class-wide demands</a> should be fought for. This completely misses the <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/07/23/the-abolitionist-road-to-socialism/">connection</a> of class <a href="https://newpol.org/racism-and-capitalism/">and</a> race in the US. It is a political weakness and a debate of critical importance, because the <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/08/the-revolutionary-answer-to-the-negro-problem/">movement</a> against anti-Black racism <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/07/23/the-abolitionist-road-to-socialism/">addresses</a> one of the principle divisions within the US working class, and has throughout our history been one of the catalysts for explosive broader liberatory struggles. Lastly, the movement against the police <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/07/23/the-abolitionist-road-to-socialism/">very quickly</a> brings to light the undemocratic nature of the capitalist state.
The path of electoralism and a reformist approach to the capitalist state—if followed by this large, new generation of socialists—is one of disaster for the project of building a serious left that can build a combative and independent organisation capable of leading the class struggle beyond—and within—the electoral realm. How these <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/12/is-socialism-winning/">debates</a> play out will determine the future of our ability to build a socialist movement that can respond to, intervene in, and influence the explosive struggles that will undoubtedly continue.

The situation facing the left in the United States

The popular rebellion against anti-Black racism and police terror continues to unfold here in the United States. Uprisings have emerged in every major city – the most significant event of its kind since the urban revolts of the 1960s. It can also be described as the first COVID-19 rebellion, as the simmering situation that boiled over with the murder of George Floyd in the midwestern city of Minneapolis was intensified by the decision of the American state to abandon working people – especially those who happen to be Black or brown – to die during the pandemic and face economic devastation as a result of looming depression. 
This revolt is a transformative moment. It is the next wave of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that swept the country in 2014 and 2015 – from the demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, after the murder of Mike Brown, to the wave of national protests after the non-indictment of the killers of Brown and of Eric Garner, to the riots in Baltimore, Maryland, and then the rolling demonstrations in Chicago after the release of video tape showing the killing of Laquan McDonald. The so-called post-racial society that the election of first Black president Barak Obama was supposed to usher in was exposed as a lie by the daily reality of police terror. 
The fire this time has been lit in different circumstances. One in every 2,000 African Americans has so far died in this plague. In Chicago, almost three-quarters of the deaths are of Black folks, who make up less than one-third of the city’s population. Federal inaction left people to die while a swift response ensured that billionaires became at least <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/us-billionaires-boost-wealth-by-406-billion-as-markets-rebound.html">$400 billion</a> richer. When social distancing measures were finally taken, they provided cover for intensified policing: in New York City and Chicago, nearly all “stay-at-home” related arrests and citations were in Black neighbourhoods, while friendly cops handed out masks to white people in parks.
Now, as the presidential election draws near, Black Americans are asked to put their hopes in a rapist, <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/05/07/joe-bidens-garbage-career-a-timeline/">Joe Biden</a>, who recently told one of America’s most popular Black radio hosts that any Black person who didn’t want to vote for him was “not Black”. Biden is a hopeless cardboard cut-out of the status quo of American capitalism, which has left Black America to suffer in plague, beats them with continued economic deprivation and then kills them with cops. The contest between Trump and Biden is not a choice – this has only intensified the hopelessness that lit the spark.
While the pandemic was killing Black America, the tension was building through a string of incidents of racist violence. On 13 March, Breonna Taylor, a Black woman in Kentucky, was killed in her house by a no-knock police raid. At the beginning of May, a video emerged of the February execution of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed by a group of white ex-cop vigilantes. 
This set the scene for Monday 25 May, in the city that remembers the killing of Philando Castile by the police in 2016, when police lynched George Floyd. Floyd was given a death sentence for buying groceries with a 20-dollar bill alleged to be a forgery. The brutal incident was captured on video by a bystander, Floyd writhing under the knee of officer Derek Chauvin while his accomplice officers looked on. The exceptional thing was not the violence, which is routine for the police, but that the whole world got to see Floyd gasp for breath and call for his mother before dying.
Immediately, powerful demonstrations filled the streets of Minneapolis. Buildings were set on fire. On Thursday evening, the demonstrators ran the police out of a precinct, set it on fire and appropriated riot gear. While looting occurred, it should be noted that the targets were large corporate stores like Target and a gentrifying un-inhabited condominium that were hit while stores with signs saying “minority owned” were passed over.
The bravery and determination of the rebellion had a sweeping effect on working class consciousness. The Minneapolis transit union issued a statement of non-cooperation with arrests of protesters – essentially a political strike. The University of Minnesota declared it was ending its contract with the police department to provide security for sports events, and the Minneapolis School Board resolved to breach contact with the police department. In a few short days, changes that some believe that only long campaigns can achieve were obtained by riotous protesters refusing to leave the streets. The day after the swarming of the police precinct, Chauvin was arrested on charges of third-degree murder. It is a lesser charge than desired, and the other police involved are yet to be arrested, but the move against Chauvin was a capitulation to the protesters. 
As these events played out in Minnesota, solidarity protests in other cities began to flower. In Ohio, demonstrators broke into the state capital building. A police precinct in Brooklyn, New York, was overwhelmed. This intensification as the week closed then culminated in an eruption on Saturday.
In every major city, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in anger and defiance. The police response was unveiled violence. More than 4,000 people were arrested across the country. Countless reports and videos circulated of cops beating demonstrators with clubs, shooting people with rubber bullets and tear gas, and even driving their vehicles into crowds. There are at least 50 documented attacks on journalists. The police violence was met with fierce resistance, cop cars being set ablaze and the rebellion overwhelming police lines. In New York City, as many as 40 vehicles were torched. 
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The sheer number of acts of police aggression and courageous resistance don’t capture the confidence and passionate, beautiful rage of the demonstrations. Glimpses of insurrection and the feel of the carnival of the oppressed are visible. In Chicago on Saturday, the central business district was overwhelmed by a car caravan protest that clogged the streets while up to 10,000 people flooded the area. Largely spontaneous, the crowd swarmed in every direction. The cops responded ferociously. Cop cars burned. The usually graffiti-free centre was covered with the names of those murdered by cops, with slogans of Black Lives Matter, Fuck 12, ACAB. Hatred of the police and their racist violence was on every tongue. 
The protest was overwhelmingly made up of young people. Though Black and brown youth were clearly in the vanguard, the make-up was diverse. One of the largest groups of police made sure that Trump Tower was protected, demonstrating the priorities of the city’s rulers. But the police lost control. Mayor Lightfoot instituted a curfew with a 30-minute warning. (Most cities around the country also instituted curfews with little warning.) City trains and buses were shut down and, in an unprecedented move, the draw bridges over the rivers were raised. This trapped 1,000 mostly young people, who were beaten and arrested by police. 
The scene of popular rebellion was similar all around the country. Saturday unlocked a continuous wave or protest. The effect is ubiquitous: in every neighbourhood, cars have signs in their windows or “Black Lives Matter” and “Justice for George Floyd” painted on hoods. Every street corner is covered in chalked slogans, the names of the dead, and angry epithets against the police.
When the morning curfew lifted, protesters awaited the Mayor outside of her house and we found the city locked down. The bridges remained raised and the police set up barricades with large sanitation trucks to block off the city centre. The train service stopped people from entering and the nightly curfew was extended. The lockdown of the centre meant that protests became smaller and dispersed in different parts of the city. At least four neighbourhoods held street demonstrations. In the Black-majority South Side neighbourhood of Hyde Park, a large protest made a stand and the police attacked again, sending many to the hospital and arresting many more. Nurses at nearby hospitals reported being overwhelmed with cases of “blunt force trauma” from the widespread police violence.
This pattern continues. Last night (Tuesday), protests even bigger than Monday’s coalesced on the North Side, and a mass meeting and speak-out occupying the streets eventually took over the closed-off Lakeshore Drive thoroughfare and defied the curfew for an hour before police beat back protesters again. By all indications, the scenes I have witnessed in Chicago are similar in character and process to those going on all around the country. In some cases, like in Kentucky yesterday with murder of David McAttee, the police are killing people by firing into crowds.
The repression, police violence and deployment of the National Guard have been carried out by Democratic Party mayors and governors. Many of the party’s progressive scions, while expressing sympathy with protesters, are imploring people to stay home and write-off the legitimate rage as the product of “outside agitators” who, apparently, have descended on every American city. The Democrats offer no answer or solution. Indeed, their failure and inability to do anything about the nightmare of American life is partly what has led to masses of people rising. What else are people expected to do when they see no other way to change the world?
The demonstrations have been almost exclusively spontaneous, spreading through social media and word of mouth. Participants are very young, intensely militant and display absolute hatred of the police. As is always the case with social eruptions that draw in new layers of people, the politics is very mixed. While anti-racism, police abolition and a general rejection of the system are foundational, there is a hodgepodge of different viewpoints at demonstrations. You will hear everything from calls for Black capitalism, religious awakening, concern for the PTSD of the police, denunciations of white privilege and even anti-abortion speeches. But mass politics is complicated. Despite all the differing opinions, hostility to the police drives the fierce resistance. 
We will soon face the question of organisation. Many of the groups and coalitions that organised past protests are either overwhelmed by the size of the protests and the level of oppression or are not equipped take the lead in a rapidly changing situation. This question will be driven home by greater repression. Donald Trump’s belligerent threats of siccing “dogs” on the “criminals” are calls for more police violence and an encouragement to far-right vigilantes. Additionally, his claim to designate his imagined “antifa organisation” as terrorist, while ludicrous and darkly comical, is also a frightening warning of the state repression that could be deployed. Just Monday night, he threatened to send in the military to quell protests, which in effect would institute martial law.
To endure and deepen, the protests must continue and activate broader sections of the working class. The future is uncertain. However, this is a transformational moment, which demonstrates the type of resistance required to challenge the horrible conditions of the bankrupt and decrepit system of racist capitalism in the United States. We need more rebellion.

Eyewitness to the Chicago uprising

It’s been one month since the US assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, and, as the immediate danger of all-out war seems to have subsided, interest in the issue has waned. But the US-Iran rivalry has not abated, and the repercussions of the US’s strike continue to be felt on the ground by the revolutionary movement in Iraq.
Despite a week of sabre rattling and back-and-forth missile strikes, followed by President Trump and Iran publicly stating they had no desire to escalate further, the tensions between the US and Iran remain unresolved. The likelihood of more military strikes, proxy struggles over Iraq, and another escalation in the near future is still high. 
Trump has implemented more economic war on Iran in the form of sanctions. Already since Trump reinstated sanctions in 2018 the Iranian economy has fallen into a deep recession, oil exports have plummeted, and massive inflation has meant that the people affected most are the poor and working people of Iran who pay the human cost for Trump’s callousness. Human rights organisations report that the sanctions will create extensive hardships particularly for Iranians who require specialised medications and healthcare.
The economic impact of the sanctions, exacerbated by the Iranian regime’s own austerity measures and disproportionate military spending on regional interventions, have pushed the Iranian people to revolt in mass numbers as recently as November 2019--only to be met by a brutal military crackdown, with security forces killing hundreds and arresting thousands. Iran’s regime thus attempted to take advantage of the aftermath of Soleimani’s assassination to drum up anti-US nationalism in order to distract from and excuse its own repression and unrest at home. The dramatic nationalistic processions remembering Soleimani exemplify this, although the shooting-down of a Ukrainian passenger jet at the beginning of January quickly rekindled mass anger directed towards the regime. Chants of “down with Khamenei” filled the streets, with protestors defacing portraits of Soleimani. This cycle of performative state nationalism followed by more repression and stifled revolt is certain to be repeated--and any US intervention will only worsen its effects on the Iranian people.
The drums of war also proved to be a stark threat to the movement on the ground in Iraq. The US assassination of Soleimani, while threatening to re-start imperialist war in Iraq, has managed to overshadow Iraq’s nascent popular revolution and has provided cover for counterrevolutionary forces to emerge emboldened. 
While Iraqis have risen up almost every year since 2011, Iraq’s current uprising that began in 2019 represents an advance in both scale and political maturity, quickly becoming a revolution with clear demands and an anti-sectarian, anti-imperialist character. 
For over four months now, tens of thousands of Iraqi revolutionaries, led by young and largely unemployed sectors of predominantly Shi’a cities, have fearlessly faced off against the militias that make up part of the Iraqi state – a product of the US invasion and post-war Iranian intervention – that have killed more than 600 protestors and injured at least 15,000 in their attempts to repress the uprising. 
Among the movement’s demands is an end to the sectarian political system that designates political positions based on confessional sectarian lines, implemented by the US as part of a divide and conquer strategy following the 2003 invasion. The revolution has symbolised the first serious hope for Iraqis in decades, showing that another Iraq is possible. But the US attack on Soleimani has given the Iranian regime and the Iranian-backed government and militias in Iraq the opportunity to not only shift the focus away from the revolution, but to manoeuvre to crush it. 
The motivation behind the US attack is clear: frustration with Iran’s growing role and influence in the Middle East and a desire to defend and maintain US power in the strategically important, oil rich region. Of course, Trump also hoped a military stunt and an applause line at the State of the Union address would give him a boost in an election season. 
Iraq’s government, on the other hand, has for the last four months been mired in a popular uprising demanding its resignation. The government and its militias – both of which are Iranian-backed, and entrenched in the sectarian and militarised political system that emerged after 2003 – have used the killing of Soleimani as a pretext to re-orient the protestors to exclusively anti-US demands in an attempt to quell the ongoing uprising. Nevertheless, the movement continues to demand the US and Iran’s ouster from Iraq, immediate democratic elections and an entirely new government.
The US assassination of Soleimani did not do the Iraqi revolution any favours. In fact, the US intervention served to strip agency from the Iraqi people just as they were making advances in their fight for self-determination. During popular uprisings, foreign intervention – no matter the claims about assisting people on the ground –undermines revolutionary momentum and shifts power away from those struggling for their own liberation. 
The US assassination of Soleimani has allowed for Iraq’s Iranian-backed government to take advantage of the moment of chaos to reassert themselves, hoping to co-opt and undermine the uprising. At the fore of this effort is Muqtada Al-Sadr, the leader of the Shi’a based Sadrist movement and the electoral Sairun (Alliance Towards Reforms) alliance. 
Sadr, who has consistently positioned himself as leader and protector of Iraq’s near-annual protest movements, attempting to mask his participation in the Iraqi government in order to blunt the movements and contain them within reformist demands – had finally begun to be discredited. The US strike, however, gave Sadr the impetus to reinvigorate his following. 
Sadr has had members in most Iraqi parliaments since 2003, and he became even more entrenched in Iraq’s government in 2018. Sadr’s political list won the most seats in 2018’s election and formed a coalition government along with the parties associated with the pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and the Sunni affiliated Al-Wataniya list. This government was headed by the prime minister and former communist Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who, though forced to resign last November under pressure from the revolution, remained as interim leader. Thus far, the Iraqi Communist Party – a part of the Sairun electoral front – has been the only political party to pull out of government as a result of the rebellion. On 1 February, Mohammad Allawi, a prominent factory owner and businessman, was put forward as a possible new prime minister. Allawi, just another deck chair being rearranged amidst the political crisis, served in previous governments, and is understood to be Sadr’s candidate. On Twitter Al-Sadr declared that Allawi was “a good step for the future” and declared his support, pushing forward his nomination. 
Sadr, with support from some of the more hard-line pro-Iranian political forces, re-energised his base after the assassination of Soleimani by mobilising the protestors out of the squares. On 24 January, he called a demonstration that brought out a quarter of a million people, under the banner of demanding the withdrawal of US troops that have been occupying the country for nearly two decades. The march was a popular referendum of sorts on the Iraqi parliament’s passing of a non-binding resolution to expel US troops from the country, passed as a response to the killing of Soleimani. 
The official response from Trump’s state department, with characteristic arrogance, was that they would not negotiate the withdrawal of any troops, but only the “appropriate force position of troops.”
Though the march against the US presence was large, the full breadth of their demands cannot be realised by Sadr or his movement. Not only because the revolutionary squares have been clearly denouncing the “twin occupiers” of the US and Iran since October--which could be seen in the banners unfurled in Tahrir square the day after the assassination, reading: “Iraq will not be a battleground for settling old scores. . . Keep your conflicts away from Iraq”--but also because Sadr’s vision for Iraq represents nothing close to the alternative demanded by the revolutionaries. 
This is clear by Sadr’s continuously changing position towards the protest movement. After the 24 January demonstration, Sadr declared “neutrality” towards the movement, declaring on Twitter: “From now on I will not interfere in these [anti-government] protesters’ affairs in neither a negative nor positive way.” 
Sadr’s mass anti-US demonstration provided the pretext for police and sectarian militias to carry out a massive coordinated attack on the revolutionary squares, particularly in Baghdad, Nasiriyah and Basra. Militias burned the tent structures of the sit-ins to the ground. In Nasiriyah, protesters reported the power being cut and the police withdrawing to allow militia to torch tents that still contained sleeping revolutionaries. Dozens have been killed. Militias used live ammunition to break up the ongoing blockade of a key Baghdad highway. Key forays to Tahrir square were pushed back. The attack on Basra was a particular blow as the workers of Basra – the economic capital of the country – have long been seen as a vanguard of resistance from the days of its uprising against Saddam, the US occupation, and their current role in the revolutionary movement and the city’s general strike. The hashtag #WaitforBasra spread as revolutionaries expressed the hope of shutting down roads in order to stop oil production in this strategically important centre. It was in Basra that the revolution’s slogans against all political parties first arose. The protestors who took up these slogans have had no illusions that Sadr is part and parcel of the current sectarian system, despite his attempts to portray himself otherwise. 
Undeterred, the morning after the intensified wave of repression the revolutionary youth and workers marched back into the squares to rebuild and recommit to the revolution. In Nasiriyah protestors have rebuilt structures with concrete blocks and mortar in an affront to the burning of tents. In Basra protestors rebuilt the encampment amid chants of “No to all parties”, “Down with the System, Down with all of them” and “you can’t shoot ideas with bullets.” Large demonstrations re-secured squares in Baghdad. “Their withdrawal has achieved the opposite effect of breaking up the movement,” one of the revolutionary youth told Al-Jazeera, “We have had more protesters joining in. On the day Sadr declared his decision, the entire area from Tahrir Square to Tayaran Square was full of people, waving only the Iraqi flag.”
As the revolution pushed back against this most recent attempt to crush it, Sadr declared again that he would “participate” in the protest movement. However, starting on 3 February, his supporters physically attempted to break up the protests, entering the encampments in Baghdad and Nasiriyah with knives and firearms, and killing nearly two dozen protestors in Najaf alone. Sadrists have tried to directly take over the protest movement and dampen opposition to Sadr’s chosen prime minister. The revolutionary squares have responded clearly to the appointment of a new prime minister, stating: “Mohammed Allawi is rejected” and denouncing the move as just another attempt to maintain the sectarian system of foreign-backed oligarchs. 
Over the weeks, mass demonstrations have called for a trial of Sadr and for a popular vote in the squares for a new government. On 13 February, hundreds of thousands of women, who have participated visibly since the beginning of the revolution, marched under the slogan “the country’s daughters” and #SheIsTheRevolution, denouncing the continued violent repression and Sadr’s latest attempts to gender segregate the movement. This march is the first of this current movement that highlights the oppression of women. 
The coming weeks and months remain uncertain. While the political system stands completely delegitimised, the revolutionary movement still faces questions of how to organise an effective alternative as a counterweight to the traditional parties and militias that have a vested interest in the system remaining. The revolution still faces the question of organisation of left and workers’ movements that can oppose the government and provide an alternative vision than that of sectarian groups like Sadr’s or like Hezbollah in Lebanon who have long used “anti-imperialist” credentials to cover a soft defence of repressive governments. A vision described by Iraqi communist Aamar Sharif of the Workers Communist Party of Iraq calls for: “The government [to] be replaced by a people’s government, not another corrupt parliament. . . People must practice their rule every day.”
Solidarity still needs to be built with Iraq’s revolutionaries struggling for a new system in the face of enormous violence. Activists globally must build a movement against imperialism that opposes outside interventions that threaten revolutionary struggles and emphasises solidarity with the ongoing popular mobilisations in Iraq, as well as those in Iran, Lebanon, and around the globe. We must uplift these voices in the cities of the region who have creatively resisted and fought for liberation with a passion and resilience that should be an inspiration for the globe. These voices denounce their respective regimes and reject attempts to limit these movements to being only about US imperialism rather than an end to both US imperialism and also a new Iraq, and an end to the sectarian neoliberal system. 
Sadr will not be able to achieve the revolution’s demands, only an advancement of the revolt will. Building a healthy left alternative internationally is the only way we can build an opposition to the politics of imperialism, sectarianism and capitalism.

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