The murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, following those of other victims like Keith Porter and the deaths of 32 others in custody in 2025, show the deadly nature of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Federal agents have gunned down multiple U.S. citizens during their immigration crackdown, then citing “self-defence” and being “under attack”. Their leader Gregory Bovino backed them up in this, despite video evidence to the contrary, as did Trump’s spokespeople Kristi Noem and Karoline Leavitt, as well as Tump himself. Alongside other crimes committed by ICE have been the kidnapping and teargassing of children, the invasion of many homes without warrants, and the creation of fear and terror in the cities ICE and the National Guard have flooded into, like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, and Portland. All of this takes place at Trump’s bidding.
This is all a piece in the global campaign of state terror. Whilst, not as yet, on the same scale as what is happening in the Middle East, it compares to it with its murders justified by blatant lies. Israeli officials have countered the growing disgust at the genocidal moves against Palestinian populations, involving many thousands of deaths, in the Gaza strip and the West Bank, with a worldwide campaign of black propaganda and media lies.
In Uganda, the 81 year old President Yoweri Museveni, held on to power in a sham election. His son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has threatened opposition politician and singer Bobi Wine, with death by beheading, labelling him as a “terrorist”. Meanwhile martial law reigns in Uganda. Museveni has been in power since 1986, and over the years many critics of his regime have been murdered, the latest during the recent elections. Museveni is supported diplomatically, financially and militarily by the USA, Canada and Europe, which maintains him in power. This in spite of his increasing attacks on civil rights, and his strict laws against homosexuality.
In Iran, as many as 30,000 have been slaughtered in the recent uprising by the regime of the mullahs, headed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There have been mass arrests and executions of opponents of the mullahs continue. The theocratic regime does not hesitate in labelling those who had been involved in the revolt as terrorists, agents of the USA, Israel, and the Shah. Phrases like “terrorists and armed rioters” were bandied about by regime spokespeople. Khamenei himself said, “We consider the United States president criminal for the casualties, damages and slander he inflicted on the Iranian nation,”, and has labelled those involved in the insurrection as “emotional teenagers”. The Iranian revolt was a grassroots phenomenon, against massive inflation and shortages, widespread corruption and heavy repression, especially against women. The exiled Shah has tried to take advantage of this, but the fact remains that many in Iran do not want his restoration. The regime has gone further in its campaign of lies, by stating that many of those killed by the forces of the regime were in fact “martyrs” defending the status quo.
In Syria, the United States now fully backs the regime of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, previously known as al-Jolani, leader of the jihadist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was an offshoot of Al-Queda. Both the USA and Israel encouraged this group in its overthrow of Bashir Assad, an ally of Russia and Iran. Initially, al-Sharaa promised a “ democratic” future, but has increasingly imposed fundamentalist rule. In fact, the new regime is looking increasingly like the old bloodthirsty regime of Assad, with its centralisation and increasing attacks on various minorities, like the Kurds, Druzes, Armenians, Assyrians and Circassians. In August last year, at least 1,400 Alawites were massacred by supporters of the regime.
Now the new regime has turned on the Kurds in northeast Syria, in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), also known as Rojava. It has begun to refer to them as “conquests” and has announced a religious war against them. The Kurdish forces were behind the creation of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which united many of the above minorities, as well as some Arabs, under overall Kurdish control.
The SDF was supported politically and militarily by the USA and by Israel. Now US support is beginning to fall away. This was in part caused by the smashing of Hamas and Hezbollah by Israel, and the resulting weakening of Iranian influence in the region. The Turkish state has seized advantage of this power vacuum in Syria and has put pressure on the Trump administration to stop supporting the Kurds. The Turkish state wants to annihilate what it sees as a Kurdish threat in Rojava. It is only deterred from this by the American presence of 2,000 troops in Kobani.
Trump may well decide to drop American support for the SDF. Meanwhile , Saudi Arabia, which previously secretly backed Islamist factions in Syria, has now given full support to al-Sharaa.
Israel, meanwhile, sees the retreat of the SDF forces in northern Syria as a threat to its own security, with the resurgence of the Islamists. Israel wanted international recognition for Rojava, in order to block Turkish ambitions in the region. The Turkey-Saudi Arabia bloc is proving to be more influential in Washington than Israel, with Trump increasingly persuaded by the arguments to remove the “Kurdish terrorist corridor”. This has worried Israel, which sees the threat to the Kurds in the north of Syria auguring bad news for its Druze allies in south Syria, which it covertly arms and supports.
The SDF has the bargaining chip with the USA of holding tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families in its prisons. However, it is under increasing pressure to dissolve its forces into the state forces of the new regime. This would mean the disappearance of the women’s detachment, as al-Sharaa’s regime has insisted that women have no rights in Syria. It would also mean the freeing of the ISIS prisoners, further aggravating the situation
Thousands of women and children have been raped in Syria since the beginning of the civil war there. At least 393, 900 people have died there since 2018, with another 56,900 missing or presumed dead. Women and children escaping from Syria to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, have been forced into prostitution or sold into marriage because of economic necessity.
If Trump abandons the Kurds, as seems likely, it will open up a new chapter in slaughter in the Middle East.
Everywhere, barbarism and savagery are effecting many areas of the world. The obscene realpolitik which dictates the policies of the different power blocs, signals the increasing dangers of capitalism, which now promises war and more war. Whilst the rich increase their wealth with profits to be made from reconstruction and capture of natural resources, the mass of the population suffers. When they fight back, they are labelled as “terrorists”.