Kurds protest at Senedd over return of ISIS to Syria

Martin Shipton

Around 300 members of Wales’ Kurdish community staged a demonstration outside the Senedd to express their anger at the return of ISIS terrorists to Syria.

Most people in the West thought the terrorist group had faded away after the caliphate they created in Syria and Iraq was overturned.

But the group has seen a resurgence since the overthrow of Syrian President Bashir Assad in 2024, and in recent weeks ISIS has been murdering Kurdish people in the north east of the country which the Kurds see as part of their homeland.

Most of the demonstrators’ anger was directed at the new president of Syria Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly an Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist also known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani.

Salah Baba Rasool of the Kurdish All Wales Association said: “The communities under attack played a decisive role in the international fight against ISIS, at enormous human cost, and the current developments raise grave concerns about civilian safety, human rights, and regional stability. Despite the scale of the crisis, it is receiving very limited media attention in the UK and Wales.”

‘Ignored’

Asked whether the UK Government and other Western powers were ignoring the situation, Mr Rasool said: “I would say both they are ignoring and they created the problem we have at the moment because of Trump and his administration shifting all the attention towards Greenland. Unfortunately, the Kurds are being ignored.

“We have been fighting on behalf of the Western countries on the front line, losing almost 13,000 individuals in the past 10 years, and that is what we get. So we are really disappointed. Every single Kurdish person around the world feels humiliated because we thought we are a modernised, westernised population, civilised people. And when a situation like this happened, we are really feeling desperate and sad.

“The problem is this ISIS jihadist ideology. When you give them a platform, they will come back. The Western nations have made a big mistake by supporting the former Al Qaeda wanted terrorist who is now the president of Syria. He has been given a polished image and wears suits, but he is still a terrorist underneath.”

“This is a tribal ideology and rooted in history. So this is the fear. When you give them that platform, when they have power, they will come back. They will be the biggest enemy for Western society. They are fundamental.

“They are using it using him for now. And they have done it with Osama bin laden with the other Islamic religious clerics in the past. And it will come back. It will come back. That’s the fear we have and we have been witnessing for in the last 100 years, this up and down, we have been used by the American Western countries. It’s really disappointing.”