No to anti-immigration and imperialist war! Unite the workers of Turkey, Syria and the Middle East!

1. Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu (Socialist Equality Group, SEG, Turkey) unequivocally condemns the attacks on Syrian refugees that started in Kayseri on Sunday and spread to other cities, targeting people, houses, shops and vehicles. We call on workers to defend their migrant class brothers and sisters against such pogroms.

2. The stabbing death of a 17-year-old Syrian child labourer in Antalya on Tuesday by three attackers highlighted the scale of the danger. This was followed by raids and arson in Syrian workers’ homes and knife attacks by fascist mobs. The crisis can only be ended by mobilising workers as a united social force on the basis of an international revolutionary programme.

3. Of the 474 people arrested for violence against immigrants, 285 reportedly had previous convictions for crimes such as “immigrant smuggling, assault, drugs, looting, theft, damage to property, sexual harassment, fraud, counterfeiting, threats, insults, false imprisonment.” The coordinated hate campaign against refugees on the social media platform X/Twitter suggests that the incidents were organized.

4. In stark contrast to the police state repression of peaceful demonstrations on May 1 or of the Turkish government’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, there are reports that in many places, as in previous incidents, the police stood by and watched as the aggressors attacked the mobs.

5. In any case, this massive attack on refugees, which has already been rehearsed many times in smaller circles, is a product of the right-wing, anti-refugee campaigns of the ruling class that its media have been conducting for years.

6. The established parties – whether in government or in opposition – have adopted the far-right’s lies-based program to divide and confuse the working class, scapegoating Syrians and other migrants for the rising cost of living, deteriorating living conditions and other social problems caused by the capitalist crisis.

7. With this campaign, in which the trade union apparatus is also involved, the ruling class wants to divide the workers along national lines and prevent the development of a common struggle of the working class. At the same time, it wants to ruthlessly exploit cheap and precarious migrant workers.