Category World News

The resignation of the UK’s West Midlands police chief, who banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending a football match in Birmingham last year, has triggered concerns that pressure from pro-Israel groups is being allowed to override policing decisions in the United Kingdom.

Police decisions are supposed to be independent of the government or political influence in the UK. But the departure of Craig Guildford, chief constable of West Midlands Police, was the result of political pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups amid heightened sensitivities around the issues of Israel and Palestine, legal and political commentators say.

In November last year, West Midlands Police recommended that Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans should be banned from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa in Birmingham on public order and security grounds.

West Midlands Police said it had classified the match as high risk based on “current intelligence and previous incidents, including violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam”.

“Based on our professional judgement, we believe this measure will help mitigate risks to public safety,” the police force said at the time.

The decision was ultimately approved by Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG), a multi-agency body that brings together police, local authorities and emergency services to assess safety risks at major events.

There was a public outcry, and numerous media opinion pieces called the ban “anti-Semitic”.

That pressure has since intensified. Last week, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood publicly stated that she had lost confidence in Guildford following criticism by a police watchdog of how the ban was handled. Guildford resigned on Friday.

But observers say Guildford’s departure is a sign that policing decisions which intersect with the issue of Israel and Palestine are no longer insulated from political consequences.

The reason for this, said Chris Nineham, vice-chair of the British group Stop the War Coalition, is that “most politicians are too scared to challenge the pro-Israel mainstream consensus”.

He believes the fallout from the ban will have lasting consequences for future policing decisions. “I think it will reinforce the tendency for police forces to go along with the establishment bias against Palestine supporters, which is a product of the British ruling class’s support for Israel and is reinforced by Israel’s impressive lobbying operation,” Nineham told Al Jazeera.

‘A very dangerous precedent’

Frances Webber, a retired barrister who writes on politics, human rights and the rule of law, said the significance of Guildford’s resignation extends far beyond football or crowd control.

In the UK, “police forces are operationally independent of government, and any case against Guildford should have been pursued judicially, not politically”, she explained.

The visible role of central government in the fallout from this policing decision, she argued, “sets a very dangerous precedent, not just for police and local authorities but for democracy”.

Supporters of the ban on Maccabi fans attending the match in Birmingham argue it was rooted in a risk assessment shaped by events abroad and local context.

In 2024, Dutch authorities reported serious disorder involving Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters at a match in Amsterdam, with violence both before and after the fixture. In intelligence shared ahead of the Birmingham match, British police said their Dutch counterparts informed them that significant numbers of visiting fans had been involved in organised confrontations and disturbances.

Birmingham is one of the UK’s most diverse cities, with around 30 percent of its residents Muslim and more than 40 percent identifying as Asian or from minority ethnic backgrounds, according to the 2021 Census.

Officers were therefore concerned that the arrival of large numbers of high-risk, visiting supporters could spark tensions and even retaliatory disorder.

Nineham argues, therefore, that while procedural mistakes have since been identified by a police watchdog, the underlying policing decision about the match in Birmingham was sound. “The undeniably violent element within the Maccabi fans would have been a risk to the local population,” he said.

Webber also points to reports that visiting Maccabi fans in Amsterdam had openly celebrated the killing of children in Gaza, and officers would have had to consider this when assessing the risks surrounding the Birmingham football fixture.

An imbalance in scrutiny?

So why was the ban called into question at all?

Last week, a police watchdog report by Sir Andy Cooke, chief inspector at His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, found that “confirmation bias” had influenced how West Midlands Police assessed and presented intelligence it had received about Maccabi fans to the SAG.

It reported that Dutch police had questioned the intelligence UK police claimed to have received from them. According to a report in the UK newspaper The Guardian this week, Dutch police said key claims about the violence in Amsterdam relied on by West Midlands Police to reach its decision to ban Maccabi fans did not align with its own experience.

The report also criticised the police’s reliance on artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, erroneous AI-generated material such as a reference to a football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham that never took place. Guildford later apologised after initially telling MPs that AI had not been used, before clarifying that the error stemmed from an AI-assisted search tool.

Since Cooke’s interim report was published, much of the British media has framed Guildford’s resignation as justified, citing the findings in the report.

However, the report found no evidence that the ban was motivated by anti-Semitism, despite repeated claims to that effect.

Critics of the report, including Jewish Voice for Labour, however, have argued that there was an imbalance when it came to weighing concerns from different members of the community.

In a letter to the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, the group said the chief inspector of constabulary met with what his report described as “significant people” including representatives of the Israeli Embassy, members of Birmingham’s Jewish community, and Lord John Mann, the government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, but did not meet with any groups representing Birmingham’s Muslim community.

The group said that this disparity showed that Muslim safety concerns had been marginalised during the process.

‘A pro-Israel consensus’

“It is worrying how the line that this ban was anti-Semitic and that only a tiny minority of Maccabi fans are a problem has been able to take hold, despite the clear evidence to the contrary,” Nineham said, adding that most politicians have appeared unwilling to challenge a pro-Israel consensus once it was formed.

The fallout that resulted in Guildford’s departure, he believes, was ultimately shaped less by the report’s findings than by concern within the political establishment about the precedent the ban might set.

“Guildford was forced out because the political establishment didn’t want the decision he made to become a precedent… The message to the police is: don’t make decisions based on a real risk assessment, toe the pro-Israel line,” Nineham noted.

He said he believes the episode will serve to reinforce a wider tendency within policing and other institutions to avoid decisions perceived as unfavourable to Israel, deepening what he describes as an establishment bias against Palestine supporters.

Indeed, the implications of Guildford’s departure extend far beyond this single case, warns Webber, with leaders in the police force being placed in an “impossible situation”, expected to weigh foreign-policy sensitivities alongside public safety – something she said is absolutely not their role.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich criticised US President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, saying it was ‘bad for Israel’ and should be scrapped. He called for the closure of the US-led Civil Military Coordination Centre in Kiryat Gat overseeing the Gaza ceasefire.

Syria’s government announced on Sunday that it had reached a ceasefire agreement with the secular-led Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as part of its effort to unite the nation following 14 years of bloody civil war. Under the agreement, the government will take over land held by the Kurdish armed group.

Despite this, Syria’s army and the SDF both reported on Monday night’s ongoing gun battles in the country, particularly around an ISIL (ISIS) prison.

What did the two parties agree on Sunday?

President Ahmed al-Sharaa said the Syrian Army would take control of three eastern and northeastern provinces – Raqqa, Deir Az Zor and Hasakah – from the SDF as part of the deal.

According to this agreement, an official from Syria’s defense ministry said government-affiliated forces had arrived on the outskirts of the city of Hasakah in the country’s northeast on Monday.

As part of a wider 14-point agreement, Syria’s defense and interior ministries are now incorporating the SDF.

Al-Sharaa’s government pledged to reunify Syria following the ousting of former President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. A decree recognizing Kurdish as a “national language” and granting official recognition to the minority group was issued by al-Sharaa on Friday.

The end of the SDF is what Omar Abu Layla, a Syrian affairs analyst, told Al Jazeera.

The SDF in Syria represents the struggle of the Kurdish people, an ethnic group present across the Middle East.

The Kurds are who?

The Mesopotamian plains and nearby highlands, which are now home to southeastern Turkiye, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and southwestern Armenia, are home to a group of people called the Kurds. The Kurdish population is concentrated in these areas, which are collectively referred to as Kurdistan.

Kurds do not have a state of their own because they are spread across several different Middle Eastern nations. Additionally, they have a sizable diaspora population, with the majority in Germany and other European nations like France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

There are between 30 and 40 million Kurdish people around the globe. The Kurds are regarded as the world’s largest stateless ethnic group, having a shared culture and a strong Kurdish language.

The dialects of Kurdish, a language spoken in the northwest of Iran, are diverse and linguistically distinct. Most historians agree that Kurds constitute the Iranian branch of the Indo‑European peoples.

While the majority of Kurds adhere to Sunni Islam, there are also Kurdish communities that practice Christianity, Yazidism, and other faiths.

Why are the Kurds stateless?

When the Ottoman Empire seized the majority of Kurdish-held territory in the 1500s, the Kurds lost their land.

Post-World War I peace treaty, the Treaty of Sevres, established the Ottoman Empire in 1920.

Under this, the Allied powers proposed creating an autonomous Kurdistan. The emerging Kurdish nationalist movement saw this as a significant advance, but the treaty was never implemented. Later, Turkishye and the Allies renegotiated the post-war agreement, and the 1923 Lausanne Treaty completely rejected the notion of a self-governing Kurdistan.

Since then, Kurds have repeatedly tried to establish their own state, but those efforts have so far failed.

How do Kurdish grievances in Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye differ?

Kurds have endured years of difficult relations with their respective governments in each of the four countries.

Syria

Kurds make up about 10 percent of the population in Syria, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Repression and unfair treatment have been practiced against Syrian Kurds.

About 120 000 Kurds were denied Syrian citizenship in 1962 by a special census in al-Hasakah province. Their children and grandchildren remained stateless, and later estimates from early 2011 put the number of Kurds without citizenship at around 300, 000.

Arab communities have also been given access to Kurdish land as a result of Arabization policies.

When the uprising against al-Assad started in 2011 and turned into a civil war, the Kurds were initially at peace. However, in 2012, Syrian government troops pulled out of many Kurdish areas, and Kurdish groups took control.

ISIL (ISIS) fighters began attacking three Kurdish areas in northern Syria that were close to the organization’s territory in 2013. The Syrian Kurdish political party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), fought them off with the Syrian Kurdish armed group People’s Protection Units (YPG). The YPG was backed by the Turkiye-based Kurdistan Workers ‘ Party (PKK).

Kobane, a Syrian Kurdish town, was taken over by ISIL in 2014. In early 2015, Kurdish forces led by the YPG and supported by American-led air strikes retake control of the town after months of intense fighting. Later that year, in October 2015, the YPG and allied Arab and other factions formally established the SDF as a broader coalition to fight ISIL across northern and eastern Syria.

The SDF pushed into Deir Az Zor, ISIL’s final major stronghold, before capturing Raqqa, the de facto capital of the SDF in Syria, in October 2017. Baghouz, the final piece of ISIL-held territory in Syria, was taken by the SDF by March 2019.

Al-Assad remained in power until he was ousted in December 2024 by Syrian opposition fighters led by al-Sharaa, who is now the interim president.

Al-Sharaa issued an official decree on Friday as part of his campaign to unite Syria that officially recognizes Kurdish as a “national language” alongside Arabic, enables its teaching in schools, and grants citizenship to all Kurdish Syrians. Additionally, the decree removes measures that were used to actively deport many Kurds from Syria in the Hasakah province census of 1962.

The decree officially recognises Kurdish identity as part of Syria’s national fabric for the first time and declares Newroz, the Kurdish New Year festival, a paid national holiday.

Additionally, it establishes penalties for “initiating to ethnic strife,” grants rights to Kurdish Syrians, and prohibits linguistic or racial discrimination.

The Syrian government’s north and northeast region’s Kurdish government said in a statement that the decree was “a first step, but it does not fulfill the aspirations and hopes of the Syrian people.” It called for more action.

It stated that “rights are not protected by temporary decrees, but rather by permanent constitutions that express the people’s and society’s goals.”

Turkiye

Kurds make up 19% of Turkiye’s population, but generations have seen their names and outfits be banned.

The Kurdistan Workers ‘ Party (PKK) was founded in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, with the aim of creating an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkiye. The group launched an armed rebellion against the Turkish government in 1984, attacking state institutions and security forces with guerrilla attacks.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and many more have been displaced in Kurdish-majority areas as a result of the PKK-Turkish security forces’ subsequent conflict.

In the 1990s, the PKK rolled back its demands, instead seeking greater cultural recognition. It continued to use affiliated parties and organizations to advance its armed resistance against the Turkish state.

The Turkish-based PKK has ties to the SDF’s secular Kurdish leadership. Although the PKK signalled in early 2025 that it would lay down its arms and disband, it is still listed as a “terrorist” group by Turkiye, the European Union and the US. PKK fighters and Turkish forces continue to engage in violent clashes.

Despite this, the US supported the SDF because it was a successful partner in the fight against ISIL, which the SDF and a US-led coalition had already defeated in northeast Syria by 2019.

Iran

Kurdish people make up nearly 10 percent of Iran’s population.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was established in Iran as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Kurdish forces in Tehran frequently clashed with the Persian-speaking, Shia Muslim government over Kurdish demands for political autonomy and cultural and linguistic rights, despite the Islamic Republic’s initial support for the Islamic Republic and briefly controlling parts of Iran.

Several Kurdish groups have long opposed the government in western Iran, where they form a majority, and there have been periods of active rebellion against government forces in those areas.

In Iran, violent uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s were severely suppressed. Important Kurdish parties were forced to leave their strongholds, and many of their fighters and leaders retreated across the border to bases in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region. Civilian communities were also forced into Iraq, although large Kurdish communities remained inside Iran.

As an armed conflict with Iran’s Islamic Republic, the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PKK) was established in 2004. Since then, it has been conducting guerrilla attacks and ambushes against Iranian security forces from positions along the Iranian-Iraq border.

Iraq

Kurdish people make up between 15 and 20 percent of the population in Iraq. They have historically enjoyed greater rights than the Kurds in neighboring countries, but they continue to face oppression in Iraq.

In 1946, Kurdish nationalist leader Mustafa Barzani established the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to fight for independence in Iraq. In 1961, he launched a full armed struggle in what is often referred to as the First Kurdish–Iraqi War or the September Revolution.

The conflict continued into the 1970s, with occasional clashes in Iraq’s northern provinces. The government then began settling Arabs on Kurdish soil and relocating Kurds in the late 1970s. Some of them – many Yazidis – settled in “Mujammaat” or army-controlled towns or settlements in northern Iraq.

A Kurdish uprising was led by Barzani’s son, Masoud Barzani of the KDP, and Jalal Talabani of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Iraq in 1991, the year Iraq lost the Gulf War. The administration of the time, led by Saddam Hussein, violently suffocated it. More than 1.5 million Iraqi Kurds fled to Turkiye to escape a crackdown by Hussein’s regime. In response, Turkey imposed its own borders. In northern Iraq, the United Nations established a “safe zone” for refugees in April 1991, killing thousands along the border. Eventually, most people returned to their homes in Iraq after the situation stabilised.

The Kurdistan National Assembly, the first democratically elected parliament in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, established the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in 1992. The KRG took control of the now semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq after the UN granted them protection in 1991.

While the KDP and PUK agreed to share power, they experienced rifts and at times engaged in armed fighting with each other between 1994 and 1998.

However, the two organizations worked together to defeat Hussein in 2003. Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah were the three provinces that Masoud Barzani led the KRG controlled. In 2005, Talabani became Iraq’s first Kurdish president.

In the semi-autonomous Kurdish region and in disputed, Kurdish-claimed regions like Kirkuk, which is south of Erbil in northern Iraq, the KRG held an independence referendum in 2017. Baghdad rejected the poll as unlawful despite more than 90% of voters’ support for independence.

The Iraqi Supreme Court ruled that the referendum was contrary to the Iraqi Constitution, which calls for the preservation of Iraq’s unity and territorial integrity.

The Kurds lost significant oil revenues and attempted statehood were severely hampered by Iraqi forces’ subsequent invasion of Kirkuk and other disputed, dispersed regions.

The United States must avoid going to war because it is likely to cause an increase in nuclear proliferation in the nuclear age. Instead, it engages in hybrid wars.

Venezuela and Iran have recently experienced two instances of these conflicts. Both were waged through relentless misinformation campaigns, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, and crushing economic sanctions. Both CIA long-term projects have recently become more significant. Both incidents will cause chaos even more.

The US’s long-standing strategy toward Venezuela has two goals: to control its vast Orinoco Belt oil reserves and to overthrow its leftist government, which has existed since 1999. The CIA helped to fund a coup attempt against Venezuela in 2002, which is when America’s hybrid war with Venezuela began. When that failed, the US began implementing additional hybrid measures, including sanctions on Venezuela, the seizure of its dollar reserves, and measures to halt Venezuela’s oil production, which eventually failed. The US sown chaos, but the hybrid war did not end the government.

The US president has now launched an unprecedented attack, bombing Caracas, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, stealing Venezuelan oil shipments, and putting up a naval blockade, which is obviously a war action. Additionally, it seems likely that Trump is benefiting powerful pro-Zionist campaign donors who want to seize Venezuelan oil assets.

Since Venezuela has long supported the Palestinian cause and maintained close ties with Iran, Zionist interests are also interested in toppling the government. The US attack on Venezuela has been praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the “perfect operation.”

Israel and the United States are both waging a hybrid war against Iran at the same time. We can anticipate targeted assassinations, airstrikes, and US and Israeli subversion. Venezuela’s conflict with Iran can quickly turn into a devastating regional conflict, even a global one. US allies in the region have been making concerted diplomatic efforts to persuade Trump to back down and avoid military action, particularly in the Gulf nations.

Iran’s history is even more extensive than Venezuela’s. The country’s first US intervention dates to 1953, when Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically elected prime minister, nationalized Iranian oil in opposition to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (BP) in 1953.

Through a combination of propaganda, street violence, and political interference, the CIA and MI6 plotted Operation Ajax to take Mossadegh to power. They assisted the shah in regaining control of the country after Mohammed Reza Pahlavi fled the country because he was afraid of Mossadegh. The CIA also supported the shah by helping to establish his infamous secret police, SAVAK, which fought dissent through censorship, imprisonment, and torture.

In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was swept into power by a revolution that eventually resulted from this repression. After the US admitted the shah for medical care, students in Tehran seized him during the revolution, which sparked the US’s desire to try to hold him in place. Iran’s and US relations were further harmed by the hostage crisis.

The US has then plotted to oppress Iran and overthrow its government. In addition to funding Iraq in the 1980s to fight Iran, which ended in tens of thousands of deaths without achieving a majority, the US has engaged in numerous hybrid operations.

A negotiated resolution that would normalize Israel’s position in the world while limiting its nuclear program is the opposite of the US-Israeli goal toward Iran. Iran should be kept economically broken, diplomatically cornered, and subject to internal pressure in order to maintain its stability. Trump has repeatedly stifled talks that might have brought peace, starting with his withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 2016 agreement that had banned Iran’s nuclear energy activities and lifted its economic sanctions.

Understanding the hybrid war strategies helps to explain why Trump’s rhetoric abruptly oscillates between false peace promises and threats of war. Hybrid warfare is a land of contradictions, ambiguities, and pure deceit.

The US supported Israel’s bombing of Iran two days prior to the start of negotiations with Iran last summer, but the US was scheduled to hold talks with Iran on June 15. De-escalation in recent days should not be taken literally, for this reason. A direct military attack can only be too readily followed by one of them.

Venezuela and Iran as examples of how dependent on hybrid warfare are Israel and the US. For decades, the CIA, Mossad, allies’ military contractors, and security organizations have been the cause of conflict in Latin America and the Middle East by acting together.

They have ruined the lives of hundreds of millions of people, hampered economic growth, stifled terrorism, and caused a large wave of refugees. Beyond the chaos itself, they have nothing to support their billion-dollar investments in covert and overt operations.

There is only suffering, no peace, no stable pro-US or pro-Israel alliance, and no security. The US is also going to great lengths to discredit the UN Charter, which it first adopted after World War II. Hybrid warfare is prohibited from using force against other countries, as is made clear by the UN Charter.

The military-tech industrial complex in the US and Israel is just one example of how hybrid war benefits. In his 1961 farewell address, US President Dwight Eisenhower made a warning about the serious threat to society that the military-industrial complex poses. Due to the fact that it is now fueled by mass propaganda, artificial intelligence, and a careless US foreign policy, his warning has come even stronger than he had anticipated.

The best chance for the world is for the other 191 UN nations to finally reject their dependence on regime-changing operations, unilateral sanctions, dollar-based weapons, and UN Charter repudiation.

The American people have a hard time making their opposition heard despite the fact that they do not support the lawlessness of their own government. The US’s deep state brutality must end before it’s too late, according to them and almost everyone else.

The people of Greenland and Denmark should be the only ones in charge of shaping the country’s future, according to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who called Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on allies over Greenland “completely wrong.”