ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A group of parliamentarians and supporters of Britain’s opposition Labour Party have issued an urgent call for additional aid to Kurds confronting the forces of Islamic State. In an open letter to the Labour movement, which includes the political party and its trade union and individual supporters, the signatories urge the British government to send increased aid and arms, including heavy weapons, to Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Kobane and in the Kurdistan Region. They also call on the government to use British warplanes to target ISIS in Syria as well as Iraq. British air strikes in the region have so far been confined to attacking the militants in Iraq. The Labour Party, and the British left in general, has been cautious on intervention in either Syria or Iraq, a legacy of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in which the left broadly opposed British military participation. Labour votes last year helped throw out a proposal to join the US in retaliatory strikes against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad for his use of chemical weapons. Lack of British support was a factor in President Barack Obama scrapping his own plans to punish the Damascus regime. In September this year, David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, won a majority in the House of Commons on a motion to approve British air strikes against ISIS in Iraq. Twenty four Labour members were among those who opposed it. The 17 prominent signatories, who noted that they were non-Kurdish members of the Labour Party and trade unions, wrote: “The Kurds of Kobane, Rojava and the Kurdistan Region, including Yezidis, Christians and other minorities, are on the front line of a global battle against the vilest fascism of our age.” The letter stressed: “We must help them, we must call on the world to help them, and this help must be given by whatever means necessary. The Labour movement is an internationalist movement which understands deeply the plight of those who suffer at under tyranny.” The Labour movement should stand united in its efforts to change current British government policy in the conflict, the letter, dated Saturday, urged. “The images of grandmothers and grandfathers fighting, and often dying, alongside their younger families is something almost impossible for us in Britain to comprehend,” the signatories wrote. “The tales of beheadings, the abandoned dead bodies of women with their breasts cut off, men with their eyes gouged out, sex slavery, genocides and mass executions, and reports of the burning skin of possible acid attacks are too horrific for the British Left to give a half-hearted response, or worse.” Nick Cohen, a prominent British left-leaning columnist who nevertheless regularly castigates the left for its compromises with Islamic fundamentalism, welcomed what he called “a glimmer of light can pass for a dawn.” Commenting on the open letter in The Spectator magazine, he wrote: “Today’s intervention by the Labour friends of the Kurds is a sign that there is not one ‘left’ but many lefts, and not everyone goes along with the compromises of the past decade. Call me a trusting fool but perhaps, too, it is a sign that left-wing politics is becoming a little less seedy.”
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