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Why Do Labour Keep Getting Iraq Wrong?

Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra) | 22.10.2015 16:12 | History | Iraq | Other Press | Liverpool | World

Hussein Al-alak is the chair of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign UK

While I don't normally get involved in party ‪‎politics, I was intrigued by the article "So Jeremy Corbyn, what made you appoint Seumas Milne, an apologist for murderous dictators?" by Kate Godfrey, a member of ‪‎Britain‬'s ‪‎Labour Party‬, who is clearly attacking ‪‎her own leadership‬.

According to the author, ‪‎Labour‬ member Kate Godfrey stated, that Seumas Milne "knows that ‪‎(Syria's) Assad‬ had no "rational motivation" for the worst chemical attacks since the ‪‎Iran‬-‪‎Iraq‬ war."

Unlike Iraq, in ‪Syria‬ there has been no single chemical attack against civilians, which parallels the Kurdish village of ‪Halabja‬, who to-date, are still dealing with the breathing difficulties and disabilities which have arisen among survivors of that fateful day, in the late 1980’s, when planes flew over the Iraqi village and killed an estimated 5.000 people in a single chemical attack.

During the First Gulf War of the 1990s, the ‪Iraqi‬ people witnessed the first hand impact of chemical war, where the combination of burning oil fields, depleted uranium, along with a host of other toxins being spewed into the environment, led to it being classified as, the “most toxic war in modern history”.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent US/UK occupation, chemical weapons were once again inflicted up on the Iraqi people, which included the use of white phosphorous against populations in area’s like Fallujah.

Between October 2006 and June 2007, Iraq experienced fifteen chlorine bomb attacks by Al-Qaeda, which according to the US Defence Department, the first documented case being in Ramadi, where terrorists detonated a car packed with 12 120 mm mortar shells and two 100-pound chlorine tanks.

Chlorine attacks also occurred in Fallujah, Balad and again in Ramadi, with a later attack against Forward Operating Base Warhorse, in Diyala, where a car bomber detonated two tanks of chlorine and 1,000 pounds of explosives, with the chlorine causing an adverse reaction to over 65 US service members alone.

I feel that members of the ‪UK‬ Labour Party, would be wise to not exploit the suffering of the Iraqi people, in their Party's civil war, especially when Labour under Tony Blair, was the organisation which waged the initial Iraq invasion in 2003, based on the now discredited claims, that Saddam Hussain had "weapons of mass destruction".

Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra)
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