Lead story

Corbyn stands firm for no new war

by Daphne Liddle

JEREMY Corbyn is starting to get tough with members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) who are urging him to support David Cameron’s plans to get Britain involved in bombing Syria.

Following the terrorist attacks in France and Beirut last week there is a storm of knee-jerk support for Britain to share in the bombing of Isis positions in Syria.

But Corbyn has asserted that he will “not offer a free vote” for Labour MPs on this issue and they should vote against bombing Syria. Currently Russia is bombing Isis positions in Syria very effectively but there is a big difference between Russia’s actions and those of the western powers.

Russia is there at the request of the elected Syrian government to support Syrian ground troops with air strikes against Isis that are proving very effective and the terrorists are steadily being driven back.

Cameron’s plan all along has been to get involved in Syria to support United States’ efforts to destabilise and remove the government the people of Syria elected because Bashar al Assad would not bow to Washington and supported other small nations trying to defy US hegemony.

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Corbyn stands firm for no new war

Russian bombers pound ISIS

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

SYRIAN forces are pummelling terrorist positions following Russian air assaults that have been stepped up following last week’s bloodbath in Paris and the revelation that the Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt was brought down by an ISIS bomb.

A squadron of Russian long-range bombers, which was part of its old nuclear strike force, pounded Raqqa, the command centre of the “Islamic State” in eastern Syria. At the same time unconfirmed reports said that Russian special forces had landed in Sadad to break the terrorist siege of the mainly Christian town in western Syria.

Now French forces are openly co-operating with the Russians in fighting ISIS after the terrorist attacks, which killed 129 civilians and wounded hundreds more in an orgy of killing by “Islamic State” gunmen in the heart of the French capital.

French president Francois Hollande performed a spectacular U-turn on Syria in the wake of the Paris massacres this week. The French social-democratic leader had been the staunchest supporter of the American drive for “regime change” in Syria in the hope that he could restore French influence in its former colony by riding on the coat-tails of US imperialism.

In the past the French actively assisted the terror gangs that are fighting to bring down Syria’s popular front government. Now the backlash on the French street has forced Hollande to change tack and work with the Russians instead.

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Russian bombers pound ISIS

Editorial

They call it terrorism when it hits them

THE WORLD was shocked at the bloodbath in Paris last week that only ended when the gunmen were shot down or blew themselves up in the final confrontations with the police and security forces. The gunmen, who killed 129 civilians and wounded hundreds more in the name of the “Islamic State” showed, once again what the Syrian people are up against in their struggle to fend off the barbarous sectarian terror gangs that have spread death and destruction across Syria over the past five years.

Last summer Syrian president Bashar al Assad said: “The West deals with terrorism in a hypocritical way. They call it terrorism when it hits them, and revolution, freedom and democracy when it hits us”. How right he was.

ISIS, along with Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, are fighting to overthrow the Popular Front government of Bashar al Assad that stands for democracy and secularism. But they couldn’t have done it without the less than covert support of US imperialism and the feudal Arab kings of Arabia who all want “regime change” in Syria.

None of these terror gangs could fight without weapons to take on the Syrian Arab Army. But they’re never short of arms and ammunition. The Americans pumped arms to the sectarian bigots in the name of “democracy and human rights” and the bogus “Arab Spring” that the imperialists used as a cover to overthrow the Gaddafi government in Libya while Nato Turkey trained the gunmen and allowed volunteers and arms convoys to cross over into Syria to stoke up the flames of civil war.

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They call it terrorism when it hits them