As a wave of French airstrikes targeted the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria overnight and as British Prime Minister David Cameron has called for the UK to respond similarly to Friday’s attacks in Paris, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on Monday warned against a potentially counter-productive military response and said that a political settlement should be the chief priority to end the cycle of violence.
Speaking on ITV1’s Lorraine program, Corbyn condemned the “appalling” and “terrible” attacks that killed at least 120 in Paris last week, but added that France’s retaliatory bombing of Raqqa, launched Sunday night, was “probably not” going to effect change.
Corbyn’s interview aired just as Cameron announced he wanted the UK to carry out its own airstrikes in Syria, but needed additional support from Parliament before holding a vote to authorize such actions.
The Labour leader continued, “The idea has to be surely a political settlement in Syria, but it’s very difficult to achieve. We have to be careful. One war doesn’t necessarily bring about peace, it often can bring yet more conflicts, more mayhem and more loss.”
“Who is arming ISIS, who is providing safe havens for ISIS?” Corbyn said. “To get there you have to ask questions about the arms everyone’s sold in the region, the role of Saudi Arabia in this. I think there are some very big questions and we have to be careful.”
Corbyn also criticized Western media for providing extensive coverage of the attacks in Paris while ignoring similar ISIS bombings that took place in Lebanon and Turkey just days and weeks earlier, respectively.
“Likewise, which didn’t unfortunately get hardly any publicity, was a bombing in Beirut last week or the killing in Turkey and I think our media needs to be able to report things that happened outside Europe as well as inside Europe,” he said. “A life is a life.”