I wrote to my MP about fighting ISIL

This morning I finally got round to doing something I had meant to do for a while: I wrote to my MP to encourage him to lobby the government to do whatever it could to oppose ISIL (/ISIS/Daesh/Islamic State) militarily or peacefully. Please write to you own MP or other representative and donate to a charity supporting innocent civilians in Iraq and Syria. If you want to feel free to borrow my words as the basis for your own letter or email.

"Dear Mr Pawsey,

I am writing to you as my MP because I have just read an article detailing how ISIL are formally organising slavery as part of their so-called 'state', and particularly the sex slavery of Yazidi women and girls, including the rape of children. Nobody doubts these facts. These Nazis-in-robes are without doubt carrying out the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Syrian and Iraqi Christians and Yazidis with the utmost imaginable brutality and horror, as well as the deadly persecution of homosexuals and other minorities. The comparisons to the Holocaust are unavoidable, only the relative disorganisation and poverty of ISIL stop them being a threat to tens of millions rather than tens of thousands.

It seems utterly clear that there can be no diplomatic or political solution to ISIL, as they are a fanatical death-cult with no aims beyond the total subjugation and murder of anyone who is not an extremist Wahhabi Sunni. I know that Britain is weary after Labour's appalling failed intervention in Iraq, and the sense that every-time we intervene in these areas it merely produces some worse horror.  But I do not think there can be any worse horror that ISIL: we already have genocide, mass organised sex slavery including the rape of children, and ethnic cleansing. It cannot get any worse. And I feel that when we invaded and occupied Iraq we became, to some degree, continuingly responsible for what happens to the people there. We cannot stand by while another Srebrenica, another Rwanda, occurs not so far away, if there is anything more we can to stop it. What is the point of sending plane-loads of our school-children all the way to Auschwitz in Poland to learn the lessons of that dark time if we do not do everything in our power to stop it happening on this very day on the borders of Europe? Northern Iraq in 2015 is not so much farther away than Poland must have seemed in 1942. I think of the Yazidi women raped and held as slaves, and I think of my mother and my wife and the young women who are my friends and family . . .

I am not an expert in the military or in international aid, so I do not know exactly what can be done.  But I beg you to do whatever you can as an MP to support and encourage the Government do to whatever it can in Iraq or Syria. Whether that is militarily or or in terms of peaceful aid and support, whether to destroy ISIL directly or to help those groups there who are already fighting it, and to give what material help we can to all those threatened by death, slavery, or being forced to flee their ancient homeland. 

Kind Regards,

Stephen Wigmore"