Seumas Milne is no stranger to defending the UK’s enemies, whether it’s Vladimir Putin’s novichok exploits or Bashir al-Assad and North Korea. Now a fresh video has been unearthed by tireless investigator Iggy Ostanin of Corbyn’s spin doctor defending the “right to resist” of a notorious Iraqi insurgent group responsible for beheading civilians. Pick a conflict, any conflict, you can almost guarantee Corbyn and Seumas will side with the wrong ‘uns…

In the 2007 video Milne describes how he “interviewed three leaders of three of the main Iraqi resistance groups earlier this summer” – by his own account this included al-Rahman al-Zubeidy, spokesman for the Ansar al-Sunna group. In 2004, Ansar al-Sunna murdered twelve Nepalese workers they took hostage, including broadcasting a beheading online, justifying it with:

“We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians … believing in Buddha as their God.”

Ansar al-Sunna also claimed responsibility for numerous suicide bombings across Iraq with hundreds of local civilian casualties, they were already a proscribed terrorist organisation by the UK two years before Milne met them. The Home Office called them:

“a fundamentalist Sunni Islamist extremist group…[which] aims to expel all foreign influences from Iraq and create a fundamentalist Islamic state.”

Now they’ve merged with ISIS…

Milne was clearly not ignorant of Ansar al-Sunna’s brutal activities, in his own Guardian article he euphemistically labels them an “Islamist armed group with a ferocious reputation in Iraq”. Despite this, he defended them in his speech to the Stop the War Coalition, claiming it was a “myth” that the insurgent groups were focused on killing civilians and concluding that “it is important that I think we support their right to resist” and “we need to make sure that their voices are heard outside the country”. With Seumas doing their PR they hardly needed anyone else…