The brutal torture and murder of Hadi Salih, who impressed all with his basic decency and dignity after decades of oppression and exile when he briefed MPs last year, is rightly damned by Johann Hari (Opinion, 7 January). It is also a watershed moment when progressives who have shown a “sneaking regard” for the so-called resistance should shed such lethal illusions. What worries Labour Friends of Iraq is that Hadi’s murder is part of a strategy to eliminate the leadership of the emerging Iraqi labour movement. Nozad Ismail, the president of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions in Kirkuk, has twice escaped the assassins and receives daily threats. We have launched an urgent global appeal but the “resistance” doesn’t have a postbox and doesn’t listen to rational argument. One way of overcoming this form of fascism is to mobilise decent people to say “they shall not pass”.