Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The motion is the result of our failure to develop a sustained, coherent and strategic policy in the middle east. ISIL has a 10-year track record both in Iraq and in Syria, but the question we should ask is how has it become so strong. Jane’s World Insurgency and Terrorism assessed that ISIL was funded from the very countries with which we now propose to ally ourselves—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait—and whose refusal to put in place any serious financial controls has seen hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned off to ISIL and other jihadists. What pressure did the UK Government put on those Governments to tighten the noose around that flow of funds? Did we talk of sanctions or of freezing accounts in London? Of course not. The Government were too busy trying to clinch the £4.4 billion deal for the 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia. That was our Government’s priority. It should have been otherwise.

Now that ISIL are regarded by its former paymasters as too big for its boots, we are joining forces with them to degrade ISIL’s capacity and to cut it back down to size, but we are told that there is no intention to have boots on the ground. What an assurance that is. Of course there will be no boots on the ground. The Sunni states in the middle east do not want to destroy ISIL. They want it to remain as a thorn in the flesh of the Iraqi Government. This Government is not America’s poodle; it is the poodle of the Sunni states. Britain could have exerted real influence on the Maliki Government, but we turned a blind eye as the Iraqi Government ruled as faction and thug. Where was our Government’s attention? It was on Syria, but who did we want to degrade there? It was not ISIL, but Bashar al-Assad. The Government have made foolish alliances and alienated countries such as Russia that could have helped. They have been pathetically weak in bringing our so-called friends to book, and they are deluding themselves—or, worse, the public—with any suggestion that air strikes against ISIL are a sufficient response to the wider hell that is the Sunni-Shi’a conflict.

I have three questions. What demands about inclusive government, and what potential sanctions, has the UK placed upon Prime Minister al-Abadi in Iraq as preconditions of our involvement? What assessment have the Government made of the warning by the Royal United Services Institute that

“limited air strikes could serve to further legitimise ISIS?”

Finally, what demands has the UK placed on Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states about cutting off funding for Wahabist jihadi groups around the globe?

The Prime Minister says that we are fighting for democratic values, but those we are fighting with are not democracies. In joining them, we are not protecting democracy. They are the last absolute theocratic monarchies on the planet, and we join them at our peril.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—