Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I visited the Christian villages near Mosul that are most affected by Islamic State. I have heard the harrowing tales of women losing husbands, sons and daughters to death and kidnapping. It is appalling to talk to a mother and hear her say that she last saw her son or her husband going to church and has never seen him again. But attacks on Iraqi Christians and other minorities, such as the Yazidis, have been happening for years, ever since our misconceived and misplaced invasion of Iraq. That replaced an admittedly brutal strongman who protected minorities with chaos. For years, I and others have argued that Assyrian Christians in the Mosul plain needed their own province in Iraq to defend themselves. Frankly, we have been met with a complacent response from the Foreign Office. Now, it is almost too late: the Kurds have failed to protect them. Perhaps they have not got the resources.

The truth is that, until now, we have done everything wrong. In our zealous liberalism, we have encouraged revolutions across the middle east and then been profoundly shocked when the forces that we have helped to unleash have turned against us. In that sense, the British Government are indirectly culpable in fostering the conditions for jihadism to thrive in Iraq and Syria. It is not surprising that last year in Maaloula, a Christian village in Syria, one civilian said to the BBC to tell the west

“that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us.”

In that sense, brutal as he is, Assad is a natural ally against jihadism.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend saying that we should not support the campaign of the Syrian free forces against the Assad regime, as some Gulf states are urging us to do?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

We all want Syria to be a democratic, modern country, and we all want the Syrian free forces to win this battle, but a year ago we were asked in this House of Commons to bomb Assad and now we are being asked to stand on our heads. I have heard of being asked to bomb our opponents and support our friends, but what we are doing now in Syria is extraordinary and makes no sense.