ISIL in Syria

David Davis Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I agree entirely with the excellent speeches by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), and by the Chairman of the Defence Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). They both made eloquent speeches, and I shall therefore focus not on the high principle but on the practicalities. I shall start with the Prime Minister’s point that all Members on both sides of the House want to see the end of ISIS. We are therefore talking about not the aim but the practical method of achieving it.

I think that all hon. Members could agree with 90% of what is in the motion. The contentious part is whether we should engage in the bombing. That is being proposed for entirely understandable but symbolic reasons. Symbolic is not a small word; they are important symbolic reasons. The proposal is to add a few British fast jets to the American-led air campaign in Syria and Iraq. We should face some facts, however. That air campaign has so far, in both countries, mounted some 10,000 sorties, one third of them in Syria, against 16,000 targets. The avowed aim? To degrade ISIS, or Daesh. The outcome? In the period in which the campaign has been operating, recruitment to Daesh has doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 personnel. By a macabre coincidence, that is about one extra recruit for every target we destroyed. So, from that point of view, we are not achieving our aim, although we are doing some good things. The former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), who is no longer in her place, talked about pinning ISIS down in Kobane, but we are not achieving what we intended to achieve. Arguably, we are achieving the opposite.

Last week, the greatest modern warrior, the American ex-special forces general Stanley McChrystal, was in the House and I spoke to him. He was talking principally about drones and aerial warfare, and he said, in terms, that we should never believe that we can cut off the head of the snake in this kind of war, because it always regenerates and reorganises. He said that that was the wrong metaphor for this kind of warfare, and that it would not work on any level.

Another point leapt out at me. I have heard arguments from many knowledgeable colleagues, but no matter how skilful and brave our pilots are—and they will be both—it is debateable whether they will make even a marginal difference. The reason is that despite the availability of a large number of aircraft and all sorts of weapons systems—including Brimstone, and others that compete with and might be better than Brimstone—the constraint will be the targets. The Americans are flying about seven sorties a day in Syria, while the Russians declare that they are flying more than 140. That is because the Russians are being given up to 800 targets a day by the Syrian army, while we are getting fewer than half a dozen, by the sound of it, from the Free Syrian Army. If you want a practical demonstration of the usefulness in war of the 70,000 fighters we are being told about, you have it there. They are not useful, even as target-spotters.

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has a clear view on what we may or may not do in Syria, but what is his opinion of the bombings taking place in Iraq?

[Mr Davis]

I have already told my hon. Friend that; he cannot have been listening. The simple truth is that the bombings have not achieved their aim; they are doing some useful things, including pinning some people down, but by themselves they cannot achieve what we have been told is their aim—namely, the reduction and removal of ISIS. That is their failure.

So where do we go from here? I will not go into elaborate detail on the long-term plan. We have heard about that from a number of colleagues, and all their arguments have been very well made. We know that the diplomatic creation of the future Syrian state and the creation of an army on the ground will be difficult and not very dramatic. However, people are looking for immediate action, and there are a couple of things that we could do pretty much straightaway. First, we could demand—not request—that Turkey shuts the Turkey-Syria border. ISIS gets $1 billion of income from putting oil across that border, and it sends weapons the other way. This gives freedom of movement to ISIS. Turkey is a NATO member, and it should not be giving any sort of comfort to our enemies.

Secondly, Saudi and the Gulf states are supposedly our allies, yet they send tens of millions of dollars into these Islamist organisations—not just ISIS but al-Nusra and others. That money is used essentially to employ soldiers in a country where starvation is always at the door, so that money is incredibly powerful. If we want to do something straightaway that would achieve more than several squadrons of aircraft, we should get our allies to do their job. People have raised another issue several times today. They have asked, “Shouldn’t we help the French?” Yes, we should help our allies, and we should do it by destroying ISIS, but we should do it properly and not by symbolism.