Derek Twigg
Main Page: Derek Twigg (Labour - Halton)Department Debates - View all Derek Twigg's debates with the Ministry of Defence
Liberation of Mosul
Derek Twigg Excerpts(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Sir Michael Fallon
With respect to my right hon. Friend, I do not think that it is for us in this House to question now the integrity of Iraq or start designing a different shape for either it or Syria. We tried that around 100 years ago—indeed, it was a Conservative Back Bencher, Sykes, who first drew the line that runs between Syria and Iraq and presented it to Prime Minister Asquith. My right hon. Friend knows from his own ministerial experience how frustrating the pace of reform has been in Iraq—for example, to get the security and policing right, to delegate sufficient powers to the governors and to ensure that the army is properly accountable. Slowly, those reforms are being put in place. I think that we must continue to do what we are doing, which is accepting that these things are slow, but there is a democratic Government in Iraq who genuinely at the moment represent Shi’a, Sunni and Kurds in Iraq, and we have to work with them.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
First, on the Secretary of State’s point about driving ISIS out of Iraq, what assurances can he give the House that we will not see a repeat of the situation that followed the surge in 2006-07, which would allow ISIS to re-emerge from the deserts and move into Syria? What steps has he taken to stop that, working with the coalition partners? Secondly, when the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) and I were in Iraq a couple of years ago, we were appalled by the dearth of intelligence. Is he satisfied that there have been significant improvements in intelligence on the ground?
Sir Michael Fallon
On the first point, nobody in the coalition—it includes some 60 countries, all involved in one way or another—wants to be back in Iraq doing this all over again in five or 10 years’ time, so we need to ensure that the political settlement that is left when Daesh is pushed out of the country endures and is as embedded as it can be and that both Sunnis and Shi’as can rely on sufficient security to get back to their cities, towns and villages and live their lives. We will therefore continue to encourage the process of political reform, which has been far too slow—in many respects, it has been behind the military progress that has been made. We will continue to encourage that.