ISIL in Syria

Jack Lopresti Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

I would not disagree with my hon. Friend at all, but we owe it to those participating in any military action to think through the plans carefully, to make sure that they are as realistic and comprehensive as possible; otherwise, we risk repeating past errors.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I have huge respect for my hon. Friend and for his military record. He makes eloquent points about the complexity of the situation and seeking a political solution in the end, but the protection of our people and their safety on our streets have to come first.

[Mr Baron]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. There are many Members on both sides of the House who oppose the Government on the extension of military strikes and who believe that that is the case. We should not forget that some of us supported the initial deployment to Afghanistan in 2001, on the basis that there was a clearly laid out strategy. I do not see such a strategy in this plan, and that is why we have to ask these questions and try to get some answers.

Perhaps the most damning accusation against those of us who say that we do not want to support the extension of military airstrikes is that we are sitting on our hands. They say that we do not want to do anything and want to stick our heads in the sand. Many of us believe in the need for military action to take on terrorists. Many of us supported that initial deployment to Afghanistan in 2001, and we succeeded very quickly—within a couple of years. Where we had trouble with Afghanistan is when the mission morphed into one of nation building, when we did not realise what we were getting into and did not have the resources to back it up.

We need a long-term strategy, so what should that be? What should it include? It is no good saying we need one if we have no idea what it should be. Let me give some examples. Let us talk about the non-military aspect. We have been talking in this place about disrupting Daesh’s financial flows and business interests for at least a year, if not 18 months. There has been no noticeable disruption of those business interests or financial flows. We have command of the skies in Syria. Why are we not disrupting those business and financial interests? There has never been a real answer to that. Why are we not doing more to disrupt Daesh’s prominence on social media? Again, we have talked about it in this place many times, but I do not see any evidence that that prominence is being disrupted. That is something we should tackle.

Above all, we should be tackling the ideology and the sectarianism that feed the extremism that these groups, including Daesh, feed off. That is a long-term strategy—we cannot do it overnight—but again, I do not see much evidence of it. Where are those awkward questions to our allies in the region about feeding this extremism? We are not getting that message across.

I come back to a point that has been raised before, courtesy of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s recent visit to the middle east. We managed to get back only on Thursday morning, in time for the Prime Minister’s statement. I refer to the mythical 70,000 troops. We all know, and all accept, that ISIL cannot be bombed out of existence through airstrikes alone. It will take ground forces, but everybody is having trouble identifying what those ground forces should be and who should supply them.

We visited various capitals—Tehran, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi—and spoke to a lot of experts across a wide range of fields. The point that kept coming across was the belief that there are very few moderates remaining in Syria after five years of civil war. But even if we believed the 70,000 figure, even if we believed they were all moderates, what the strategy does not address—I have asked this question before and I have not had an answer—is this: once these moderates have somehow been told miraculously to swing round, stop fighting Assad and take on Daesh, what is stopping them splintering into 100 or even 1,000 militias, as we saw in Libya? We ignore the lessons of Libya at our cost. What we were being told on the ground only last week is that this is not a homogenous group by any stretch of the imagination, and that those troops are just as liable to turn on each other as on an enemy, if they are set on doing so.