Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Jason McCartney Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

That is not the subject of the debate today. Clearly, the United Nations always plays a role in such matters. The UN Security Council has already pronounced against ISIL over the past several weeks. The conditions were neither available nor legally necessary for a chapter VII resolution to be passed.

There was strong feeling from all parts of the House today. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), who is not in her place, spoke out as someone of the Sunni Muslim faith. Like the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander), she said that Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state. She said that the greatest antidote to its perversion of Islam is moderate, peace-loving Muslim communities elsewhere and in this country. As the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), the right hon. Members for Salford and Eccles, and for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) and the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) said, that is why it is so important for us to work closely with all those individuals, families, community organisations and religious leaders who have spoken out with great, great courage and strength of feeling at a time of rising Islamophobia and increasing anxiety in many Muslim communities. They say ISIL is as much of a potent threat to their way of life and their religion as it is to anybody else’s.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

We have heard a lot about failed military interventions in this part of the world today, but does he agree that the one successful one was the no-fly zone over northern Iraq in the 1990s that allowed the Kurdistan region to flourish as a democratic, prosperous and religious tolerant part of the world. I met Kurdish students at Huddersfield university during the summer. As well as responding to Iraq, let us respond to the Kurds. Does he agree?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is entirely right to say that we as a country played a role in that intervention. That allowed the space for the Kurdish authorities to find their own feet, metaphorically speaking, and to decide their own fate. The assistance we are giving in terms of lethal equipment, advice and training and the longstanding partnership we have with the Kurdish authorities will play an extraordinarily important role in Iraq, combined of course with the work that we must do with the Iraqi army to ensure that as we and other members of the coalition deliver air strikes—Denmark has just announced that it will be taking a similar route—the Kurdish authorities, the peshmerga and the Iraqi army will be able to push hard against ISIL on the ground.