ISIL: Iraq and Syria

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Looking at a map, that would exactly be the logic. My understanding is that the Turks are allowing humanitarian supplies across the border, but they are not currently allowing military reinforcements across their border.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

ISIL swept across northern Iraq and the middle of Iraq in its brutal and bloody campaign of genocide. One thing that concerns many people within and outside the House is the kidnapping and abduction of women, children and families. What steps have been taken to return those members of families to their loved ones, and what can be done to help them?

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Gentleman is right: there have, sadly, been industrial-scale organised kidnappings—perhaps not so much kidnappings as enslavement of large numbers of people, particularly of women but people of communities and faiths that ISIL does not recognise or approve of. Sadly, there is little that we, from outside, are able to do to trace what has happened to those people on the ground. Some of them have escaped and turned up as refugees, and their heart-rending stories have been published in some of the newspapers, which the hon. Gentleman will have seen. I am afraid we have low visibility when it comes to what has happened to many of these people.