ISIL in Syria

Khalid Mahmood Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

First, I want to welcome the Prime Minister’s use of the name Daesh for this barbaric group of people who have absolutely no connection at all to Islam, my faith—as has been affirmed by the Grand Imam Sheikh el-Tayeb of al-Azhar University in only the last few days. That ensures that those people are not referred to in any way as Muslims; nor should they be seen as such.

Since 9/11, we have been saying to the majority of Muslim countries that they should start to take action against radicalisation and terrorism. They have started to do that. Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries are involved in doing that, and Pakistan has, over almost three and a half years, lost 5,000 troops in tackling this. Before that, it was a common occurrence for a number of suicide bombings to take place across the country, particularly in Karachi, where there was a disproportionately large number of deaths. By taking the very difficult steps of putting boots on the ground in the North-West Frontier areas, and going street by street, door by door, Pakistan has managed, by and large, to deal with this.

We cannot tackle the terrorists, the ideology and all these people by airstrikes alone. In terms of the case put forward today, I have had the fairly strong view for a long time that we should support action against Daesh, but I am in a quandary at the moment, having heard all the people who have spoken to me, including my constituents and people I have spoken to in this place. I find myself in a very different place at the moment. That is because of some of the things that have been said by the Prime Minister. He and the Foreign Secretary have said that under no circumstances will we have any people on the ground. The only way we will defeat this horrid group is by having people on the ground. That means not just us, America, France or others from the EU; we need a coalition of the nations, including the Muslim countries in the area, to deal with this problem. We must not think we can deal with it by airstrikes, no matter how accurate our Brimstone missiles are, and no matter how many strikes and sorties we can carry out. If we are able to wage that war from the air and defeat Daesh, there is a bigger issue: consistently, on the issue of terrorism and radicalisation, we have managed to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.

When the Syria dispute started, there was the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. That popped on for a bit and nobody took much notice—it was considered to be fine because they were having a go at Assad, and it was thought, “That’s okay, we can stand by and allow them to do that.” Also, of course, some of our allies wanted to supply arms to them. So we turned a blind eye and allowed them to carry on, but that turned into Daesh/ISIL. Not only is there the barbarity of those people and what they wanted to do, but they were joined by the Ba’athists in Iraq, and all those people—in some instances Sunnis—who call for a geographic state in Iraq. We now discuss how we can divide Iraq up to reflect the different religious groups, but that is complete nonsense. First, what we must do is take on this rag, tag and bobtail group of people who do not represent anybody, and the only way we will do that is by moving forward.

I also want to say very quickly that we need to tackle the assertions of 70,000 people whom we call the Free Syrian Army. That is, again, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, and those people who are never going to be our friends.