ISIL in Syria

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Truscott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their strategy to defeat ISIL in Syria.

[Lord Truscott (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Government Whips’ Office for finding time for this debate, and I am grateful to the Minister and other noble Lords for participating in the last business of your Lordships’ House this week.

I commiserate with the Minister, who has been given the rather short straw of defending the Government’s strategy against Daesh. The strategy proposed so far is threadbare and lacking in detail, but more worrying is the fact that the public have no confidence that the Government are capable of finding a solution to the huge issues that they face in Syria, from achieving peace to solving the refugee crisis.

Since I tabled this debate, events have moved swiftly, with the other place voting in favour of air strikes against Daesh in Syria. The Government’s action to combat Daesh in Iraq has been superseded by the strategy outlined by the Prime Minister in the other place on 26 November 2015, and again during the debate on 2 December. It is a four-pillar strategy. We were told last November that pillar one represented a counterextremist strategy, meaning,

“a comprehensive plan to prevent and foil plots at home, and to address the poisonous extremist ideology that is the root cause of the threat we face”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/11/15; col. 1492.]

Just how do the Government aim to achieve the latter? Given Daesh’s successful manipulation of the internet, what is required is a comprehensive cybercampaign to discredit Daesh and the hateful extremist ideology that it represents.

The other three pillars of the strategy refer to humanitarian aid, military action and support for the diplomatic and political process. Humanitarian support is of course vital for refugees and those, like the citizens of Madaya, who are starving. Her Majesty’s Government have already given more than £1 billion in aid and pledged £1 billion more for reconstruction. What strategy do the Government have for dealing with the 11 million Syrians in the region who remain displaced, and under what circumstances would Syrian refugees in Britain be repatriated? All this lacks clarity.

The UK’s military action in Syria is largely symbolic in the scheme of things, and I cannot believe it will make a material difference to events on the ground. Still, what are the operational objectives of the UK’s intervention in Syria, how long is it expected to take and at what human and financial cost? Perhaps the Minister can give an update on the UK forces committed to Syria, the number of aerial sorties and the co-operation with local forces such as the Kurds. Are the Government in favour of a grand international coalition of all the major powers to defeat Daesh, including Assad’s Syrian army? Lastly, after the incident when a Russian military plane was shot down by Turkish fighters, is he satisfied with the co-ordination between all the different anti-Daesh forces in the region?

More important is the diplomatic and political process itself. The UN special envoy to Syria has set 25 January as a target date to begin talks aimed at ending the five-year civil war. In late December, building on the work of the International Syria Support Group and the Vienna process, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2254, which called for a Syrian-led political process facilitated by the UN. The aim is to establish within six months credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance, setting a schedule for drafting a new constitution and free and fair elections to be held within 18 months under UN supervision. A ceasefire is also envisaged under a parallel process. That is an ambitious target. Do the Government think it is feasible? Can the Minister say how Her Majesty’s Government aim to ensure that this diplomatic process ends in success and in peace for Syria and the Syrian people? What is the Government’s assessment of the likelihood of a ceasefire over the coming months?

May I also inject a heavy dose of realism into my remarks? No one is suggesting that a solution to the Syrian conflict, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced many millions, will be easy. It has helped fuel a refugee crisis which has shaken the foundations of the European Union and, without a Europe-wide strategy to deal with it, may influence the UK’s decision whether to remain in the EU or not. A failure of British government policy here, or the mere perception of failure, may have a profound effect on the country’s future in Europe. A whole series of proxy wars are being fought out in Syria, with Sunni ranged against Shia and Sunni against Sunni. It is a battleground for a regional power struggle between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, which has been discussed in your Lordships’ House before. It is also the focus of an old-style “great game” involving Russia and the United States and its allies. It is not a new Cold War; it is simply that the old one never ended.

In your Lordships’ House last week, several noble Lords asked whether Russia knew what it is doing in Syria, and the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, appeared perplexed that Moscow had focused much of its attention on supporting Assad. Whether we in the West like it or not, Moscow’s assessment is that what weakens Assad will strengthen Daesh and vice versa. Russia would hardly concentrate all its fire on Daesh merely to watch Damascus fall to the rebels. However, it is also clear that Moscow is not wedded to the brutal Assad regime itself but rather to protecting its vital strategic interests in the country and the region. It fears a Libyan-style disintegration of the country and a consequent loss of influence. It also fears the export of Islamist radicalism. I hope that the British Foreign Office’s assessment of Russia’s motives is merely disingenuous and not born out of lack of understanding.

Like any great power, Russia is acting in pursuit of its interests, and whether we disagree with it or not, its strategy is at least clear and supported by the Russian people. Apart from its military bases and long alliance with Damascus, Moscow is acutely aware of its own 21 million indigenous, mainly Sunni, Muslims, its own militant insurgency in the Caucasus and the possibility of contagion. Recently, our Prime Minister said that we maintained a relationship with Saudi Arabia, despite its appalling human rights record and military attack and intervention in neighbouring Yemen, because:

“For me, Britain’s national security and our people’s security comes first”.

Militarily, a solution to the Syrian conflict looks unlikely anytime soon. Even if your Lordships were to accept the Prime Minister’s unlikely figure of 70,000 non-extremists willing to fight the Assad regime and added in the 20,000 Syrian Kurds, this would still be fewer than the 240,000 soldiers in the Syrian army, backed by Hezbollah, the Iranians and the Russians. In any event, the UK Defence Secretary concluded that a majority of the posited 70,000 were non-secular Islamists, disinclined to support a western-style democracy. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, former Chief of the Defence Staff, has said, the most capable forces on the ground to defeat Daesh in the absence of western forces are Assad’s Syrian army and the Kurds. Incidentally, his assessment was also that around 40% of the population supported Assad. The remaining rebels are largely a disunited rabble, of varying degrees of extremism.

The West’s policy of regime change in the Middle East has been an abject failure. There was an interesting exchange on this at a meeting of the Liaison Committee in the other place, held on 12 January last, between MPs and the Prime Minister. Some MPs felt that getting rid of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Gaddafi in 2011 had been a terrible mistake, as brutal as those dictators undoubtedly were. We are now seeking to do the same in Syria. Prime Minister Cameron seemed to make the same mistakes in Libya that had been made by his predecessors in Iraq, with the implosion of both states. By removing these dictators forcibly by western intervention, we have opened a can of worms in the region. For most people in these countries, life has got worse instead of better.

While we are in the West are not morally responsible for the horrors of Daesh, it is undeniable that we were partly responsible for its creation. It was former disgruntled Sunni officers of the dismantled Baathist regime which created Daesh in Iraq, as the police and army were forcibly dissolved by the western coalition in the hubris after victory. We should not make the same mistake in Syria. We should put the UK’s weight behind a diplomatic and political solution in Syria, but allow the people of the country to determine their own future.