Government Policy on Iran
Debate between Maria Miller and Jonathan Gullis(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) on securing this timely and important debate. Since the signing of the nuclear deal in July 2015, Iran’s regional aggression has continued unabated, as has its deeply troubling human rights record, which remains one of the worst in the world. The Islamic Republic is still a leading sponsor of state terrorism, providing financial and material support to extremist Islamist terrorist groups across the middle east, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Iran not only supports acts of terrorism, it seeks to form militias in parallel to national armies throughout the region, in order to bolster its influence. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is tasked with exporting Iranian revolution, with its infamous Quds Force establishing pro-Iranian proxy militias in other countries. Those forces are created using the IRGC’s effective blueprint, which includes the creation of social welfare projects financed by Iran, in order to take advantage of power vacuums and gain support in local communities for the militias.
As we have heard, Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of up to 150,000 rockets on Lebanon’s border with Israel, and currently has an estimated 45,000 fighters, many of whom have extensive battle experience from their time in Syria, where Iran is deeply engaged in supporting Assad’s regime. In May this year, Iran’s supreme leader compared Zionism with a virus and a cancerous tumour, and said that Israel must be eliminated as soon as possible. Hamas, meanwhile, has fully restored its military strength to levels before the 2014 Operation Protective Edge conflict in Gaza, including its rocket arsenal, military infrastructure and attack tunnels infiltrating Israeli territory.
Last year, the US designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organisation, the first time a part of another Government has been named an FTO. The US said that that underscored the fact that Iran’s actions were fundamentally different from those of other Governments. The US was right to state that the IRGC was the Iranian Government’s primary means for directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign. I urge the Minister to encourage governmental colleagues to examine the IRGC for proscription, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) has already outlined, following the welcome move to proscribe Hezbollah in its entirety.
Mrs Maria Miller (in the Chair)
We now move on to contributions from the Front Bench. Please leave two minutes at the end for John Howell to wind up.