Mike Gapes
Main Page: Mike Gapes (The Independent Group for Change - Ilford South)Department Debates - View all Mike Gapes's debates with the Ministry of Defence
Liberation of Mosul
Mike Gapes Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Sir Michael Fallon
It is perhaps worth saying that, when my hon. Friend refers to progress, we are at the very start of this campaign to encircle and then liberate Mosul. I must remind the House again that this may not be easy; there may well be setbacks along the way. We have trained a large number of peshmerga forces, as well as Iraqi troops, over the past two years. We can be proud of the role that the British Army has played, particularly in training them to deal with improvised explosive devices, which have been seeded on a much larger scale than in any previous campaign we have come across—far greater than in Afghanistan or in the original Iraq conflicts—and in helping them to deal with evacuation to face snipers. It has been a consistent training effort over the past two years, and I hope that, as a result, the peshmerga are better able to deal with what will be a very difficult assault.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
This conflict is taking place in a globalised world with social media. Will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to send out the very clear message that, although we have not seen the crimes and atrocities carried out inside Mosul by Daesh, terrible things will be portrayed from this conflict, which could take weeks or months, and many people will die, but that is a necessary part of saving the world and particularly of protecting Muslims around the world, who are dying as a result of the horrors carried out by this caliphate cult?
Sir Michael Fallon
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who has experience of chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee in previous Parliaments. He is right: horrors are being perpetrated every day in Mosul, and that was the case long before the liberation and the assault started. We should not forget that some of these horrors have been perpetrated on our own citizens—on the hostages taken back in 2014—and others have been subject to atrocities ever since. It is important that the world does not forget just how evil Daesh has been in the extremes to which they have gone in punishing or killing those who happen not to accept the perversion they believe in.