Middle East: Security

Stephen Doughty Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

My right hon. Friend will know that this House proscribed the full element of Hezbollah a few months ago. It is key that we work with our allies to strengthen Lebanon so that it has some resistance to Hezbollah within its state. That is important because Hezbollah has a habit of assassinating people in Lebanon who disagree with it. At the same time, it is important that we work with our ally, Israel, ensuring that we share any knowledge that either we have or Israel has to protect it from terrorists.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State is right to call for de-escalation because the consequences of a wider conflict with Iran would be severe, and the situation diverts attention from the many other crises in the region, including in Idlib and Yemen. I want to ask him about the prisons in northern Syria that were housing many of the Daesh fighters who pose a risk—both to us and to civilians in northern Syria. The prisons have effectively been left abandoned because of the consequences of US actions with regard to our Kurdish allies and Turkey’s intervention. What is the Secretary of State’s assessment of the security of the prisons and of the risk posed by the escape of prisoners from them?

[Mr Wallace]

At present, we, the French and even the United States consistently talk with the likes of the Syrian Democratic Forces to ensure that the prisons are still guarded and that we provide whatever support we can to help them with that. Like the hon. Gentleman, we recognise the importance of those prisons, which contain lots of foreign fighters as well as more localised fighters. We do not want Daesh to be reborn in those prisons, and it is incredibly important that we are able to stay in Iraq because we are partly going to deal with that situation in partnership with the Iraqis—there are Iraqi foreign fighters and others. We urge the Iraqi Government to reconsider their vote, because we think it would be useful to stay to secure that situation.