Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent steps his Department has taken to protect Christians in northern Iraq.

We are providing humanitarian assistance to those who have fled areas of Iraq controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and have taken part in a series of airdrops to people trapped by ISIL. We are providing military assistance to the Kurdish Peshmerga forces fighting ISIL as set out in the Prime Minister’s statement on 1 September so that they can restore control over the areas taken by ISIL.