Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what the lessons learnt were from the deployment of the RAF in Chad in 2014.

Three Tornado GR4 aircraft were deployed to Chad, from late August to mid October 2014 as part of the international effort to locate and retrieve the abducted Chibok schoolgirls in North East Nigeria. Up to ninety-one UK military personnel were in Chad supporting the Tornado aircraft, and those personnel had all returned to the UK by 17 October.

We learned a range of lessons from the Tornado GR4 deployment in Chad in 2014, not least in terms of the challenges associated with deploying fast jet aircraft to a new and austere location.

Since October, four UK military personnel have deployed to Chad in support of French counter-extremist activity in the region.