Counter-Daesh Update

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to give a counter-Daesh update.

I should like to begin my statement by paying tribute to the commitment and professionalism of our armed forces. They operate in a world of constant conflict in which the dangers posed by the likes of Daesh and rogue states are ever-present, but we sleep more soundly in our beds thanks to their tireless dedication and sacrifice.

Since the House was last updated on the campaign against Daesh in July 2019, RAF aircraft have continued to patrol the skies on an almost daily basis, conducting attacks on some 16 occasions, striking 40 terrorist targets. Those targets range from caves occupied by Daesh terrorists in remote areas of northern Iraq to weapons caches, bunkers and training camps, and included the destruction of two Daesh strongpoints engaged in close combat with Iraqi security forces.

With that in mind, I would like to salute the service of Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon, who was tragically killed in a rocket strike on Camp Taji on March 11 this year. Lance Corporal Gillon’s entire career was dedicated to helping and saving lives. A sports physiotherapist in her civilian life, she joined the Reserves in 2015 and volunteered to be part of the Irish Guards battle group as a class one combat medical technician. At just 26 years of age, she was fulfilling a lifelong ambition to serve her country, and her commanding officer believes she was destined for great things. Lance Corporal Gillon remains a shining example of what our armed forces and Reserves stand for. Our thoughts are with her family, and I am sure the whole House will join me in remembering her exceptional life and condemning the cowardly attack that cut it short.

When the former Secretary of State for International Development last spoke to the House on this subject, he was able to report that Daesh had lost control of the territory they once held. Thanks to the continued pressure of the 82-member coalition and partner forces in Iraq and Syria, that remains the case, but the hard fight against Daesh is by no means done. Indeed, yesterday was the third anniversary of the liberation of Mosul from its grip. Its black flag no longer flies over the great cities of Iraq and Syria. Its leader, al-Baghdadi, no longer rallies his followers with calls to war. But the threat from Daesh, I am afraid, remains. Its poisonous ideology endures, and its pernicious influence continues to spread. Conflict, economic collapse and inequality are creating new opportunities that it will continue to exploit to grow and recruit. The prospect of its resurgence should concern us all. As long as it is able to operate over there, it can hit our citizens over here. Daesh retains its intent to carry out and inspire attacks against us and remains the most significant terrorist threat to the United Kingdom and our interests.

That is why our commitment to the Global Coalition against Daesh remains unwavering. The UK will continue to play a leading role in the coalition in the often unseen fight against Daesh’s insidious propaganda. Our military support has proven highly effective, and I would like in particular to recognise the work of the Iraqi security forces. They have made huge sacrifices in the fight against Daesh and become a capable and robust fighting force. With support and training from the UK and our coalition partners, they are increasingly able to conduct independent operations. Last year more than 50,000 personnel from the Iraqi army, federal police, border guard, Kurdistan security forces and emergency response battalions completed training delivered by coalition troop-contributing countries. In 2020 so far, the ISF have conducted more than 1,200 missions to defeat Daesh.

But, as the ISF themselves acknowledge, they still require our enduring assistance to defeat the threat. That is why the UK will continue to provide training, mentoring and professional military education to the Iraqis through the coalition, NATO Mission Iraq and bilateral initiatives. That is also why we will continue to provide essential air support. The terrorists have nowhere to hide. We have destroyed bunkers and hidden bases. This is a long-running effort. Indeed, since the beginning of this year, I have authorised 10 strikes on Daesh.

As the Daesh threat changes, so the coalition response evolves. The campaign has now entered a new phase, with greater emphasis on helping the Iraqi Government to develop a strong security apparatus. The UK’s commitment to Iraq’s stability and sovereignty is for the long term. That is why I signed a memorandum of understanding on our future defence relationship with the Iraqi Defence Minister last year—the first such agreement with a western power since the territorial defeat of Daesh. I look forward to building on that work. It is also why the UK seeks to support Iraq to minimise the destabilising effects of economic crisis, which could provide an opportunity for Daesh to re-emerge. Through our funding and leadership alongside the World Bank’s Iraq reform, recovery and reconstruction fund, we have managed to help build the Iraqi economy.

But, even as we seek to strengthen Iraq, there are others who seek to destabilise it. As I made clear to the House in the days following the US drone strike against General Soleimani on 2 January, malign activity by Iranian-aligned proxies only furthers the instability in which insurgents thrive. Meanwhile, rogue militia groups continue to conduct reprehensible attacks on diplomatic premises and bases hosting coalition personnel. We urge the Iraqi Government to protect coalition forces and foreign missions and to prosecute those responsible for the attacks. The coalition is in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi Government, to help defend Iraqis and others against the very real shared threat from Daesh. Without their efforts, Daesh will only be emboldened. The US and Iraq are engaged in an ongoing strategic dialogue to shape the coalition’s future support to the Iraqis in continuing to degrade Daesh—efforts that the UK sincerely supports. The collective mission to crush Daesh remains paramount.

We should not forget that Daesh respects no borders, and as it moves between Iraq and Syria, so must our response. In Syria, Daesh continues to take advantage of a fractured and unstable country. Like the ISF in Iraq, the Syrian Democratic Forces have made huge sacrifices in the fight against Daesh, and we are deeply grateful to them. The coalition continues to support this fight through aerial missions, seeking out Daesh locations and striking when necessary.

We are also determined that those individuals who have fought for or supported Daesh, whatever their nationality, should pay for their crimes. This should occur under the most appropriate jurisdiction, often in the region where the crimes were committed. At the height of the conflict, over 30,000 foreign terrorist fighters answered Daesh’s call and travelled to the region. Around 900 of those came from the United Kingdom. Of these, approximately 20% have been killed; 40% have returned to the United Kingdom, where they have been investigated, and the majority have been assessed now to pose no risk or a low security risk; and some 40% remain in the region, either at large or in facilities managed by the Syrian Democratic Forces or others.

We are working closely with international partners to establish an effective justice mechanism to make sure that all those who fought under Daesh’s black flag are brought to justice. As part of this, we continue our strong support for the UN investigation teams, UNITAD and the IIIM, building evidence of Daesh crimes in Iraq and Syria.

Syria is one of the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophes, and the UK remains at the forefront of the response. The International Development Secretary has committed to at least £300 million of aid to Syria and neighbouring countries for 2020, bringing our aid spend to more than £3 billion since 2012 in the region. We are alleviating the burden of millions of people who have been displaced. We are providing food, water and healthcare. We are supporting the education and mental health of children scarred by Daesh occupation. We are providing grants for businesses to help them to grow and crops to farmers to restore their livelihoods.

In Iraq, 7.7 million Iraqi citizens were liberated from Daesh rule, but the damage inflicted by Daesh remains. Since 2014, the UK has committed £272 million in humanitarian support, providing millions of Iraqis with shelter, medical care and clean water. We have also provided £110 million putting basic utilities in education in place and enabling Iraqis to return to their homes.

We should take immense pride in our role as a leading member of the global coalition against Daesh—a coalition that has managed to degrade and bring this terrorist organisation to the point of weakness. Our challenge is now to hold our course, strengthening the grand and unprecedented coalition, denying Daesh every inch of comfort and every ounce of hope, addressing the poverty and lack of opportunities in communities that has helped Daesh to build its ranks, and finally, giving the Iraqi and Syrian people the security they deserve to rebuild their lives in peace. I commend this statement to the House.

I thank the Secretary of State for making this statement and for advance sight of it. I hope that this marks the return to Ministers fulfilling the Government’s commitment to provide the House with quarterly updates on Daesh. It has been a year and 20 days since the last statement and a lot has happened since, including that the last Secretary of State to make this statement is no longer a Member of this House or, indeed, the Conservative party.

I begin by paying tribute to the dedication of our armed forces and those from the multinational coalition, who continue the fight to counter the deadly threat of Daesh. I also salute the service of Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon. Her death is the toughest possible reminder that our troops, both full-time and reservists, put their lives on the line to defend us. Today, I want to reaffirm the strength of the commitment of my party for the UN-sanctioned global coalition and the comprehensive international approach against Daesh.

The coalition’s success so far is clear. Daesh no longer controls any territory, compared with its height six years ago, when it had sway over 8 million people and a land area the size of our own UK. However, it is also clear that Daesh is stepping up its insurgent attacks and must be at risk of gaining a foothold south of the Euphrates in the area controlled by the Syrian regime, backed by Iranian and Russian allies. The Secretary of State said this afternoon that the RAF has conducted 16 air attacks since July last year. Half of those have been in the past two months alone, so can the Secretary of State confirm how many air strikes have been carried out by the global coalition as a whole in the past two months, and is the number of such attacks rising?

In April, NATO agreed to an enhanced role against Daesh. Will the Secretary of State explain what this role will be, what additional activity will be conducted by NATO and what the UK contribution will be through NATO? In particular, will more NATO mean less US in Iraq and Syria?

I will do my best to answer all the questions. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support of the counter-Daesh actions.

The right hon. Gentleman asks whether the number of strikes has increased. I can write to him with the details of the total global coalition strikes, but I can say that United Kingdom strikes have increased in the past few months, although that is mainly a reflection of the functioning Government of Iraq and a better outcome that they are requiring and requesting in support. He might remember that the previous Government were in a state of paralysis and then on a number of occasions not functioning. The increase in strikes is mainly a reflection of what we have seen since then, but I am happy to write to him and clarify more the overall coalition responses.

On NATO and training, NATO has sought to see where it can step in and support specifically in the areas of training, security improvements, nation building and so on. It has not progressed as fast as needed, because of covid and the quietness at the beginning of the year, from both the threat and everything else. Also, many of the traditional partners we work with feel that their training has been completed. Therefore, we are working with NATO and the Iraqis to see where else we can assist. We stand ready to do more, and we are exploring more.

At the same time, in answer to the question whether more NATO means less US, the outcome of the US security dialogue will, I think, be the next stage where we will be able to understand what more we can do. We all recognise that the previous Iraqi Parliament passed a non-binding resolution asking the United States forces to leave. That only becomes binding if the Iraqi Government act on it. The new Iraqi Government have said they continue to require coalition support, and that is why the security dialogue is ongoing at the moment.

I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement to the House. The Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi army united with the global coalition to help destroy the brutal Daesh caliphate, but Daesh is now regrouping in territories disputed between the Kurds and the Iraqis. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this underlines the vital importance of our actively helping Baghdad and Irbil resolve their differences in military and political matters?

It is vital, for all the people of Iraq and Syria, that we get as much stability as possible. It is incredibly important that we work with the Kurds and the Iraqis to ensure that, where there are differences, they are sorted out or negotiated. Indeed, we should work with both Turkey and Kurdish forces to make sure that they both accommodate each other and that they understand there is often a common need for them to work together, or certainly that it is in their common interest to defeat Daesh and al-Qaeda.

I, too, am grateful to the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. Like him, I would like to put on record our condolences to the family, friends and colleagues in uniform of the late Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon. He is right to say that she was identified as having had a stunning career so far, and it is sad that her best days in that career will no longer be realised.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to ask a few questions, if I may. First, is it the Government’s intention, at some point after the recess, to lay before the House an updated threat assessment, following the statement that the Secretary of State came to give in January, after the drone strike by the United States that killed General Qasem Soleimani?

On cyber-recruitment, which has affected my own constituency, and Daesh funding, I appreciate that this setting is not the place for it, but, similarly, can we get a bit more information for the House—I am not sure, but perhaps through the Defence Committee—on exactly what the Government are doing to tackle online recruitment and to strangle off the funding mechanisms that keep them going? The whole House will be concerned to hear what the Secretary of State had to say about attacks on diplomatic personnel and diplomatic infrastructure. Again, at some point, it would be useful to get more information on that.

More broadly, on Syria, which of course continues to break all our hearts when we see the ongoing war there, I have asked the Government previously why they have not taken action to remove British citizenship from the first lady of Syria and members of the Assad family, some of whom are living here in the city of London. I know the Secretary of the State will get up at the Dispatch Box and say he cannot discuss individual cases—that is entirely right—but can he at least tell us if, within the Government, serious consideration has been given to removing their British citizenship? I appreciate that that is not always simple, because sometimes having that citizenship can give us a judicial angle to pursue them in the courts.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I am happy to publish, probably in the autumn, a threat assessment—I will probably put it out as a written ministerial statement in the Library—to give him an update. If that is all right, I will do it for Iraq and the region as well, because I think it is in everyone’s interests to get a sense of the threat that our allies, and also our troops, face.

On cyber and recruitment, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. This is the age when a terrorist in Syria can reach out to his constituents, radicalise them in their own bedrooms, and target them with everything from glamorous glossies to how to make bombs. We have, unfortunately, seen that unfold on our streets. That is why—this comes from my old days as Security Minister, so it may have changed its name; if so, I shall write to him—we set up RICU, or the research, information and communications unit, in the Home Office. Its job is potentially to spot this type of publication, working alongside the police and the counter-terrorism internet referral unit, and then go directly to the internet service providers and ask them to take down the material. If memory serves me right, it has taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of material.

Daesh is definitely very, very clever at using that medium. That is why, some two to three years ago, one of the methods of the counter-Daesh military response that we were using in Iraq and Syria was to target the media operations as much as some of the actual fighters, because those media operations are used to radicalise people who have never been to Syria. It is also appalling that Daesh now often targets those who are the most vulnerable in our homes and our societies because they are all it can recruit. We see too many people who are displaying mental health issues as well.

On diplomatic infrastructure, it is no secret that forces linked to Iran are interested in destabilising Iraq and effectively poking the stick as provocation. That is why the Government believe that the best solution is absolutely to de-escalate the situation. We do not work with the Iraqi Government to try to escalate the problem; we work with them to try to bring people to justice. Only recently, the Iraqi Government did indeed follow up work that we had been doing, and the Americans had been doing, on some suspects, and made a considerable number of arrests. It is not straightforward for the Iraqi Government sometimes, but we do not blame them for that—we recognise that this is a difficult area. Certainly, our messaging to the wider regional actors is that destabilisation helps no one. We would definitely condemn any attacks on our diplomatic infrastructure, which is of course the same infrastructure that delivers international and foreign aid.

I, too, salute the service of Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon. May I also pay tribute to the commitment and professionalism of all our armed forces? Will the Secretary of State confirm that this Government will continue to provide our armed forces with all the support they need, not only when they are overseas but here at home?

I can give my hon. Friend that assurance and that prompts me to answer one of the other questions. The integrated review is back up and running. Part of the purpose of that review is to ensure that we have the right ambition funded to the right level with the right equipment. That is the best service that we can offer to our men and women of the armed forces, and that is what we are determined to do through this review.

As a former physiotherapist myself, may I pass on my condolences to the family of Lance-Corporal Brodie Gillon? Their tragic loss is a loss to us all. Since 2010, the Government have presided over a sharp decline in our regular armed forces. For example, the Regular Army has fallen from 102,000 to just 73,750—a 28% drop in personnel—and the number continues to fall. In light of the fact that NATO has agreed to enhance its role against Daesh, can the Secretary of State say how the UK will continue to play its part with such depleted armed forces?

It was going so well until the very last comment. If we stuck all our planning for the armed forces on numbers, we would end up back in the first world war. Modern armed forces need the right equipment and to be doing the right task. It is no good fighting the last war, the war before that, or the war before that. What is important is that we provide the right equipment, that we meet today’s threat—not yesterday’s threat—and that we plan for tomorrow’s threat as well. That is why this Integrated Review has started not with a discussion on the number of troops, or the numbers on the budget, but with threat, the doctrine of our adversaries and then what we need to do that job. On the point about the reduction of the regular armed forces, that was done because we recognised then that reserves, as Lance Corporal Gillon has shown, are incredibly important in today’s world. We need specialists—specialists who do not grow on trees, specialists whom we use depending on the fight or indeed the need that we have to attend to—and reserves are playing a stronger and greater part in our armed forces and are absolutely key in being able to meet the modern hybrid threat that we face every day. I do not apologise that we have lost some regulars, but have increased our reserves. That is really important because that is why our troops remain among the best in the world.

As somebody who, while in the Royal Air Force, served on Operation Warden, the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, may I acknowledge the RAF’s operations—40 strikes against terrorist targets—in the past year?

On the Integrated Review, may I just confirm again with the Secretary of State that we will look at having well-equipped armed forces with the right numbers of personnel, because the threats are still out there, and the last thing that we want to do in this dangerous world is to reduce our military capabilities?

We have been clear that we are not in the business of reducing the potency and capability of our armed forces. We are in the business of making sure that we are modernising to meet tomorrow’s fight. The worst thing that we can do is modernise—actually not really modernise, but equip ourselves—for what happened 10, 15, or 20 years ago. That is why we are determined to invest more in autonomous areas, in new domains, such as space and cyber, which are really important. The threat against space is, regrettably, real. Our adversaries are weaponising space and we are deeply vulnerable in the west to such actions because we rely so much on space assets.

It feels like distant history now, but the vote in December 2015 on the subject of deploying airstrikes in Syria was one of the most difficult that I faced in my time in the House. I was eventually persuaded to support that, and I think that the situation that the Secretary of State describes today is one that justifies the decision that the House took in 2015, but the assurances that I and others were given by the then Prime Minister were around what would happen in addition to the military solution. It was about the reconstruction phase and the aid effort that would be made. What assessment has the Secretary of State for Defence made of the changes to the Department for International Development now being folded into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? Will we have an overseas development operation that can meet the obligations that were taken on by the Government in December 2015?

I know that the right hon. Gentleman is a thoughtful colleague and, indeed, at the time I think we were in the same Government. We should be proud that we spent £3 billion of aid in reconstruction and investment in that region and in protecting people from the effects of poverty. That is the other half of that reconstruction that he was worried about, and I think that that is incredibly important. On the other part of his question, which related to—[Interruption.] It has slipped my mind.

DFID.

DFID. We often talk about organisations and machinery of Governments—they come around, and come and go—but the key here is the sense of purpose and the mission. The mission has not changed; the mission to invest and to help provide security and stability in Iraq and Syria has not changed and will not change. We all have an obligation to that part of the world because of events that happened perhaps 20 years ago or more, and that is not going to change. Whatever badge we put on the front of a door and whatever office someone sits in, that is not the fact; what matters to the people of Iraq and Syria is whether they are getting the aid, support, stability and security they need. I believe we are providing that, and we will continue to do that.