1Introduction
1.Following the decision to hold a vote in the House of Commons on extending military operations to Syria, we announced on 1 December 2015 that we would be conducting an inquiry into UK military operations in Syria and Iraq. This builds upon our joint oral evidence session with the Foreign Affairs Committee,1 earlier in this Parliament, and our predecessor Committee’s report on military action in Iraq.2
Terms of reference
2.The terms of reference for our inquiry posed the following questions:
- What is the order of battle (ORBAT) and military capability of ISIL/DAESH in Syria and Iraq and what tactics and strategy should we employ to confront it?3
- Will airstrikes alone be effective in degrading and defeating DAESH?
- Do the RAF have the capacity, in terms of equipment and personnel, to sustain or increase the involvement in a campaign of airstrikes against DAESH in Syria?
- Which ground troops are active in theatre, countering DAESH, which might benefit from UK airstrikes?
- Is there adequate intelligence to ensure that airstrikes are accurately targeted against DAESH?
- What would be the impact of deploying UK ground troops?
- Will military engagement in Syria increase the UK’s ability to broker a political peace process and transition to a democratically-elected representative government?
- Should the UK engage bilaterally with Iran and Russia on deconfliction if the decision is taken to extend airstrikes into Syria?
The Inquiry
3.We held nine oral evidence sessions as part of this inquiry, with contributions from academics, retired military officers, journalists and NGOs, as well as Government officials and the Secretary of State for Defence, the Rt Hon Michael Fallon MP. The full list of witnesses can be found at the end of this report.
4.We also visited several countries in the region, the better to understand the military effort being carried out by the UK Government. We held meetings with senior politicians and military figures in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. We visited the Sovereign Base Area of Akrotiri in Cyprus, as well as incorporating meetings to discuss the UK military effort with relevant individuals and institutes during a visit to Washington DC.
5.We are grateful to all of our witnesses who provided oral and written evidence, as well as the Ambassadors and staff at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office posts in the countries we visited for their assistance in programming and logistics. Finally, we wish to thank the foreign governments and the individuals that we met on these visits for assisting us in our understanding of the conflict in the region.
1 Oral evidence taken before the Defence Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee on 8 October 2015, HC (2015–16) 457
2 Defence Committee, Seventh Report of Session 2014–15, The situation in Iraq and Syria and the response to al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq al-Sham (DAESH), 27 January 2015, HC 690
3 Although we intended to look in detail at the DAESH order of battle, we have not managed to explore this matter sufficiently, due to lack of evidence.
© Parliamentary copyright 2015
16 September 2016