Commons committee against Britain joining Syria airstrikes

LONDON, Tuesday

Britain should not join air strikes on Syria until there is a clear strategy to defeat the Islamic State group and bring peace to the country, an influential committee of MPs said Tuesday.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s government wants to extend Britain’s current involvement in US-led air strikes on targets in Iraq into Syria if it can get support from across the political spectrum in a House of Commons vote.

However, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said in a new report that Cameron’s focus on joining air strikes was “incoherent” and “a distraction”.

“We are concerned that the government is focusing on extending airstrikes to Syria...without any expectation that its action will be militarily decisive, and without a coherent and long-term plan for defeating ISIL [IS] and ending the civil war,” said committee chairman Crispin Blunt, a senior MP for Cameron’s Conservatives.

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“There is now a miscellany of uncoordinated military engagements by an alarming range of international actors in Iraq and Syria... These forces desperately need coordinating into a coherent strategy and that is where our efforts should be focused.”

Blunt urged the government to concentrate on supporting international diplomacy to end the conflict, which has killed over 250,000 people, following last week’s talks in Vienna attended by 17 countries.

Cameron has said he will only push a vote on Syrian air strikes in the Commons if there is a “genuine consensus” behind the plan.

Several newspapers reported late on Monday that Cameron had dropped his plan for a vote, in the wake of Russia’s entry into the war by bombing to support the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Cameron assessed that airstrikes would not now have the support of enough MPs to pass.