Whitehall has reluctantly admitted that it is unlikely the Prime Minister will go forward with a Commons vote on extending airstrikes against Isil (or Daesh) in Syria. Rumours of this vote have dominated, and even distracted, UK political debate over Syria for months. Now that the Commons’ influential Foreign Affairs Select Committee has firmly brought the debate back to reality, it is time to focus on what the UK can do to help the Syrian people whose lives are at daily risk.
In the four and half years of the Syrian conflict almost 200,000 civilians have been killed, 96 percent are thought to have been killed by President Assad’s forces. Like Bosnia and Rwanda, Syria will be remembered as a humanitarian crisis where civilian groups were purposefully targeted for destruction by their own state. As with Bosnia and Rwanda, the failure (or reluctance) of the international community to identify the dominant perpetrator has been part of the block inhibiting effective international policy responses, to the detriment of the Syrian people.
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