In its report, the committee said there had been 550 RAF missions in Iraq since December 2015 and 65 in Syria. Substantial progress was being made in Iraq, it said, where the UK was also playing a pivotal role in training Iraqi forces.
Opposition details But the situation in Syria was more "complicated" given the nature of the Assad regime and a lack of clarity over the opposition forces operating on the ground. The committee said it had requested details from the government about opposition groups in Syria in light of David Cameron's comments last year that there were 70,000 moderate forces which were neither aligned with Islamic State nor the regime. The MPs said the government's unwillingness to identify all the groups was understandable given the risk of intelligence falling into the regime's hands. But they said the government's failure to provide details could undermine its claim that the action in Syria was in support of "credible moderate ground forces". The disparity between the effort being put into military and stabilisation efforts was "concerning", said the committee, which added that the low priority being given to diplomatic and development work "does not reassure us about Iraq's long-term future". It also called on the government to put more information about the targets for air strikes in Syria into the public domain, in order to "justify and validate" its policy of military action. Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said the UK must focus on the risk of ISIS-Daesh proliferating into an "international movement". "Assuming Daesh is squeezed out of both countries, we have to focus too on what happens next - both in other countries to which Daesh may migrate and in Syria especially where there is no shortage of other Islamist groups, just as dangerous, which are planning to take control."
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