I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate today. I will support the motion before the House, but I do so with deep concern and real worry about the future. That is not because I do not want ISIL to be destroyed—I do—but because I believe that our history in Iraq, with the war of 2003, has eroded trust, created suspicion about our motives for getting involved and perhaps caused some of the factors that has led us to where we are today. Without genuine, prolonged efforts to achieve a political settlement, I have fears about where this may ultimately end. I am deeply concerned about the potential scale of civilian deaths that may occur, bearing in mind the scale of those that have already occurred and that are occurring even as we speak. Such decisions are deeply difficult—I often feel that we have to choose between the lesser of two evils—but a political solution is the only way to ensure that peace can be won and, in the end, that it can be a lasting peace.
The starting point for making my decision is that those in ISIL are fanatics and monsters; they are not Muslims. They have hijacked the name of Islam, the religion that I, as well as tens of thousands of my constituents and hundreds of thousands of British Muslims, follow and practice, and which we all love. They have hijacked and dishonoured the name of our religion. I am a Sunni Muslim, like the majority of British Muslims, and like them I abhor and am repulsed by the fact that those in ISIL describe themselves as true Sunni Muslims: they are not, and we reject them utterly.