I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on bringing this important debate to the Chamber. I also commend the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood). I have just returned from a trip to Iraq and Turkey as part of my work on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the teams in both
places told me how engaged he was. I believe that he will be making his fourth visit to Iraq very soon. I want to put it on the record that our ambassadors in those places are doing a tremendous job. I hope to describe in detail some of the solutions in Iraq and Syria. I, too, highlight to the House my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
Britain has been deeply involved in the middle east for centuries. The region has occupied our diplomatic and cultural attention for decades. Those close links are the reason I stand here today. Britain was the haven of choice for my family when we fled Saddam in the 1970s.
Today, ISIL captures the news headlines, our nightmares and our imaginations, but it is just a symptom—a potentially fatal symptom—of a deep rift at the heart of the Muslim world. The rift has several parts at different layers and they all matter. For decades, a stricter, puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam has proliferated across the region. Traditional and more enlightened forms have been rejected, leading to more aggression and intolerance. It has led to the spread of extremism when that interpretation has mixed with other social problems, such as unemployment, corruption and poverty, which are all too common in these countries.
The regional powers of Saudi Arabia and Iran are at a stand-off and undermine each other at every turn, their relationship poisoned by suspicion and fear. They risk tearing apart their neighbours by proxy. Syria and Iraq are vulnerable to that because of their origins as Ottoman provinces fitted together into new kingdoms by the victorious empires of the first world war.