LONDON—The massacre by a lone wolf Daesh supporter of dozens of British and other tourists in Tunisia was the subject of a sombre debate in the Commons following a statement by the Prime Minister, David Cameron.
The UK High Representative of the KRG sent a message to MPs. Karwan Jamal Tahir, a former Deputy Foreign Minister in Kurdistan, told MPs that 'The grotesque massacres by the so-called Islamic State in Tunisia, France, Kuwait, and Kobane all confirm deepening fears about its global reach. One of the best and most willing allies of the West and its people are the Kurds, who are in the frontline but whose brave Peshmerga forces need proper arming and for Baghdad to release the full budget payments so we can pay the Peshmerga and other employees, and grow our economy to present prosperity, pluralism and peace as the answer to a cult of death, mass murder and genocide.'
His view was echoed in the Commons by Jason McCartney, the Chairman of the all-party parliamentary group and a former RAF officer based in Zakho during the no-fly zone in 1995, who told the Prime Minister that 'I join the Prime Minister in praising our brave Royal Air Force for the role that it is playing in the skies over northern Iraq. Meanwhile, on the ground, the brave Kurdish Peshmerga forces are taking on Daesh. Does he agree that now is the time for the Peshmerga forces to be properly armed and to receive the funding from Baghdad that was promised?
The Prime Minister promised to look into the funding from Baghdad and added that 'All that I can say is that we are helping the Kurdish forces with ammunition, training and support.'
Conservative and British-Kurdish MP Nadhim Zahawi argued that 'A powerful antidote to the ISIL poison would be if young British Muslims could see Arab Sunnis who are playing host in Iraq and Syria rejecting ISIL and ejecting it from their midst.' And he asked the Prime Minister to 'redouble his efforts to find a political solution to reject ISIL and eject it from Iraq and Syria.'
The Prime Minister agreed and said that 'We need to build an Iraq where its Prime Minister is clearly working for Sunnis as well as Shi’as and Kurds, but we also need Sunni Muslims in Iraq to rise up and reject ISIL. Without that, it will always be more difficult to take that cancer out of the country.'
Cameron later said that allied air action in Iraq, together with the Kurds, has shrunk the territory that ISIL holds in that country. He also told the Commons that he had spoke with the Iraqi Prime Minister to 'be brave in reaching out from his Shi’a base' to Sunnis to encourage them to accept the offer of an inclusive Iraqi Government and to reject ISIL. He also accepted that Daish thrives on divisions between Kurds, Arabs and Shia.
The massacre in Tunisia, the worst single terrorist atrocity to affect British people for ten years, may prompt greater understanding that the so-called Islamic State is a clear and present danger with the threat level being 'severe,' which means that security officials think that an attack in the UK is imminent.
