Some campaigners moved quickly to suggest that the Syria vote and military action could shift the ground in the debate over independence; Scottish CND for example said the vote demonstrated that Scotland’s voice was being ignored and that the result of the vote strengthened calls for independence.
Advertisement
INSKEEP: Thanks for coming by.
Yesterday Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told BBC2’s Newsnight that Britain’s military action in Syria would not be over in a matter of months.
Caption + Two British Tornados warplanes fly over the RAF Akrotiri, a British air base near costal city of Limassol, Cyprus, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2015, as they arrive from an airstrike against Islamic State group targets in Syria.
We know that the airstrikes won’t be part of an imminent decisive military campaign.
Drone-cam captures the moment a British military drone takes out an ISIS stronghold. They will be arriving there in the course of the day.
INSKEEP: In practical terms, are you simply striking targets that the United States would have struck but it’s symbolically better if Britain strikes them?
I also disagree with the suggestion that somehow there are 70,000 troops who are going to step in and that the goal of these air strikes is to provide air cover for these troops to take on and defeat Daesh because we know that’s not going to happen any time soon, we know there aren’t such forces anywhere near Raqqa and these forces are divided. “The prime minister failed to convince us that his planned intervention would achieve that outcome, and speaker after speaker who supported this action confirmed that this would be the case”. But we also bring some precision weapons which were not available inside Syrian territory.
The British airstrikes in Syria aren’t expected to deal a significant blow to the Islamic State.
INSKEEP: At the time there was a chemical weapons controversy…
Six key targets within the oil field were smashed by RAF Paveway IV bombs.
France welcomed the first British airstrikes in Syria, saying they are a sign of the European solidarity promised after the deadly November 13 attacks on Paris claimed by IS militants. The terrorists don’t recognize the border. He signalled that the battle against IS would be lengthy but Britain’s involvement would now be rapidly stepped up.
Conservatives voted nearly unanimously in favor of the strikes, but it was a key contingent from the Labour party that broke rank to skew the numbers.
Britain’s debate over extending strikes to Syria showed how fraught the subject has become for Western politicians, with no easy answers to a civil war that has produced the biggest refugee crisis since World War Two and drawn thousands of disaffected youths from Western countries to the jihadi cause.
Advertisement
The US-led campaign is being conducted without the approval of Damascus or the United Nations.
