There is no clear strategy, objective or endgame, with one US commander describing the campaign in Syria and Iraq as a stalemate

David Cameron’s case for UK military action in Syria has several highly contentious key points.

‘There is a credible military strategy to defeat Isil in Syria as well as Iraq’

If there is, no one has told the US. In private briefings and in public testimony to Congress, a long line of senior American officers have acknowledged frustration with the battle against Islamic State. General John Allen, who was in overall charge of the US campaign in Syria and Iraq, has quit after a year.

A marine commander, Lieutenant General Robert Neller, offering his best assessment of how the war is going, described it as a “a stalemate”. By the middle of last month the US-led coalition engaged in air attacks in Syria and Iraq had conducted 7,600 attacks (4,900 in Iraq and 2,700 in Syria). Their main problem is finding targets to hit. Isis has long learned the danger of deploying en masse in the open.

Pilots frequently return to base without having fired missiles or dropped bombs, partly they say because of fear of hitting civilians but mainly because after a year there is little left to hit. So what can the UK add? Nothing much that is not already being done by the US, France and other allies.

The bombing raids do serve a useful purpose in that Isis fighters cannot move around as easily as they once did. It makes them more cautious, having to watch the sky for a drone or fighter aircraft.

‘Airstrikes can degrade Isil and arrest its advance’

It is debatable whether this is true. The coalition repeatedly says it has shrunk the geographical area controlled by Isis by 30% in the past year, but in that same period Isis has advanced on and taken Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. In any event, Cameron goes on to concede that air strikes alone cannot defeat Isil.

‘We need partners on the ground’

Who is going to provide these troops on the ground? The Obama administration is opposed to deploying more ground troops. British military chiefs laugh off suggestions of committing tens of thousands of UK troops to take Raqqa.

So who is going to do it? The Kurds are too small a force, with little interest in fighting beyond neighbouring territory. The Iraqi army is riven by religious and ethnic divisions. The Free Syrian Army and similar groups have so far been largely ineffective – although Cameron says there are 70,000 anti-Assad non-Isis fighters available for the task.

There are so many questions to be answered. Does this mean the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, will be left in place? What other military options are there? More special forces targeting the Isis leadership or helping to pinpoint targets for air raids? Begin to destroy oilfields, the main source of Isis finance?



The main reason for attacking Syria appears to be a show of solidarity with the US and France.

How easy will it be to take the IS stronghold Raqqa?

The US had 170,000 troops in Iraq at the peak of the fighting in Iraq in 2007 and struggled to suppress the insurgent force, even though it was much smaller than IS. Quelling towns and cities often required house-by-housing fighting, with high casualties on both sides.

Retired British brigadier Ben Barry, a specialist in land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, estimated a joint US-UK-French coalition would require 20,000 troops to retake Raqqa. He described the prospect as “challenging”, given that IS had been preparing its defences for the last year.

Barry said Cameron had explicitly ruled out British ‘boots on the ground’ so he anticipated that the troops would be made up of moderate Sunni opposition groups.

‘Our intelligence is that there are 70,000 moderate Sunni forces’

Rebel leaders claim to have 70,000 fighters but Cameron should have added that at present they are not much of a fighting force. The rebel forces are deeply divided among lots of competing factions. For many of them, the focus is fighting Assad’s forces around Damascus, not Isis.

In one indication of the strength of the forces Cameron has made so much of, the US spent $600m (about £400m) training rebels to go back over the border into Syria. In the end, only 58 went back. Asked in September at a Congressional committee how many of them were still fighting, General Lloyd Austin said: “We are talking four or five.”

Cameron said the intelligence about the 70,000 moderate Syrian rebels comes from ‘the highest level’

The one thing it might have been assumed that Cameron would avoid is an echo of the dodgy intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And yet he did just that, saying the intelligence about the 70,000 figure had come from the “highest level”. Who is this? The UK’s joint intelligence committee, which coordinates information from all the agencies and was responsible for the bogus claim in the run-up to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein could hit a UK base with missiles within 45 minutes.

‘Decisions to use force are not to be taken lightly’



Politicians nearly always say that. The British military, like their counterparts around the world, like to fight, to put into practice all those hours of training, but only if there is a clear strategy, a fixed objective, an endgame. And there is none at present.