The Situation in Iraq and Syria and the Response to Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya Fi Al-Iraq Al-Sham (DAESH)
House of Commons Defence Committee
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The Defence Committee
The Defence Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Ministry of Defence and its associated public bodies
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Current membership
Rory Stewart MP (Conservative, Penrith and The Border) (Chair)
Richard Benyon MP (Conservative, Newbury)
Rt Hon Jeffrey M. Donaldson MP (Democratic Unionist, Lagan Valley)
Mr James Gray MP (Conservative, North Wiltshire)
Mr Dai Havard MP (Labour, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney)
Dr Julian Lewis MP (Conservative, New Forest East)
Mrs Madeleine Moon MP (Labour, Bridgend)
Sir Bob Russell MP (Liberal Democrat, Colchester)
Bob Stewart MP (Conservative, Beckenham)
Ms Gisela Stuart MP (Labour, Birmingham, Edgbaston)
Derek Twigg MP (Labour, Halton)
John Woodcock MP (Labour/Co-op, Barrow and Furness)
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A decade ago a jihadist state in Western Iraq and Eastern Syria would have been perceived as the worst possible scenario for the region—the sum of all our fears. As recently as the 2006–7 surge, the very possibility was considered sufficient to justify operations which consumed more than half a trillion US dollars, and involved the deployment of half a million coalition soldiers..
2 The DAESH campaign in Iraq and Syria
The DAESH advance
4. DAESH—‘al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq al-Sham’—the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (also called ISIS/ISIL/IS)—is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group originally founded by the Jordanian, Abu Musab al Zarqawi before 2003. By 2006, this group had emerged as a major threat to the stability of Iraq and indeed the international order, and had become the prime target of the US surge. By 2007, Al Qaeda in…
10. In 2013, the Islamic State in Iraq’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quarrelled with one of the movement’s off-shoots in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra and ultimately with Al Qaeda itself. He declared his group to be fully independent of Al Qaeda and renamed it the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—‘al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq al-Sham’—or DAESH…
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Download The Soufan Group’s special report on the Islamic State here.
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Click here to access a copy of the full report.