Shouldn’t the Syrian men flocking here fight to free their nation?

The drum beat to war in Syria is becoming ever louder. It seems inevitable now that our MPs will vote for air strikes, beginning perhaps as soon as next week. Many, like me, have a deep sense of foreboding. Military experts say there can be no defeat of Islamic State by bombing alone; no prospect of peace without troops on the ground.

But whose troops? Whose lives on the line? Surely not those of our young men and women — again.

Despite the PM’s pledge there will be no British ‘boots on the ground’, many of us fear inevitable mission creep.

That apprehension was perfectly articulated by a man named John Miller, from Tyne & Wear, who called BBC’s Five Live during a debate on the Syrian conflict on Wednesday.

John is the father of the late Corporal Simon Miller, 21, one of the six British troops slaughtered by a baying mob inside a police station in southern Iraq in 2003. The memory of that atrocity still haunts us all. Now Mr Miller is fearful more British lives will be needlessly lost and more parents like him left to grieve.

‘What Cameron is saying doesn’t half smack to me of how Blair built up to Iraq,’ he said. ‘We are certainly moving to mission creep, boots on the ground there. And we will have body bags coming home every day again.’

But unlike the armchair generals in Westminster, John Miller had a solution. ‘We have thousands of migrants coming PRINCE Charles says climate change is partly to blame for Syria’s descent into conflict. I suspect it might be more to do with a brutal dictator, an Islamic death cult and religious divides that go back centuries. But then, unlike HRH, I don’t benefit from the wisdom passed on from chatting to his plants. from Syria. Most are young men. We should train them up, arm them and send them back to their own country. And that is the way to do it.’

he’s right. Why should we risk British lives when there are Syrian men, fit enough to fight for freedom in their homeland, fleeing to safety here?

We have a proud history of offering sanctuary, but surely the long- term future of Syrian men lies in their own country. And if they love it as they say they do, they should be willing to fight for it.

of course, there would need to be careful planning as to who they should be fighting for — not President Assad nor IS, but the Free Syrian Army on whose shoulders the PM’s hope lies.

But the questions must be asked: Why have so many fit young men come to europe in the first place when their families and country so desperately need them?

And why should one more drop of British blood be spilled when it’s their fight, their nation and their future?