Don’t tell us going to war won’t cost lives

DEFENCE Secretary Michael Fallon has the air of a doctor anxious to conceal from a patient the unpleasant sideeffects of surgery when he talks about the virtues of bombing Syria.

With his practised bedside manner and speech modulation, he claims that there has not been a single innocent casualty as a result of recent RAF bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq.

‘We set very high standards to minimise civilian casualties,’ he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr soothingly yesterday. As for terrorists, ‘we can take them out very precisely’, he said, as if talking about tonsils.

If that were really so, few might object to bombing the city of Raqqa.

It has a population of about 150,000, of which about 10 per cent are members of ISIS. However, ordinary citizens do not live apart from ISIS terrorists. Indeed, youths over 14 are conscripted into ISIS.

Those unwilling, or unable, to flee are in effect held as human shields. They’re not able to escape the bombing by hiding in deep tunnels dug by ISIS to shelter its commanders.

‘Mona’, a former resident who fled the city for the Turkish border town of Gaziantep, tells the Observer: ‘How could I, as an activist, condemn the killing in Paris, but then be silent about bombing in Syria? Are we cheap and their lives valuable?’

Another former Raqqa resident said coalition bombing was more targeted than the Assad regime’s, but it also killed civilians, including the son of a neighbour.

‘He was a 12-year-old boy, biking in the neighbourhood, and they hit an ISIS vehicle and killed him by mistake. They were trying to hit the emir for security in Raqqa, but unfortunately he was not in the car.’

Another resident who fled the city said many civilians there preferred to face bombing at home. ‘You can die with your family, not alone in the street where no one will know who you are.’

Bombing is generally a prelude to ground attack. An area containing enemy combatants is pulverised with high explosives, degrading their capacity to fight.

But we do not plan to send ground troops. Neither does our ally, France. Instead we are said to be relying on about 70,000 local fighters, some from the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army (FSA), and Russian forces.

Will the FSA join Assad forces in a ground attack on ISIS? That is not clear. And where do Russian forces stand? They’re pledged to support Assad. As such they have been bombing his enemies, including the FSA.

The UK and the French are allied to the anti-Assad Americans. While Fallon talks about killing ISIS leaders without harming the local people they are terrorising, the Russians have other methods they used in Chechnya to suppress with spectacular brutality the Islamicist insurgency.

CHECHNYA’S capital city, Grozny, was devastated. The families of jhadists were arrested, their homes demolished or burned. No quarter was sought nor given. It began in 1999 and ended officially in 2009 when Akhmed Zakayev, the separatist leader, called for a halt to armed resistance, saying: ‘Starting with this day Chechens will never shoot at each other.’ Unofficial Chechnyan death toll: between 25,000 and 50,000 dead or missing, mostly civilians. Official figure for Russian casualties: about 11,000, according to the Russian Committee Of Soldiers’ Mothers.

In Israel, where brutal military tactics are used against militant Palestinians, and their families, the coalition tactics for fighting ISIS are derided by military experts.

‘They must stop talking and start doing,’ says Shabtai Shavit, former head of the intelligence service Mossad. He told Israeli radio: ‘With this enemy, we have to push aside arguments on law and the rights of the individual.

‘That means doing what they did in World War II in Dresden. They wiped it off the map. That is what has to be done to all the territorial enclaves that ISIS is holding.’ Syria is already destroyed, its borders meaningless. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a result of the civil war. Great swathes of its major cities are in ruins, occupied by ISIS, or both. Why? Because two branches of Islam — Sunni and Shia — are at war.

Whether we bomb Syria is neither here nor there. If the Commons votes yes, we’ll be doing it for a political reason — ie, to remain a member of the coalition. But it’s absurd for Fallon to claim that bombing will hasten a political settlement there — or prevent terrorist attacks here. That ship sailed long ago. HAVE the Blairites who hate him misjudged their moment in trying to remove Jeremy Corbyn?

I suspect his arguments against bombing Syria are shared by more Labour voters than theirs and plenty of Tory ones, too.

Hilary ‘Creeping Jesus’ Benn is being suggested as a suitable stand-in should they manage to defenestrate the shell suit-wearing Corbyn. They might as well choose People’s Poet Pam Ayres. Then they could go from bad to verse.