Army has mission ‘to quell rise of terror’

BRITAIN’S new-look Army needs to do more to deter people from joining terrorist groups as a result of its actions, a former head of the Royal Marines has said.

Major General Andy Salmon said the success of Operation Haven in Iraq, launched 30 years ago this week, was a model for the new expeditionary focus of the Armed Forces.

He said the Army’s new Ranger Regiment and the Future Commando Force needed to balance “strike” missions with working with people on the ground in order to prevent a rise in terrorism.

The effort to protect 1.5million Kurds in northern Iraq from reprisals after Saddam Hussein’s defeat in the Gulf War shows how military forces can best be used in humanitarian situations, Maj Gen Andy Salmon said. Such deployments are more likely in the coming years.

He said Operation Haven was “a great example of crisis response where there was humanitarian need”, but cautioned “you need to specifically role and train people to do these softer tasks”.

“If you just narrow your focus on war-fighting... sometimes it’s very difficult to get out of that role and just be humanitarian life-savers. You need lots of people better at making those human connections.”

Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2003 forced the military to become more “strike” focused, he said. Such an approach “orients the outcome of your intervention in a certain way”.

“If you’re not careful you escalate things and create more enemies, more terrorists,” Maj Gen Salmon said.

The cessation of hostilities between coalition and Iraqi forces in January 1991 did not mark the end of war for the peoples of Iraq.

Following a failed rebellion by Kurds in the north of the country, Saddam Hussein’s reprisals against the Kurdish people precipitated a massive flow of refugees into the hostile mountains of the border between Iraq and Turkey.

From April to July, a multinational relief operation was mounted, with the British and Dutch combining their forces in Operation Haven. In all, nine countries provided 20,000 troops to the effort.

Over a 38-day period, Op Haven provided more food and relief than the whole of the Berlin Airlift. It saved the life of around 1.5 million people in the refugee camps.