Why has Britain not gone further to support the Americans in fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria? Cameron personally would like to do more, but feels his hands are tied. Like most Western intelligence and security agencies, Britain’s National Security Council is wrong-footed when Mosul, not far from the Syrian border in Northern Iraq, falls to ISIS on 10 June 2014. Some 500,000 flee the city to escape the militants. On 18 June, ISIS celebrate their victory by bulldozing part of the desert frontier between Iraq and Syria, symbolically negating the validity of the Western-imposed border that dates back to 1916. The same day, the Iraqi government officially asks the US and UK for military assistance. The Obama administration responds quickly to the call, fearful that the ISIS advance will be swift without it. Cameron’s response, however, is that the most he can offer, given the stance of Labour and the Lib Dems, is to help the Kurdish Peshmerga, with whom Britain has had a close relationship over the previous twenty years. British efforts have hitherto concentrated on al-Nusra in Syria, which it regarded as the most dangerous Islamic faction operating in the country. Cameron constantly maintained that the key to stopping the export of terrorism from Syria was the departure of Assad, which he recognised as a step too far at least in the short term. Instead, efforts focused heavily on jihadists returning to Britain, and Iraq was initially regarded as ‘an American problem’. But now in mid-2014, ISIS is replacing al-Nusra as the dominant opposition force in Syria, and is quickly crossing over the border into Iraq and towards Baghdad.6
By August, alarm is growing about the danger posed by returning jihadists, and at the end of the month, the UK’s terror threat level is raised to ‘severe’. Cameron publicly commits to fighting radical Islam ‘at home and abroad’. In the run-up to the NATO summit in Cardiff on 4–5 September, pressure builds from the White House for Cameron to make a military commitment to combat ISIS in Iraq. Number 10 knows that after the August 2013 Syria defeat it is inconceivable not to seek the support of Parliament, so they ask the White House to bide their time until the Scottish referendum is over. After the earlier Syria defeat, this vote has to be won, so the Lib Dems and Labour have to be on board. Number 10 grows intensely frustrated that ‘despite the awfulness of ISIS’, the Lib Dems are constantly worrying about the use of force, while Labour are ‘unreliable’, so support cannot be a ‘slam dunk’. Obama tells Cameron he understands, and is content to bide his time. But lower down the food chain in Washington, the grumbling is intense about ‘the Brits dragging their feet again’.
As soon as the Scottish referendum has taken place, the pace builds for a vote in Parliament. On 24 September, Cameron asks the Speaker, John Bercow, to recall the Commons on Friday 26. On the 25th, Cameron flies to the UN for the General Assembly, where he devotes much of his speech to ‘the mortal threat that we all face from the rise of ISIS’, and how the world should unite to ‘defeat the ideology of extremism’.7 Public opinion is moving decisively in favour of air strikes against ISIS, in response to their gruesome atrocities in Syria and Iraq. In early August, 37% of those asked by YouGov approved air strikes and 36% disapproved. By the time he arrives in New York, 57% are responding in favour with only 24% against.8 A repetition of the disastrous Syria vote thirteen months before is becoming less likely all the time. For Cameron, a second rebuff would be fatal.
While in the US, Cameron has a long phone call with Miliband from his Plaza Hotel suite. Cameron outlines the legal case for British intervention, and runs over the arguments for British strikes in Syria as well as in Iraq. Miliband is adamant: there will be no Labour support for strikes in Syria, a viewpoint echoed by the Lib Dems. This kills any hope of using force in Syria, so Cameron concludes with Miliband that they should restrict any attacks from the air purely to Iraq. Despite Miliband’s words, Cameron is still nervous, and tasks Michael Gove with ensuring that the Conservative support will be there, given that the opponents of action against Syria in 2013 are becoming more vocal again. Cameron also remains anxious about the Lib Dems, and whether Labour MPs might split off from the leadership. He accepts that he needs more time for the public to accept any action in Syria. His case this time is strengthened by Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, writing to him asking for support, and the UN Security Council making it clear it also supports the action. On 25 September, the government publishes a summary of its legal advice arguing that international law does not prohibit the use of force if a territorial state requests such support in its defence.
Cameron is thus confident of success when the House of Commons meets on Friday 26 September. He opens the debate by arguing that while there might be ‘a strong case’ for Britain launching air strikes in Iraq, he does not wish to do so without consensus. He wants British support to be conditional on Iraq ‘defending and protecting all [its] people’ including its Sunni population. ‘Even after ISIS has been dealt with, we should be in no doubt that future British prime ministers … will be standing at this despatch box, dealing with this issue of Islamist extremism in different forms and in different parts of the world for many years to come.’9 Miliband then speaks in support of the motion.10 Broad support is clear for action. The vote is carried easily by 524 votes to forty-three, including six Conservative rebels, twenty-three Labour MPs and one Lib Dem. Three days later, RAF Tornados fly their first armed reconnaissance missions over Iraq. The following day, they carry out their first actual strikes over Iraq.11
But the British military contribution in Iraq, while greater than that of any nation other than the US, is still strictly limited. At the White House in January 2015, Cameron confirms that there can be no British escalation until after the general election. In February, Obama asks Congress for approval for military engagement to continue for a further three years. Progress is slow and the Iraqi army struggles against ISIS, though on 17 April, after a bloody two-month battle, Iraqi and coalition forces retake the strategically important city of Tikrit.
Cameron’s focus on the dangers of Islamic extremism is one of the leitmotifs of his first five years in government. The security of British nationals is a constant concern, and on those rare occasions when they are taken hostage, he becomes personally involved and will not waver from the policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists or pay a ransom. Paying ransom money, the British and Americans believe, only increases the numbers of hostages being taken. (He tried, in particular at the Lough Erne G8 in June 2013, to achieve an international agreement to end the paying of ransoms, but other nations were unwilling to follow suit.) During hostage crises, he convenes meetings either in COBRA or his study, attended by the Chief of the Defence Staff, National Security Adviser and head of special operations: ‘but it is always his decision alone whether to order British forces into action’.
He does so on three occasions over the parliament. In October 2010, he approves an unsuccessful American military operation to rescue British aid worker Linda Norgrove, held in Afghanistan. A subsequent US/UK investigation concludes that she had been killed by a hand grenade thrown by one of the US soldiers involved in the rescue.12 In March 2012, the Special Boat Service (SBS) co-operates with the Nigerian army in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue British hostage Chris McManus, who had been taken by Islamic terrorists. Both McManus and Italian hostage Franco Lamolinara are killed by the kidnappers before the special forces can save them.13 The final attempt, in June 2012, again in Afghanistan, is when the SAS conducts an operation alongside US Navy Seals, which results in the successful rescue of British national Helen Johnson, with seven Taliban being killed in the process.14 Downing Street is informed at 2 a.m. that the operation has been a success. Cameron is only woken at night on rare occasions. This is one of them, and he stays up until every member of the SAS is safely back in Kabul, and thanks several of the soldiers personally by phone.15 Another of the rare occasions when he is woken in the middle of the night is when he learns about the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011. The White House has given no forewarning to Downing Street, and wait until the military o
peration is over before speaking to their British counterparts. When they call at 3 a.m., the duty clerk phones a senior official and asks ‘Should we wake the boss?’ ‘Yes, we should, he will want to know,’ is the reply. Cameron is woken and, shortly after, Obama speaks to him, coming across, Cameron notes, as very collected.
ISIS takes some twenty Western hostages in 2014–15, most of whom are released after a ransom. The beheading of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, followed days later by the beheading of a British aid worker, David Haines, by a man with a British accent known as ‘Jihadi John’ (subsequently revealed to be Mohammed Emwazi), creates a national furore. ISIS release a sickening video of Haines’s beheading on 13 September. Emwazi’s words at the end of the video are: ‘This British man has to pay the price, for your promise Cameron to arm the Peshmerga against the Islamic State … playing the role of the obedient lapdog Cameron will only drag you and your people into another bloody and unwinnable war.’16 On 3 October, another video is released by ISIS showing Emwazi beheading British aid worker Alan Henning, a taxi driver from Salford who had volunteered to deliver aid to Syria when he was kidnapped the previous December.
Cameron’s fears about young British Muslims returning to the UK from Syria or Iraq determined to commit terrorist offences grow steadily over the parliament. An estimated 600–700 British Muslims have gone out to fight by early 2015, some 20% to al-Nusra and the remainder to ISIS.17 He clings to his belief that a replacement to Assad in Damascus with more legitimacy is the only enduring answer. The Home Office wants to throw all available resources into monitoring terrorist suspects who return, to deter them from planning terrorist acts which they think will be almost inevitable before long. After the security threat level is raised in August 2014, Cameron asks even more regularly ‘How can we get a grip on this?’ He constantly presses the intelligence agencies for details of the latest plot and whether there are gaps in their capacity to detect them.
A widespread media fear is an attack on British soil akin to the marauding strike by Islamic extremists in Mumbai in November 2008, which killed 164 people and wounded hundreds more. He constantly drives the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary to keep on top of the government’s preparedness. ‘He takes an obsessive interest in intelligence,’ says one member of that community, ‘his role as defender of the nation is one he takes very seriously’. Officials comment that few items in the prime minister’s box command his attention as much as the classified intelligence reports.
Cameron has made his interest in security matters known from the very outset. He surprises officials in the autumn of 2010 by his close scrutiny of discussions of threats to Britain, ranging from nuclear attack to cyber warfare, terrorism, and natural disasters. His first major opportunity to outline his thoughts on terrorism comes at the Munich Security Conference on 5 February 2011. In Opposition, he had been critical of Labour for not doing more to challenge violent extremism out of concern about alienating the Muslim population. He is in tune with the arguments in Gove’s book Celsius 7/7, which is critical of those willing to accommodate unacceptable Muslim viewpoints. To help prepare him, he invites a number of thinkers into Number 10, including members of the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism think-tank, such as Maajid Nawaz, a counter-extremism activist who wrote Radical: My Journey From Islamist Extremism to Democratic Awakening. Cameron is already clear in his mind that he wants to challenge what he sees as the orthodoxy of not just the previous Labour government, but also Whitehall. When an official asks him to tone down a passage in the draft for fear it might be seen as an anti-Muslim speech, he adds the line: ‘Would you advocate inaction if Christian fundamentalists, who believed that Muslims are the enemy, were leading prayer groups in our prisons?’18
The speech is to be delivered to an audience of transatlantic security experts, so he is persuaded to build in some standard foreign policy material. But Cameron is clear: while this may be a speech for an international audience in Germany, it is also strongly targeted at his domestic audience. Heavy briefing to the media precedes and follows it. ‘The biggest threat we face comes from terrorist attacks,’ he tells his audience. ‘We will not defeat terrorism simply by the action we take outside our borders. Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries … we have to get to the root of the problem … the origins of where these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamic extremism.’19
Cameron is disappointed that the speech doesn’t have more resonance and that he continues to meet complacency about Islamic terrorism, both in Britain and amongst European partners. Laudatory though he is of Theresa May’s tenacity over the cases of the radical clerics Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, he becomes highly frustrated at the slow progress of extradition, which eventually takes place on 5 October 2012 and 7 July 2013 respectively. Lib Dem sensitivities about trampling on civil liberties, regularly articulated by Clegg, are another irritating thorn for Cameron. An early battle comes in 2011 for a replacement to control orders to monitor suspected terrorists, but agreement is eventually reached over new measures, articulated in the Terrorist Prevention and Investigative Measures Act in December 2011.
A number of terrorist attacks on British soil are foiled between 2010 and 2015. On 29 October 2010, for instance, security officials intercept a bomb hidden in a computer printer on a cargo plane at East Midlands Airport that was en route from Yemen to Chicago. The bomb was timed to destroy the aircraft over the eastern seaboard of the US, and had been co-ordinated with another device found in Dubai. However, on 22 May 2013, out of a clear blue sky, comes the most serious terrorist attack of the five years on mainland Britain. While walking near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich in south-east London, Fusilier Lee Rigby is brutally murdered in front of passers-by in broad daylight by two Islamic fundamentalists, originally of Nigerian descent who had recently converted to Islam. It is what Cameron has always feared: while alertness of the security services and police has thwarted a number of plots, this low-tech attack – involving nothing more than a car and a set of knives bought the day before (though they also possessed an aged unloaded revolver) – has evaded scrutiny. Andrew Parker, who succeeded Jonathan Evans as head of MI5 the previous month, immediately calls the MoD to express his condolences. David Richards phones to reassure him that the armed forces are not blaming the security services for negligence. ‘We all know what MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police do to protect us, so don’t worry about that and thanks for everything you have done.’20
Cameron is in Paris when he hears of the attack. In his absence, a meeting is immediately convened in COBRA, chaired by Theresa May. Those present are concerned because the BBC has already started to report that the perpetrators are of ‘Muslim appearance’. Sensitivities about further attacks are running very high. The security services and police do not know if it is a lone attack or one of a series. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond orders off-duty military personnel not to wear uniform, but Cameron rescinds the instruction the next day. The atmosphere is very jumpy. It is agreed that no one should say anything beyond a bald holding line, as the situation is still regarded as live and dangerous. Boris Johnson says that as mayor of London he has got to say something himself. One of the security staff intervenes to say, ‘Well, Mr Mayor, we don’t know the full facts yet and it’s quite dangerous and potentially lives are at risk if we start saying the wrong things.’
‘This is the first terrorist attack since 7/7, and I’ve got to go out there and say something,’ Johnson replies; he takes his own responsibility for keeping London safe immensely seriously too. Boris turns to one of the Number 10 aides and is heard to say: ‘Who the fuck is that guy? He needs to get elected before he tells me what to do!’ He then goes outside and makes a statement in which he says, ‘The fault lies wholly and exclusively in the warped and deluded mindset of the people who did it. What we need now, for the sake of the victim and for the sake of his family, is for these killers to be brought to
justice.’ Cameron returns promptly from Paris and chairs a COBRA meeting the following day. He is told that there are some 5,000 people living in Britain believed to have terrorist tendencies. He launches an extremism task force, and subsequently the Muslim Brotherhood review.
Islamic fundamentalism is not the only terrorist threat. A few weeks before, on 29 April 2013, Mohammed Saleem is murdered in Birmingham, which the West Midlands police do not at first realise is a terrorist murder. It was committed by Pavlo Lapshyn, a white supremacist who had also attempted to carry out a string of bomb attacks. Cameron’s concerns are borne out in two late items of legislation: the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act of July 2014, and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of February 2015. The former in particular is subject to some last-minute haggling, with May and Clegg working late in Cameron’s office, sorting through papers, scrabbling to make final amendments before the bill is signed off.
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