Posts
Australia
tells Europe: Join ISIS strikes & you’ll solve your migrant
problems
RT,
31
August, 2015
Australian
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has called for more European countries
to join airstrikes against Islamic State, claiming that bombing will
relieve the refugee crisis. Australia has not agreed to an US request
to expand its own operations against jihadists into Syria, however.
Bishop
said that 40 percent of refugees trying to enter Europe are coming
from Syria, suggesting that additional strikes would help reduce that
number.
“There's
more countries can do in terms of supporting the airstrikes which are
proving effective in stopping Daesh (Islamic State) from claiming
territory off sovereign governments,”
Bishop said.
“The
crisis that is unfolding in Europe will focus their attention. This
humanitarian crisis is unprecedented,” she added, referring to the
number of asylum seekers from the Middle East. “It will focus their
attention on trying to resolve the situation at its source and that
will include a military and political solution in both Syria and
Iraq.”
Meanwhile,
Australia is still mulling an American request to expand the
country’s military operations against Islamic State (previously
ISIS/ISIL) from Iraq into Syria.
Countries
involved in the US-led airstrikes against the ISIS jihadists include
Australia, Denmark, Canada, France, Jordan, Netherlands, the UK,
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Australia
maintains that strikes are an effective way to fight ISIS. The group
has lost more than 7,000 fighters and leaders over the past year,
which “reduced
the organization’s overall effectiveness,”
the head of Australia’s Defense Force said earlier in August.
However, critics have been speaking out against this approach,
pointing to the fact that ISIS recruitment is still on the rise as
sympathizers flock to join the terror group.
A
total of 20,000 foreign fighters from around the world were in Syria
and Iraq as of February, including 3,400 estimated to have come from
Western nations, US intelligence officials say.
@ABCNews24
Obviously @JulieBishopMP
is desperately chasing leadership votes from the extreme right wing
of the Parliamentary Party!
In
March, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said this figure could
rise, with as many as 10,000 Europeans joining ISIS by the end of
2015. “There
are 3,000 Europeans in Iraq and Syria today. When you do a projection
for the months to come, there could be 5,000 before summer and 10,000
before the end of the year,”
Valls said.
Aside
from ISIS’s success in recruitment, many anti-war activists have
doubts that bombing ISIS positions could help to resolve the problem
of refugees in the EU.
The
UK-based Stop the War Coalition said in August that the UK
government’s military campaign against Islamic State is “going
nowhere.”
\
#ISIS
may have potential to 'build chemical weapons', Australia says
http://
on.rt.com/hnx14o
http://
on.rt.com/hnx14o
“Hundreds
of civilians are being killed. This is only going to increase the
anger felt by locals toward Britain and other coalition countries,”
Stop the War Coalition’s national officer, Chris Nineham, told the
Morning Star newspaper.
“What
we know is that if America didn’t invade Iraq in 2003 probably we
wouldn’t have ISIS or al-Qaeda in Iraq or anywhere in the Middle
East now,” Khaled El Shami, political editor of al-Quds newspaper,
told RT’s In The Now. “Airstrikes are not going to solve the
problem. A guerilla war can never be won by airstrikes. Yes, ISIS was
contained in Syria and Iraq but it is expanding actually in Libya at
the moment, and I don’t believe the US is doing enough to beat ISIS
or to achieve a clear victory there.”
:
Civilian
deaths from the airstrikes have been rising. Airwars, a non-profit
organization that tracks the international airstrikes against ISIS,
said at least 459 civilians were killed by the US-led coalition’s
bombing of supposed ISIS positions. To date, the coalition has
launched more than 5,800 airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria.
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