Australia's involvement in Iraq: your questions answered

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/15/australias-involvement-in-iraq-your-questions-answered

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Who and what is Australia deploying?

The Australian government announced on Sunday that it would deploy to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) up to eight Royal Australian Air Force Super Hornet combat aircraft, an early warning and control aircraft, and an aerial refuelling aircraft. The Super Hornets are capable of joining US-led airstrikes targeting Islamic State (Isis) militants in Iraq.

The Australian Defence Force will also send a special operations task group of military advisers to assist Iraqi and other security forces fighting Isis, such as the Kurdish Peshmerga. The 600-strong force is expected to comprise about 400 air personnel and 200 military personnel, including special forces.

But the government is yet to made a final decision to then send these personnel and military assets into Iraq. Such a decision is likely after next week’s UN security council meeting in New York to be chaired by the US president, Barack Obama, and attended by the prime minister, Tony Abbott.

Are we at war?

Abbott has emphasised that Australia will act with permission from the Iraqi government. He said the force being deployed was capable of combat but he described it as “a fundamentally humanitarian mission”.

The attorney general, George Brandis, said Australia was pre-positioning Australian forces in the UAE and it was not correct “to describe what we are speaking of as a war in the first place”.

Australia would be helping “an established, lawful, constitutional government” in dealing with a violent insurgency, Brandis said. “It is essentially a humanitarian mission, with military elements of course,” he told Sky News.

What is the objective?

Abbott told the Seven Network on Monday the objective was “to work with the Iraqis, to work with the Kurds to ensure that they are able to keep their people safe, they are able to maintain reasonable control over their territory and they are able to ensure that [Isis], in their territory, is no more effective”.

He told the Nine Network: “If the [Isis] forces inside Iraq have been defeated, dislodged, if the Iraqi government is once more reasonably capable of maintaining control over its own territory, maintaining internal security, that will be certainly a success.”

Later at a media conference Abbott said: “There’s a very specific objective here. The objective is fundamentally humanitarian and we realise that fundamentally humanitarian objective by helping the Iraqi armed forces to disrupt and degrade [Isis]; hopefully, to drive [Isis] entirely from Iraq.”

Will Australia participate in ground combat?

Abbott has previously ruled out Australian combat troops on the ground in Iraq. He told the ABC on Monday “a modest special forces contingent” would be ready to be deployed to Iraq as military advisers.

“Should they be further committed, they’ll be working with the headquarters of Iraqi or Kurdish units to ensure that these units are fighting at their optimal capability. What we’re certainly not intending are independent combat operations by Australian forces.”

How long will we be there?

It is unclear how long the commitment will last. Abbott said he would not put a timeframe on it, although he said the task might take “many, many months”.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, told the Nato summit earlier this month that the campaign against Isis “may take a year, it may take two years, it may take three years”.

Could we end up fighting in Syria?

Obama, outlining his strategy last week, said the US would not hesitate to launch airstrikes against Isis in Syria. He also spoke of ramping up military assistance to the Syrian opposition and sought Congress backing to train and equip these fighters.

Abbott said Australia’s focus was on Iraq: “There’s a big difference between combat operations within Iraq that will be conducted with the full approval of the Iraqi government and combat operations inside Syria which is effectively ungoverned space and whose government Australia does not actually recognise. So, there is a clear legality to the combat operations that Australia has in mind in Iraq which would not be applicable to any operations inside Syria. So, I’m not ruling it out under all circumstances, but it’s not part of the Australian government’s intention at this time.”

Will our involvement increase the terrorist risk?

An Isis video released early in September of the beheading of an American journalist, Steven Sotloff, called on the US to abandon airstrikes against Isis targets in Iraq. The masked man in the video said: “We take this opportunity to warn those governments who have entered this evil alliance with America against Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone.”

On Monday Brandis cautioned “against taking the rhetoric and propaganda of terrorists at face value” and Abbott argued Australians were terrorist targets before Australian forces went into Iraq in 2003.

“There’s no doubt that those who wish us harm will cite things like this as an excuse, but it’s not the reason,” Abbott told the ABC. “The reason why we are targeted is not because of anything we’ve done, but because of who we are and how we live.”

But the Greens leader, Christine Milne, said Isis would recruit people to its cause by presenting the conflict “as a western imperial fight against Islam; and by going in after the US, that will enable those jihadists to ramp up the rhetoric and ramp up their recruitment”.

In March 2004 the then Australian federal police chief, Mick Keelty, said of the Madrid train bombings: “If this turns out to be Islamic extremists responsible for this bombing in Spain, it’s more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq.”

Keelty’s comments prompted criticism from Howard government ministers at the time, but the view was later backed up testimony to Britain’s Chilcot inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The director general of MI5 from 2002 to 2007, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the inquiry there were were indications Britain’s involvement in Iraq had “radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young, some British citizens” who “saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam”.

“Although the media has suggested that in July 2005, the attacks on 7/7, that we were surprised these were British citizens, that is not the case because really there had been an increasing number of British-born individuals living and brought up in this country, some of them third-generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the west’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world; so it undoubtedly increased the threat,” Manningham-Buller told the inquiry in 2010.