Jack Lopresti, an Army veteran who served in Helmand Province in Afghanistan in 2008-9, recently asked the outgoing Prime Minister David Cameron to supply these facilities and has since penned an article on the influential Conservative Home website.
The article recognises that the UK faces "a generational struggle with Islamist jihadism but have strong allies in the Muslim world" and that "foremost are the Kurds whose Peshmerga are fighting and dying to wrest back territory from [Daesh] and crucial to liberating Mosul."
Lopresti, who is the Chairman of the Conservative Party's backbench Defence Committee, was part of an all-party parliamentary group visit to the frontline in Kirkuk last November. He recalls that the Peshmerga Commander showed MPs Daesh positions two miles away and told them two British Tornado jets had prevented Daesh advances.
Lopresti adds that "The Commander explained how Daesh threw heavily armoured Humvees at a strategic bridge when air cover was impossible. This time, the Peshmerga killed the driver with small arms fire but they have not always been so lucky. Such attacks must be stopped at a distance or huge suicide bombs obliterate the frontline."
He notes that Britain supplied just forty heavy calibre machine guns that can do that but the Peshmerga need more to defend a 650 mile front and that "the armour piercing ammunition for our guns ran out a year ago and it took a huge effort by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and MPs to persuade the government to send fresh supplies without which the guns are merely decorative."
The article notes that the superior firepower of Daesh and their prowess in seeding villages with booby traps before leaving means the casualty rate has been high for the Peshmerga with 9,000 injured and nearly 2,000 killed.
Britain, he writes, has provided training in demining and in battlefield medical treatment but "Peshmerga continue to die of injuries that afflicted British soldiers in the second world war but which are less likely to become fatal thanks to treatment in the first golden hour in field hospitals and surgical teams on the frontline. But my fellow MPs, Colonel Bob Stewart and Ian Austin were told that there were no such plans."
He writes that the KRG's huge economic crisis and a limited health service mean it cannot cope with the scale of Peshmerga injuries, but the KRG has spent precious revenues in sending 800 injured Peshmerga to hospitals in various countries and India has also provided 50 of the 126 free hospital beds.
In June Colonel Stewart, a former Commander of British forces in Bosnia, asked the Defence Minister to give a small number of the most seriously wounded Peshmerga soldiers free specialist beds at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, where British soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq recuperated. The minister brushed this off by saying ministers would support such cases on merit and that past limited treatment in the UK to foreign nationals has only been offered in "very exceptional circumstances."
These ministerial answers, according to Lopresti, were "needlessly ungenerous to our allies" and he then raised these issues at David Cameron's final Prime Minister's Questions where the outgoing PM promised that "we will look to see whether more can be done."
The Lopresti memo will reach senior opinion-formers in the government and in the party and could add much weight to the MPs call for "a relatively small investment that would make a huge difference to our allies in a common fight to defeat the evil of terrorism."
from Rudaw http://ift.tt/2agTHnV
via Defense News
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