Destroying 'Prospects of Peace,' UK Begins Bombing of Syria

Amid warnings that “new war will not increase the prospects of peace,” the UK carried out its first airstrikes in Syria on Thursday, just hours after members of Parliament voted to expand the use of military force in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).

Four Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter jets were seen taking off from a base in Cyprus and returning without their weapons early Thursday morning. The Ministry of Defense confirmed that the planes had taken part in the UK’s “first offensive operation in Syria and conducted strikes.”

“A new war will not increase the prospects of peace in Syria, nor will the British people be safer from terrorism.” —Stop the War Coalition

On Wednesday night, Parliament debated for more than 11 hours on whether to authorize bombings in Syria, eventually voting to approve them 397-223, despite widespread outcry against military action from the public and anti-war MPs like Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“British service men and women will now be in harm’s way and the loss of innocent lives is sadly almost inevitable,” Corbyn said following the vote.

Thursday’s strikes were reportedly focused on six targets in an oilfield in eastern Syria, which Defense Secretary Michael Fallon called “one of the largest and most important to Daesh’s financial operations.”

At least two Syrian diaspora groups, Raqqa Is Slowly Dying and the Manchester-based Rethink Rebuild Society, immediately rebuffed those comments, warning instead that targeting oilfields would have no positive impact for the coalition or for Syrian citizens—and could in fact send ISIS an influx of new recruits.

As Raqqa Is Slowly Dying’s Sarmad Al Jilane wrote in a blog post published Monday, the U.S.-led coalition already conducting airstrikes in Syria has made no progress against ISIS. “[T]he oil extraction operations were not affected significantly because the extraction methods are primitive, and the bombing of these wells will not detriment to the financial cycle associated to the oil sector,” Al Jilane wrote.

Middle East experts have also cautioned that targeting oilfields cuts off Syrian civilians from the infrastructure that they depend on for daily life and stirs opposition to the West’s cause.

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