Cameron admits not ‘enough' moderate fighters in Syria

David Cameron has admitted that “there aren’t enough” moderate Syrian fighters on the ground to beat the Islamic State (IS) group.

Speaking to the all-party Commons select committee on Tuesday, the British prime minister said that some of the rebel forces were “relatively hardline Islamist groups” and not all the “sort of people you bump into at Liberal Democrat party conference”.

In late November, while he was making the case for the extension of the UK’s aerial campaign into Syria, Cameron said that the anti-IS coalition could rely on the support of 70,000 moderate fighters.

The British press and some within his own party queried Cameron's figures, either indicating that some hardline opposition groups were included or that many of the possible 70,000 fighters would not be diverted from the main offensive against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

During the hearing, however, Cameron still insisted that the figure was not “invented” but said that Britain’s security services had provided it as a “best estimate”. 

“The reason for not breaking down in huge amounts of granular detail exactly who they are is simply this: we’d be effectively be giving President Assad a sort of list of the groups of the people and potentially the areas that he should be targeting and that’s not my approach,” Cameron said.

“People want to say there aren’t enough opposition ground troops – I totally agree, they’re not all in the right places, I couldn’t agree more, they’re not all the sort of people you bump into at Liberal Democrat party conference – correct.”

But Cameron, whose government began bombing IS positions in Syria in December and has been bombing IS in Iraq since 2014, still insisted that there was a “third way” for Syria which would see IS eliminated and Assad step down. 

“My answer is there has to be a third way, we have to find a third way, it should involve, of course, people [like] Alawites, perhaps even [those] who’ve taken part in the state run by Assad – we don’t want to dismantle that,” Cameron added.