Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about a topic and a country which may, at present, seem remote from our national priorities. I speak of the ongoing Syrian war. The motion is of great importance, but I'd like to first cast our minds back to the bigger picture and the history of how we got here before getting to the motion itself. The context is incredibly important when discussing the decades old and centuries old geopolitical and other rivalries in the Middle East. There was a time, honourable members right recall, when the Arab Spring swept across North Africa and the Middle East. A positive mood dominated the views of Western foreign policymakers and thinkers. The Tunisian revolution was seen by a great many as ground zero of a tsunami of democratisation across the Middle East. Those protests soon spread to Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Morocco. We all remember the shock after Mubarak resigned in Egypt and Yemen's president fell. We recall the historic fall of Tripoli to the rebels and Gaddafi's regime crumbling.

Tragically, this was only the beginning of the events and we are still living with the consequences each and every day. We remember terribly well that history didn't end in 2011. We remember the protesters shot, tortured and killed in Damascus. We remember the Coptic Christians attacked with tanks in Egypt. We remember the brave, peaceful protesters across the whole region at that time who took such great risks for ideals that all of us in in this room would share at enormous risk to their own safety, their own health and often their own lives. We remember, too, that the Gillard Labor government joined in offering international support to the Libyan transitional government, but, despite an international coalition's military and political efforts, the country's civil war has raged on and off for nearly 10 years. As of today, Libya is still torn apart by infighting between rival warring factions, backed militarily by competing great powers. The scale of human tragedy in Yemen is almost beyond belief, as is the fact that some democratic governments, like ours, have sold arms for use in Yemen in contravention of international norms.

But one of the most bitter and costly civil wars to have devoured the region since the heady days of the Arab Spring is, of course, in Syria. Syria matters strategically, but let's just look at the human element. The basic fact before us is that the Kurds have been reliable, outstanding and fearsome allies of coalition forces since the 1990s. They have been allies not only to the US but also to Australia. In 1991, following widespread violence in Iraq, 75 ADF personnel were deployed to Kurdistan in northern Iraq under Operation Habitat. This was part of an international operation to defend four million Kurds fleeing their homes in the Gulf War and to provide humanitarian aid. The ADF's medical teams treated over 3,000 people for a range of diseases and illnesses. While the information is necessarily classified for now, we can reasonably expect that our brave pilots and men and women in uniform in Operation Opera in the Middle East often relied either directly or indirectly on the ground support—the reconnaissance and intelligence support—of their Kurdish mates on the ground. This is one of the reasons I am particularly concerned.

This is a very important motion: it signals that we are deeply concerned about the fallout from the October 2019 Turkish military operation, which followed the decision by the Trump administration to withdraw US forces from the area. It is an operation which targeted the Kurds, which risks destabilising the region and which risks further progress against Daesh. This motion also tells the Kurds, who are both US allies and our allies, that we don't forget or abandon our longstanding partnership and friendship. There are also longer-term risks to Australia's national interest from this unfortunate series of events, which we should reflect on. One risk is the effect on the morale and trust of other local allies in the Western and ADF soldiers deployed in the Middle East region. Another is the potential knock-on effect across the Indo-Pacific region.

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