Lisa Cameron – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lisa Cameron on 2016-03-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, if he will estimate the proportion of rebel ground forces in Syria which could be considered moderate.

Mr Tobias Ellwood

The Prime Minister, the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) stated in Parliament in December 2015 that we assessed at that time that there were around 70,000 non-extremist fighters in Syria, standing up to both the tyranny of the Asad regime and the poisonous and murderous ideology of Daesh. Since the time of that assessment, there have been significant shifts on the ground, particularly as a result of Russia’s military escalation, the majority of which has directly targeted the moderate opposition.