Australia should help bomb IS in Syria: MP

“We were outraged. We had no idea who the Turkish fighters were, their call signs, what frequencies they were using, their altitude or what they were squawking (to identify the jets on radar)”, the source told Sky News.

Islamic State could have obtained the mustard agent in Syria, whose government admitted to having large quantities of the blistering agent in 2013, when it agreed to give up its chemical weapons arsenal, the newspaper reported.

While the opposition Labor Party supports Australian involvement in Iraq, it questioned the legal basis of Australian air strikes in Syria.

“Our authorities are very good at protecting us in the online environment… clearly if there was any physical risk to any Australians then we would take action immediately”.

Professor Barton said Tehan’s comments were most likely an attempt to test public opinion on the issue. He said that the war had given rise to the Islamic State, and the US should have focused not on conflict but perhaps on solutions.

“I can’t imagine this is just a careless throwaway comment or random thought that’s entered his mind”. Others are believed to have possibly deserted or been captured as well, since they have not been seen since finishing training.

Now Australian F/A-18 Hornet aircraft conduct air strikes inside Iraq right up to the border with Syria but don’t intrude into Syrian air space.

Captain Al-Wawi told us that the U.S.-funded training program is taking so long, that at this rate it will take more 30 years to build a new Syrian Army.

“The reality is, however much we dress it up, we’re not going to be home by Christmas”.

Turkey’s involvement in the war, then, will starve the USof both ground forces and intelligence in their fight against IS in Syria.

Obama’s requirement that they target militants from Islamic State has sidelined huge segments of the Syrian opposition, which is focusing instead on battling Syrian government forces.

On the floor, Neller’s cautious evaluation – that the struggle has settled into no less than a short lived stalemate, with Islamic State nonetheless holding a lot of the territory it seized final yr – seems closest to the reality. Perhaps a better use of our diplomatic resources would be to ask our friends in the Middle East why so few of them are contributing aircraft to the fight against ISIS when Australia is.

The point is that apart from piecemeal efforts to eliminate IS leaders, allied with attempts to bolster the Iraqi military to stand on its own feet, there is no grand design separate from a tactical response to slow IS’s advance west of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Tehan assures the AFR Weekend the initiative was his and his alone and arose from his legitimate concerns about a humanitarian disaster unfolding in Syria, where 250,000 people have lost their lives since the start of the civil war in 2011 and more than 11 million have been displaced, about half Syria’s pre-war population.

“So there really is an argument of urgency about trying to bring this to an end as quickly as reasonably as can be done”.