The Future of Canada's Iraq Mission

By: Murray Brewster, CBC News 

A captured ISIS battle flag hangs in a glass case on the wall outside the Ottawa office of the commander of Canada's special forces.

A hard-earned prize from a misunderstood war.

Losing "the colours" is a humiliation for any military unit, a sign the battle, and maybe even the war, has been lost.

The black flag, with white Arabic letters declaring, "There is no God but Allah," is also a startling, visceral reminder of how much of the three-year conflict in northern Iraq has played out away from the public spotlight.

It also raises the question of whether Canada's involvement has run its course.

Canadian special forces look over a Peshmerga observation post in northern Iraq last February. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

The Trudeau government committed last June to keep troops in the war-torn country until 2019, but it has never been clear about what those troops would do there once ISIS was expelled.

Just before Christmas, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan signalled the mission would get another makeover, but was vague on what it would look like.

The question military commanders are grappling with is whether this next phase of the war will fall within the strict political lines laid down by two successive governments.

Special forces troops were mandated to "advise and assist" but not take part in offensive combat alongside the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The expulsion of ISIS, also known as Daesh, which fought large conventional battles to hold on to the territory it seized in 2014, did require Canadians to shoot to protect themselves and their allies.

Mission accomplished?

Last fall, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi effectively declared his country's war with ISIS over.

But while ISIS may have been defeated as a military force, it is far from dead, said Maj.-Gen. Mike Rouleau. The commander of Canada's special forces has drafted recommendations for the next steps as they pertain to his troops.

"The threat is going to morph," Rouleau told CBC News in a recent interview.

"What is Daesh going to do next? If they are not landowners with an overt military presence and heavy weapons in the hinterland, we believe they are probably going to go underground."

Going underground would mean the Iraqis and Kurds would have to be taught to fight a counter-insurgency and counterterrorism war, or at the very least, supported in their own elite forces operations.

It is a much more delicate, precise kind of warfare.

"It's much more intelligence-driven," Rouleau said.

"So, it's a slightly different skill set. It's too early for me to tell you whether [the new mission] is going to have a training component to it — or just an advise, assist component. But these are all the things we are looking at."
Combat vs. non-combat

The political debate about whether the special forces were engaged in "combat" in Iraq has dogged the governments of both Stephen Harper and now Justin Trudeau.

The precise — sometimes hair-splitting — explanations boiled down to this: it wasn't considered combat unless Canadian troops planned an operation and took the offensive. Officials have insisted the latter never happened.

Avoiding direct combat is something the Canadian government, particularly the Liberal government, has been keen to do.

But counter-insurgency and counterterrorism is all about going on the offensive and even taking pre-emptive action against an enemy.

A resident of Tabqa, Syria, waves an ISIS flag after militants reportedly seized control of an air base near Raqqa in 2014. ISIS has since been defeated in much of Iraq and Syria. (Reuters)

Rouleau visited Iraq last month as part of his assessment.

He would not discuss the specifics of what he is recommending to the chief of the defence staff and by extension the government, but it is becoming evident the mission has reached a fork in the road.

Rouleau said it remains to be seen whether his "options are squarely within the mandate the government gave us."

"At this juncture, I believe they will be under the advise, assist and potentially accompany regime."
Reconstruction needed

Other senior defence officials, speaking on background, said there is also the possibility that the special forces could continue with traditional military training of Iraqis and Kurds.

That would be to ensure Iraqi forces hold together in the future and don't melt away in the face of an enemy, the way they did when ISIS fighters swept out of Syria in 2014 and captured vast swaths of Iraqi territory.

Canada's special forces arrived on the ground in the fall of that year and began training the Peshmerga in conventional battle skills.

But that co-operation came to a screeching halt a few months ago when fighting erupted between independence-minded Kurds and the Iraqi army, which wanted to impose the authority of the central government in Baghdad.

In this 2016 photo, a partially destroyed ISIS banner hangs at the entrance to Qayara, Iraq, where oil wells were set alight by militant fighters attempting to obstruct airstrikes as Iraqi forces took control of the area. (Susannah George/Associated Press)

Aside from training, there is also a large role for Western forces in reconstruction, particularly around recently liberated Mosul, the country's second largest city.

ISIS extremists, as they retreated, sowed many ruined buildings and streets with mines and booby traps. Some estimates last summer suggested it could take up to a decade to rid the city of explosives entirely.

United Nations officials have said Iraq will need a de-mining program similar to the one instituted in Afghanistan, which employed 15,000 people at its peak.

Canada currently has combat engineers training Iraqis in the finer points of dismantling bombs.

A helicopter detachment, two C-130J Hercules transports, intelligence officers and a Role 2 combat hospital are also stationed in Iraq.

What Happens After Mosul?

By: Matthew Fisher, Ottawa Citizen 

ASSOCIATED PRESS - Kurdish security forces overlook Islamic State-controlled villages east of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Monday. Iraqi Kurdish forces retook 200 square kilometres and a half dozen villages east of Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on the first day of a massive operation to liberate the city from the extremist group.

Territorial gains made on the first day of the battle for Mosul are a “turning point in the war against terrorism,” said Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region.THE

Iraqi Kurdish forces retook 200 square kilometres and a half dozen villages east of Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on the first day of a massive operation to liberate the city.

Iraqi, Kurdish, U.S. and Canadian generals in Iraq are all predicting victory against ISIL, the most reviled terrorist group of modern times. However, they warn after quick initial gains in open terrain and villages on the outskirts of what was once the country’s second largest city, the battle will likely become a ferocious slog across an urban maze of tunnels, booby-traps, suicide bombers and well-hidden snipers.

“There were less than 10 Daesh in the village,” said Kurdish peshmerga commander, Lt. Mehsen Gardi using the Arabic acronym for ISIL after liberating the village of Shakouli. “But they were running around like rats in and out of tunnels and surprising us with suicide attacks and snipers.”

Left unsaid, although hinted at, is worry over what will happen once Mosul falls.

The biggest elephant in the room is Kurdish independence, but tensions could surface quickly if ISIL’s resistance suddenly collapses, and fighters try to flee across the desert to Syria, where its other redoubt, Raqqa, is besieged by Russian and Syrian forces and coalition warplanes.

Canada’s top general, Jonathan Vance met other coalition military chiefs in Washington Monday to discuss how to fight ISIL and other malevolent forces, such as al-Qaida and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra).

The 30,000-strong force attacking Mosul, which includes about 4,000 Kurds, is thought to outnumber the jihadists six to one.

Among the competing interests are members of the Kurdish peshmerga, who are itching to seize more land for what they hope will be a Kurdish state. Another possibility is the territory that evolves north and east of Mosul is so autonomous, it will be independent in everything but name.

Shia militias want into Mosul to exact revenge on the estimated one million Sunnis who stayed on and, in many cases, initially supported fellow Sunnis in ISIL because they did not like the Shia-led government in Baghdad.

But ISIL’s draconian interpretation of Shariah law eventually became too much for them and an underground resistance evolved that has been fighting back against the jihadists. They do not want the peshmerga and the Shia militias to enter the city, let alone govern them.

The Iraqi government — and its forces, who ran away rather than fight for Mosul in June 2014 — wants to restore its battered prestige and the status quo, with Baghdad in charge. More than anything, they do not want the Kurds to gain any advantage.

Mosul’s large Christian minority, now mostly scattered across Kurdistan, simply wants to be able to return home in peace, as do the Yazidis, whose women were forced en masse to become sex slaves.

As always in Iraq, complicating everything is who gets to tap the rich oilfields surrounding Mosul.

Before then, there is a war to be won. And then, according to the United Nations and many aid agencies, another humanitarian crisis looms, with hundreds of thousands of newly displaced people fleeing east and north.

Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, said in a worst-case scenario, some 700,000 civilians would require shelter.

Canadians will wonder what the 200 members of the Armed Forces, who have been advising the Kurds, will be doing. Some will accompany Kurdish units as they advance. How far forward and to what purpose is not clear, but commanders have said their orders do not include entering Mosul.

The Canadians’ rules of engagement allow them to defend themselves. It was confirmed in Ottawa this month that some advisers have been going forward more often and have been in gunfights.


Two generals are among about 30 Canadians based in Baghdad. They have been providing high-level advice to Iraqi commanders and supervising the training of some of the Iraqi troops now involved in the assault on Mosul.

Although it has not been heavily advertised, two Canadian Aurora spy planes, based in Kuwait and often operating near Mosul, have been providing specific bomb targeting information for coalition aircrews. The crews receive their orders from commanders who base their decisions partly on the work of a Canadian intelligence cell that studies ISIL’s whereabouts and its vulnerabilities.

Once Mosul is conquered, all eyes will turn to the fight against the jihadists in Syria, which has become extremely complicated because Russia is there with troops, warplanes and warships and supports Bashar Assad’s regime, which is as almost as repulsive to western leaders as ISIL.

The Trudeau government was the only coalition country to withdraw its fighter jets from the air war over Iraq and Syria. However, a Canadian refuelling tanker is still in the region to top up coalition warplanes attacking ISIL in Iraq.

Canada will likely face pressure from allies to rejoin the fight against ISIL’s caliphate in Syria, which is every bit as evil as the pernicious Iraqi variant. Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion has not said much on the issue except to note Canada is in favour of peace there.

Canada in Iraq: At war by any other name ...

By: Michael Den Tandt, National Post 

As the pivotal battle of the war with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant begins, Canada is deeply implicated, with about 600 soldiers deployed in four countries, more than a quarter of those in ground combat. You wouldn’t know it though, unless you dug around. There is no stream of independent dispatches from embedded reporters, as was the rule during the 2002-14 Afghan campaign because there is no embed program. And the Defence Department has been exceptionally stingy with information. “Operational security” is a handy excuse. It doesn’t justify the level of secrecy.

There will be quibbling, as is customary whenever Canada fields soldiers carrying loaded firearms, about whether the troops “advising and assisting” Kurdish forces in northern Iraq are actually in combat. It may be in the Liberal government’s political interest to assert that, although Canadians have exchanged fire with the enemy — we don’t know how often, that’s a secret — these have been “defensive” actions only. The truth is much simpler, as it has been since the Conservative government launched the mission in 2014: Canada is at war. That’s what it means to provide intelligence, targeting for airstrikes, refuelling, aerial surveillance and leadership on the ground, at the front. To call it anything else is dishonest. It’s also a great disservice to the soldiers risking life and limb.

THE TRUTH IS MUCH SIMPLER ... CANADA IS AT WAR.

If we acknowledge that Canada is at war — and, reading between the lines of recent remarks from Brig.-Gen. Peter Dawe and an “update” Monday from Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, this conclusion is inevitable — then certain other conclusions also become inevitable. The first is that the Liberals either did not know, or knew and did not care, when they promised last year to remove Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 jets from “combat” in Iraq and Syria, that this would soon prove to be an empty gesture.

The campaign pledge to end Canada’s role in coalition bombardment of ISIL positions — based on the specious notion that bombing was somehow more aggressive or combative than, say, refuelling or targeting — did not withstand scrutiny from the get-go.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to replace the CF-18s with a more robust ground training mission, it was pointed out that ground training was both more dangerous than flying bombing runs and no less combative, given the nature of modern war. Humanitarian work and training require force protection; force protection requires intelligence; intelligence applied requires pre-emptive action, which sometimes mean bombing.


In an integrated command, such as the coalition against ISIL is, there is no distinction between the left hand and the right. They work together.

There can be no effective training of ground troops in a shooting war without accompanying those troops into combat, a point made during the election campaign. This was a central lesson of the Afghan war. Canadian trainers in Kandahar found they needed to join Afghan trainees on the battlefield to be credible. Trainers from other nations, who stayed mostly behind the wire and out of harm’s way, got little traction, Afghan contacts told me at the time.

Perhaps because it made so little sense upon examination, the vow to pull the CF-18s was not popular with most Canadians, polls indicated in 2015. But it did have an obvious political benefit: it helped make a vote for the Grits more palatable to the more pacifist-minded New Democratic Party voters who were the Liberals’ main strategic target in Campaign 2015.

The CF-18 withdrawal reflected Trudeau’s genuine desire to keep Canada at some remove from a conflict that had, after all, begun with president George W. Bush’s catastrophic decision to pre-emptively invade Iraq in 2003. Likewise the “whole-of-government” approach to Iraq introduced in February, including a boost in of humanitarian assistance and a tripling of the special forces contingent, was in keeping with the PM’s desire for Canada to have lasting impact on the ground, rather than “just bombing.”

The arguments that there is no such thing as “just bombing” in modern warfare, as applied by the U.S.led coalition in Iraq and Syria, that bombing is precisely targeted, and that it protects allies on the ground, fell on deaf ears. Last winter, when the Liberals could have changed course and left the fighters in place, they chose not to, the political imperative of keeping this signature promise apparently outweighing military considerations, frank speech and common sense.

Yet now Canada is at war outside Mosul, with soldiers on the front lines of what appears to be ISIL’s last stand as a wannabe state with its own territory — and, thanks to the lack of independent reports from the scene, something that can only be done with relative security through an embed program, we know next to nothing about it, beyond the scraps of mission data parcelled out on a Defence website.

Transparent and accountable? No. This is neither.