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Under its previous Conservative Harper Government, Canada sent air support, advisors, trainers and special forces to Iraqi Kurdistan in order to help in the war against the “Islamic State” (ISIS). By every account, the people of Kurdistan very much appreciate these forces’ contribution. Canadian soldiers on occasion also fought ISIS on the ground in Iraqi Kurdistan and suffered some casualties.
After the Liberal Party won the October 2015 Canadian elections, they withdrew their air support but left the advisors and trainers in Kurdistan there. In February 2016, new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau then promised the Iraqi Kurds military equipment to help fight ISIS. The promised equipment did not amount to anything too huge – just ammunition, small arms, light mortars and some optical sights. Eight months later, none of those arms have been delivered.
The reason, apparently, is that some people in Ottawa warned the Prime Minister that the Kurds hold aspirations for self-determination and that they do not always agree with Baghdad’s demands. A briefing the Prime Minister received on the issue also stated that “Should the (ISIS) threat recede Baghdad will have to contend with a range of land disputes with the (Kurdistan Region), as well as strengthened Iraqi Kurdish forces, which have received training and equipment from coalition members, including Canada.”
The Canadians have therefore been demanding “diplomatic assurances” that any weapons provided to the Kurds will only be used for the purpose of fighting ISIS. In the meantime, of course, the ISIS Jihadis did not suspend all hostilities with the Kurds until they could properly assure the ever-vigilant Canadians that there would be no improper use of their weaponry.
Your humble columnist is Canadian himself, and feels nothing but embarrassment for such nonsense. Canada is presently the second largest arms exporter to the Middle East (after the United States). Ottawa apparently has no problem selling $15 billion dollars worth of light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia as it smashes dissent in its Shiite region or pounds Yemen to a pulp. The same goes for Turkey as it burns basements full of civilians in Cizre, shoots its artillery at Syrian Kurds, and refuses to even let journalists and human rights investigators into the southeast of the country to see what happened there.
A list of Middle Eastern and North African states that Canada has sold weapons to in the last couple of years includes quite the menagerie of human rights abusers: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Yet somehow we are to believe that the Peshmerga of the Iraqi Kurds – the force that stopped ISIS from taking all of northern Iraq in 2014 and completing its annihilation of Yezidis, Chaldeans, Assyrians and others – is some kind of dubious, dangerous force that Canada needs to avoid empowering (as if Canada’s modest contribution of some light weapons would even change anything)? Apparently the pencil-pushers advising young Prime Minister Trudeau not only worry that well-armed Kurds might be harder for Baghdad to dominate again – they also expressed fear that any weapons provided to Erbil might end up in the hands of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). It must really require never leaving Ottawa to be so clueless as to think that the Barzani-led Kurdistan Regional Government would ever arm the PKK.
Given the history of Iraq and Baghdad’s previous attempts at genocide against the Kurds, would it not seem more appropriate to worry about the military equipment being provided to the Iraqi federal government rather than to the Kurds? Might a better armed Peshmerga discourage Baghdad from reverting to past habits of forcefully suppressing any and all dissent in the country? It seems reasonable to conclude that arming the Kurds better might actually encourage peaceful settlement of disputes between Erbil and Baghdad, since in a context of closer military parity neither could expect to successfully use force against the other.
Canada instead prefers to stick by the old policy of completely deferring to state sovereignty no matter what, only dealing with central governments of other states. Ottawa will arm even the most vicious governments, as long as they are recognized states and there is money to be made in the process. In the process, we like to pretend that this is an ethical policy and that we champion human rights across the world.
Luckily for the people of Kurdistan and unluckily for ISIS, at least other countries – including the United States, Britain, Germany and France -- have been more forthcoming in their military assistance to the Peshmerga.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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