More than the sum of its parts
Canadian efforts against ISIL not going unnoticed
A senior planner closely involved in directing the U.S.-led coalition’s air war against ISIL says that Canada had contributed far more to the campaign than the relatively small number of Canadian Special Forces personnel and aircraft might suggest.
“I would submit it is a combination of all the coalition contributions that come together to produce capability. It is the sum of all the parts, if you will, and Canada is a key coalition member,” U.S. Marine Brig.- Gen. Tom Weidley said in an interview at a secret base in the desert where coalition commanders, including some Canadian officers, both collect and analyze intelligence from the battlefields in Iraq and Syria and advise Kurdish and Iraqi forces.
Canada’s deployment of approximately 70 Special Forces advisers with Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq and of 9 RCAF aircraft that have been flying missions out of Kuwait were significant force multipliers, said the general, who commanded a Super Cobra assault helicopter squadron that flew combat missions in Iraq when the U.S. had ground forces there.
Elaborating on the mission of Canada’s elite trainers, whose presence in Iraq has until now largely been clouded in secrecy, Weidley said, “They provide training, education and their experiences to the Kurdish Peshmerga, whether in the conduct of operations, in the integration of aviation fire support or in terminal control advice. They become integral to what the Peshmerga are capable of doing.”
In what were the first public comments from an American general about Canada’s role in the war against ISIL, Weidley added: “Every Peshmerga fighter the Canadians touch enhances a future Peshmerga leader. Those intangibles grow over time. That Peshmerga fighter is going to train his subordinates and it continues to grow as that leader moves up in the chain. Small numbers of trainers have the ability to make a huge impact across the battle space.”
About 6,500 hand-picked Iraqi and Peshmerga security forces had already been trained for between four and six weeks each at five different centres and about 5,000 more were currently in training, according to the general.
The Canadians and mentors from other Western nations such as Britain, France and the Netherlands have been providing training in everything from the law of war, basic marksmanship and counter-IED skills to mine clearing, the integration of aviation fire and squad, platoon and company level attacks.
“We are not looking to create Canadian-equivalent infantry battalion structures,” Weidley said. “The goal is to take those Iraqi units and get them to a level where they can be successful against Daesh (the Arabic acronym for ISIL) in the current fight.”
Although well back from the front lines, Weidley looked very much like a Marine straight out of Central Casting. Barrelchested with ramrod straight posture, he sported a brush cut that looked as if you could polish shoes with it.
Using common Marine parlance, he described the Canadian troops now serving in the Middle East as “brothers.”
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has mocked the fighting abilities of Canada’s Hornet fighter jets and the fact that they were more than 30 years old. While unaware of those remarks, the general said the RCAF’s warplanes were “an absolutely capable platform in this environment. They provide a great deal of flexibility in the ordnance they can carry in order to address different targets. They have a tremendous array of sensors and data sharing capabilities.”
As for the Aurora spy aircraft, “I have seen some of the products that they have provided and they are superb,” he said. “It is the synthesis of that ability to rapidly bring that information to bear that has an operational effect on the battle space. Working in combination with the other intelligence gathering platforms they give us a fused picture of what is actually happening on the ground.
An area of great interest to Weidley’s headquarters was the Euphrates River Valley, all the way from Iraq to the Syrian city of Raqqa and beyond that to the northwest toward the Turkish border.
“Because they control the lines of communication those have become the focus of a lot of our intelligence collection in order to strike at Daesh’s revenue generating capabilities with oil refineries and wells,” Weidley said.
“Coalition ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities including Canadian ones are helping us develop an understanding of the networks that Daesh uses to distribute weapons and move troops from Syria to Iraq. It is a lot of space and takes a lot of dedicated assets to do that.”
While it was difficult to “quantitatively” gauge the success of the coalition and their Iraqi and Kurdish partners “we continue to see progress every day,” he said.
Proof of this, he said, was that territory had recently been regained from ISIL after what had been large-scale offensive Iraqi and Kurdish operations.
“This isn’t a near-term fight. It is a fight that is going to take some time.”