Trudeau: Canada to lead training mission in Iraq
Canada is taking the lead of a new NATO training mission in Iraq, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed Wednesday, stocking up his political armoury should U.S. President Donald Trump try to cast doubt on the Canadian government’s commitment to the global military alliance.
The Iraq endeavour marked Trudeau’s second announcement involving Canada’s military in as many days. On Tuesday, he declared that the Canadian Forces would continue to lead a NATO battle group in Latvia through 2023.
Both were delivered in advance of Wednesday’s tense meeting of NATO leaders, where Trump said each of the 29 member nations should budget an amount equal to four per cent of their economies as measured by their gross domestic product.
Canada’s defence spending this year is expected to reach 1.4 per cent of GDP.
The federal government has insisted repeatedly that spending alone isn’t sufficient to measure a country’s commitment to NATO, and has quietly acknowledged that the announcements were aimed at underscoring Canada’s contributions.
Basing a NATO endeavour in Iraq might also be by design, since Trump has made fighting the Islamic State group a key focus of his foreign policy — and has demanded that NATO step up its operations there.
Either way, the actual number of Canadian troops deployed abroad will increase only marginally with the two new commitments: the 250 service members assigned to the new training mission will be drawn from the 850 that the government had already allocated for Iraq operations.
The only true growth will be in Latvia, where the government plans to add 80 new soldiers to 450 already there.
The $40-million cost of Canada’s training efforts in Iraq will come from previously approved funds, one senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity..
The NATO training mission will build on a smaller program that since November has seen 20 Canadian military engineers, working out of a base near Baghdad, teach about 150 Iraqi soldiers how to defuse roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices and other forms of the deadly traps that are the hallmark of the Islamic State group, also known as Daesh.
Canada plans to provide a senior general to oversee the NATO mission, which will see hundreds of military trainers teach their Iraqi counterparts to counter IEDs, maintain armoured vehicles, work with civilian authorities and provide emergency medical aid.
“That is the next step in the challenge in Iraq, which was first defeating Daesh. And now we have to rebuild that democracy and strengthen it,” Trudeau told an audience of NATO officials, foreign representatives and defence insiders.
Canada’s contribution to the mission will include helicopters and crew to ferry NATO personnel around the country, the senior official said, as well as 50 trainers, 20 headquarters staff and 150 soldiers to protect the force.
Trudeau did not— have an official bilateral meeting with Trump on Wednesday, but did have a conversation with the U.S. president “on the margins” of the NATO summit, said a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office.
The conversation focused on trade, including efforts to revamp the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement and the ramifications for those talks of Mexico’s presidential election, from which left-leaning populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador emerged victorious, the spokesperson said.