Feds blasted for clampdown on Iraq mission details
OTTAWA — The federal government is under fire for a lack of transparency about Canada’s mission in Iraq, which entered a critical stage this week with the attack on Mosul.
Conservative defence critic James Bezan honed in on the issue during a news conference on Parliament Hill on Tuesday, saying that the military held more briefings and provided more information while the Tories were in power.
National Defence provided 12 technical briefings on what Canadian troops were doing in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant during the first year of the mission, which coincided with the Conservative government’s last year in office.
Those updates included specific details, such as the number of troops on the ground in northern Iraq as well as how many times those soldiers had called in air strikes and engaged in firefights with Islamic State forces.
The military also at one point provided an unprecedented walk-through on a socalled friendly fire incident involving Kurdish peshmerga fighters in March 2015 that killed Sgt. Andrew Doiron and injured three other Canadian soldiers.
Yet briefings largely dried up during the mission’s second year, which is when the Liberals were in office. The most recent, held two weeks ago, was only the third since the Liberals were elected last October on a promise of greater transparency.
A senior military officer revealed during that briefing that Canadian troops have been spending more time on the front lines, and engaged in “sporadic” firefights with Islamic State, during the spring and summer.
But he refused to say how many firefights Canadians have been in or how many Canadian soldiers are on the ground — even though that figure was already included in public documents tabled in the House of Commons at the end of September. He also wouldn’t say if Canadian troops are still calling in air strikes.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan defended the tightened grip on information, saying it was necessary to protect Canadian troops and the operation to free Mosul, which has been billed as the most important battle to date in the fight against Islamic State.
“It was actually around Mosul, everything that we did,” he said of Canadian activities over the last few months. “If it was in a different location, it’d be a different story. I have to trust in the military when it comes to the type of information that’s provided.”
On the ground, the pace of operations slowed Tuesday in the fight to retake Mosul from Islamic State , as Iraqi forces advancing to the east and south of the city began pushing toward larger villages and encountering civilian populations.
Iraq’s Kurdish fighters, also known as the peshmerga, largely paused their advance, according to commanders stationed along the front to Mosul’s east, consolidating gains from the previous day.
Iraqi army forces advanced to the south and east of Mosul, reaching the outskirts of al-Hamdaniyah, a historically Christian town also known as Bakhdida and Qaraqosh, which was once home to tens of thousands, east of Mosul. On the southern front, Iraq’s federal police pushed toward up to the town of al-Houd, still home to hundreds of people, according to estimates from the United Nations.
Iraqi army Lt.-Col. Mohammed Shaker said al-Hamdaniyah had been surrounded and his forces had retaken six other villages over the past two days.
More than 25,000 troops have mobilized for the Mosul fight.