Up until two days before the press corps boarded their flight, they thought they were just accompanying the prime minister to the Netherlands to commemorate the 70th anniversary of that country’s liberation from Nazi occupation. Then they were told they might also be going somewhere “hot and dangerous.”
The big surprise was that prior to landing in the Netherlands, Harper intended to pay a whirlwind visit to Kurdistan, Iraq and Kuwait.
In the interest of security, the media could not be told beforehand. Journalists were notified of the updated itinerary while on the Airbus en route to Sigonella, Italy. Once there, they were switched from the C-150 to a C-17.
Caught up in the adventure of flying into an actual war zone, no one seems to have asked Harper why he felt it necessary to use so many military resources on what could only be described as a pre-election photo op.
After landing in Erbil, Kurdistan, Harper and Defence Minister Jason Kenney set off toward the front lines, where the Kurdish Peshmerga militia has contained ISIS fighters.
For this little battlefield tour, the Canadian press entourage was left behind, but Harper and Kenney had a convoy of several armoured SUVs and a full platoon of our elite JTF2 Commandos accompanying them. They also of course had the PM’s personal video crew, whose mission was to film Harper and Kenney as they walked along the parapets staring and pointing at distant landmarks, which the public were told later were the ISIS front lines, a mere 6 kilometres away. All of the security, including the heavily armoured SUVs, would have been flown in for the occasion.
While it would be unwise to suggest that Harper and Kenney do not require high-level protection in such a volatile region, one question has to be asked: what possible benefit could the presence of these two politicians possibly have had for the allied forces in their battle against ISIS? The Kurds have been fighting in northern Iraq for close to 30 years, if not against Saddam’s security forces, then against each other, al Qaeda or Turkmens, or now ISIS.
For the average Peshmerga soldier, the arrival of the Canadian prime minister might have been a curious distraction: an out-of-place foreigner posing for video footage in a danger zone for all of a few minutes.
No doubt the Kurds would have been far happier if the C-17 carrying Harper’s vehicles and bodyguards had been full of modern weapons and ammunition instead. I’m sure the tens of thousands of Iraqis displaced by ISIS offensives would have preferred the Canadian cargo plane to have been filled with humanitarian aid.
What Harper’s little PR foray into the Middle East did accomplish, however, was to give us a glimpse of how complex this conflict is.
For example, while in Kurdistan, the Kurds made sure that any photo or video taken of Harper and his sidekick, Kenney, included the bright green, white and red striped flag of Kurdistan. Bright flags aren’t something you usually use to decorate a camouflaged front-line bunker, but they are bold markers that the Kurds are fighting for Kurdistan and have no intention of reintegrating with a central Iraqi government in Baghdad.
After leaving Erbil, where Canada has 69 Special Forces personnel training and assisting the Peshmerga, Harper’s entourage touched down in Baghdad. During that brief stopover, Harper met with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. It was Iraq’s Shiite-dominated central government that ignored U.S. advice to appease the Sunni minority and thus directly created the Sunni support base for ISIS. Al-Abadi’s countermeasure to ISIS advances was to request U.S. military air strikes, which Canada quickly agreed to contribute to, as well as bringing in Iranian officers and volunteers to train the Iraqi Shiite militia.
Being allied to Iranians is something the Harper government is loath to admit.
The final leg of the trip was to -Kuwait, to the base from which -Canadian aircrews have been flying sorties against ISIS since last October. By virtue of being aboard the PM’s aircraft, the media accompanying Harper were the first of Canada’s press corps to be allowed entry to the Kuwaiti airfield. Canadian media who had previously attempted to visit in the past could at best conduct interviews by phone or at a public location, but were barred from the airfield. This would have been due to the domestic sensitivity of the Kuwaiti government, which does not want its Sunni population to know that these airfields are being used by Western pilots to bomb Sunnis in Iraq in support of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiites.
All glorified photo ops aside, Canada has been involved in the Iraq conflict for more than seven months. We are now bombing targets inside Syria, and still the Harper government has not said exactly what our troops are fighting for. We are told that the mission is to “degrade ISIS,” but no one has yet defined what victory will look like.
Scott Taylor is a former Canadian infantry soldier, founder of Esprit De Corps Magazine, author and documentary filmmaker. He has made many trips to Iraq as a war correspondent.
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