Iraq News Now

By Justin Ling

Canada has done plenty to “help, support and strengthen our local allies” in the Middle East, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said Friday. But over the past four years, Trudeau’s government has worked to slowly end support to those partners, specifically to the Kurdish people.

According to government reports and interviews with private industry, Canada has frustrated efforts to sell weapons to our Kurdish allies, while failing to deliver long-promised military aid.

Since 2014, Canada and other allies have partnered with local groups like the Kurds to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Canada began working to train and equip the Peshmerga in Iraq, while its fighter jets supported the YPG in Syria. Under the then-Conservative government, Canadian military aircraft carried equipment into Iraq, while private companies began exporting arms, mostly to the Peshmerga — nearly $2 million worth in 2015, and $1.3 million in 2016.

With the Liberals in power, that help ground to a halt, even as the Kurds were waging a costly fight against ISIL’s strongholds in the area. Trudeau immediately halted Canada’s bombing campaign in Syria. And while special forces had been training Kurdish fighters in Erbil, the Trudeau government put a halt to that mission in 2018 and diverted the resources towards the central Iraqi government in Baghdad.

North Eastern Arms, an Ontario-based rifle manufacturer, was one of the bigger exporters to the Kurds.

“We, under the Conservatives, shipped about 2,000 rifles over there,” said Jeff Hussey, former president of the company, which has since been acquired by a larger defence contractor.

Hussey said the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq subsequently placed orders for 18,000 more rifles. But the new Liberal government required they get approval from both Kurdistan and Iraq — which he did. Hussey supplied to the National Post proof that both Erbil and Baghdad signed off on the deal, but he said that didn’t sway Ottawa. “They basically slow played us.”

In this case, and others, the Canadian government hasn’t explicitly denied the request for export permits, but it hasn’t approved them either.

A representative from a second arms company that had done business with the Iraqi Kurdish government confirmed similar problems with their export permits.

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Global Affairs refused to comment on any aspect of these sales, writing in a statement that “permit applications, and decisions related to applications, are confidential. Global Affairs Canada does not release this type of information.”

The Canadian government also didn’t send the aid it had explicitly promised. In 2016, Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan committed $9.5 million in military aid to Kurdistan, including rifles and mortars. The government procured the weapons, but they have sat in a Montreal warehouse ever since.

The Department of National Defence confirmed this week that the weapons haven’t moved, and it appears that won’t change.

A core part of Thursday’s deal between President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end fighting in Northern Syria would require the YPG to hand over all their Western-supplied heavy weaponry. While Canada did not supply the YPG, the Turks have long-held the position that any arms sent from the West to the Kurds would end up supply the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group in southern Turkey that has been listed as a terrorist organization by Canada. It’s on that basis that Erdogan has lobbied hard for the West to end all military aid and weapons sales.

Turkey has even supplied a photograph claiming to show Canadian rifles in the hands of the PKK, though it’s hard to verify those claims.

Canadian export permits forbid the Kurds from sharing the weapons with any other group, beyond the official military and police of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Even as the Trudeau government halted new military exports to the Iraqi Kurds, it has expanded them significantly to Turkey. Canada sold just $4 million in military goods to Ankara in 2016 — that number jumped to more than $115 million in 2018.

The issue has become pressing after Trump pulled American forces out of Northern Syria, leaving a vacuum for Turkey to go after its Kurdish rivals. The American withdrawal has also seemed to inspire ISIL to regroup.

The Post asked Trudeau about Canada’s Kurdish allies while he campaigned in Whitby, Ont., on Friday. The Liberal leader took the opportunity to condemn Turkish incursions into Syria and express concern over the Washington-Ankara deal that will see Turkey control a 30-kilometre stretch of land along the border in Northern Syria. There’s no guarantee the YPG will respect the deal, and Turkish shelling of the border continued Friday.

Trudeau said that, upon being elected in 2015, he decided that “Canada would not, anymore, have any engagements in Syria and we would focus our help in Iraq, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

Even as the Trudeau government halted new military exports to the Iraqi Kurds, it has expanded them significantly to Turkey

Canada’s condemnation came with an announcement last week that it would temporarily suspended new export permits to Turkey because of its invasion of Northern Syria. Global Affairs confirmed Friday that would only apply to new export permits, not existing ones.

In his statement, Trudeau never once mentioned the Kurdish people or their government by name.

That’s in direct contrast to French President Emmanuel Macron, one of Trudeau’s liberal and internationalist brethren. Macron’s foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian travelled to Erbil to relay a message of support alongside his Kurdish counterpart.

Hussey has largely given up on Canada. “We used to brag to the Americans and the British about how great Canada was to do business in,” he said, adding that the problem isn’t just with the Middle East. Ottawa also held up another $6 million contract with Guatemala, he said. The second defence contractor confirmed that Ottawa has held up or kiboshed several other deals.

Now, with an order for another 30,000 rifles and 150,000 pistols from the Kurds, Hussey says he’s moving the manufacturing to the U.S., where the State Department is more supportive of his deals.

“We were going to make them in Canada, but it’s just not worth the risk,” Hussey said, shrugging off the idea of getting the Liberals to change their mind on these exports.

“I’m not SNC-Lavalin.”