Rewarding Loyalty : Canada and Iraq's Peshmerga Stalwarts

"The CAF [Canadian Armed Forces] delivery and distribution of equipment on the ground would ensure increased accountability and control while allowing for better synchronization of intended training efforts with equipment delivery and issue."
Briefing document, July 2016

"The list of equipment comprised of small arms, ammunition and optical sights that has been acquired was originally intended to equip a force of between five to six hundred Kurdish security force soldiers."
Dan Le Bouthillier, spokesman, Department of National Defence, 2018

A Peshmerga soldier returns fire as his convoy drives through an area exposed to a sniper on November 8, 2016 in the town of Bashiqa, during street battles against ISIL.ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated in February of 2016 that Canada was prepared to, and would provide weapons to the Kurdish fighting forces representing the sole regional, reliable and credible fighting force diminishing the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Iraq. The then-government of Iraq made it known that it opposed providing weapons to the Kurds, despite their front-and-centre combat viability against ISIL.

Arrangements were made to filter the equipment and weapons through the government of Iraq which would then provide them for use of the Kurds. However, it was an open secret that the Kurds intended at some future date to secede from Iraq. Kurdish leaders themselves openly admitted that the equipment awaiting receipt from Canada had a double purpose; fighting ISIL, and eventually defending an independent Kurdish state at some time in the near future.

The issue is fairly straightforward. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria became beneficiaries under French and British colonial rule of historically heritage land that was Kurdish and which was, in fact, promised by the colonial powers would be returned to them. However, that's not how reality played out; Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria were awarded the land promised to the Kurds, a large ethnic group comprised of approximately six million people.

Ever since, the Kurds have bemoaned the loss of their ancestral land, and hoped that by some miracle it would be restored to them. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, the only stable, forward-looking and responsible part of Iraq was in fact Kurdistan, which had suffered horribly under Saddam, where villages were razed, people were gassed, and a general upheaval took place of countless homeless and countless more slaughtered.

With the Kurdish Peshmerga dominating the offensive against Islamic State it was only reasonable that hope would be rekindled and they would be enabled to declare themselves independent, ensconced on their native homeland. But because of politics and the sensitivity of NATO countries to the wishes of the three Arab and one Aryan country squatting on Kurdish land, the promised equipment was never delivered.

C6 general purpose machine guns and C8 carbines, used by the Canadian Forces are among the military equipment being withheld from the Kurds, promises be damned. The Canadian military planned to use the Canadian Commercial Corporation to buy equipment which the Canadian Forces would be the "exporter of record" for. Non-lethal equipment was provided to the Kurds, such as helmets, clothing, bulletproof vests and bomb-hunting robots.

A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter runs to take position as the Iraqi Kurdish forces pushed deeper into 

the town of Bashiqa during street battles against ISIL on November 8, 2016. 

ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images

Iraqi authorities seized an aircraft bearing weapons for Canadian special forces on a training mission with the Kurds, in Kurdistan. That was the result of anti-western conspiracy theorists commanding Iraqi politics. The arms sit now in a military warehouse in Montreal, no plans underway to distribute the equipment either to Canadian forces or the Kurdish militias.

Canadian special forces were to have distributed the weapons to Kurdish soldiers whom they were dispatched to train in the active conflict against ISIL. A military aircraft was to have transported the weapons to Kurdistan for that purpose. The arms, estimated to be worth around ten million, got as far as the Canadian Forces Supply Depot in Montreal, and there they still are.

The .50 calibre sniper rifles equipped with silencers, 60 mm mortars, Carl Gustaf anti-tank systems, grenade launchers, pistols, carbines, thermal binoculars, cameras, scopes and medical supplies. No plans, according to an official with the Department of National Defence exists at present to distribute the weapons in Iraq for the federal government has not yet determined what to do with it all, and it doesn't seem that they will decide, any time soon.

Two years ago Kurdistan held a referendum for independence which was overwhelmingly passed despite some concerns of a backlash. The backlash brought those sovereign aspirations to a shuddering halt. And the plans of a future independent Kurdistan have been once again put on hold. With the hope that eventually justice will prevail.


Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani’s decision to hold an independence referendum has triggered a humiliating reversal of fortunes for Iraq’s Kurds. (SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty Images)