Mr. Chair, I have personally had contact with a number of the members of those groups. I, too, felt the same sort of distress when Afghans that I'd served with would reach out to me, and I was not able to support them in the way I would like. I had to be very careful as well, as the Chief of the Defence Staff, not to have a conflict of interest and give certain priority or precedence to Afghans just because I knew them. It was a difficult spot.
I will say that, over the course of this operation, we were inundated with requests for specific Afghans at specific locations. People of influence, individuals in different walks of Canadian life contacted us, in fact overwhelming our communication systems with their individual pleas for their individual Afghans, to rescue them. Information management was a challenge as systems became clogged.