Thank you, once again, for inviting me here this evening. I'm a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces. I retired as a senior intelligence officer with the rank of major. I deployed to Afghanistan, for the first time to Kandahar in 2007, and then again with Joint Task Force 2 in 2012 with Operation Attention.
During the initial tour, I had the pleasure of being a member of the OMLT team under, at that point in time, Colonel Wayne Eyre, now General Eyre.
I was embedded with a kandak of approximately 500 Afghans. It was during that time that I was introduced to Afghan interpreters. Being an S3 and S2 within a kandak—that is an operations officer and an Afghan intelligence officer—it was very important for me to be able to communicate with the Afghan officers, the Afghan troops and the Afghan citizens we were interacting with out in the battle space.
It was during that mission that I befriended a guy named Sangeen, who is still in my life today. He's the person who contacted me last summer to help his family, who were in dire need of help due to the unfolding events in Afghanistan. His family in particular were also quite involved with helping Canada, as his brother was also an interpreter, who went on afterwards to work for ATCO and KBR. His father was not an interpreter, but he was a senior officer with the Afghan National Army. He was a colonel, so again, another high-profile potential target for the Taliban.
For that reason, Sangeen reached out to me to assist his family in getting out of Afghanistan. That's when I became involved in this committee and with the Government of Canada's response at that time to get the Afghans out before, of course, things folded at the end of the summer of 2021.
During that time, I had numerous dealings with the IRCC. I had dealings with the SJS within the Canadian Armed Forces for vetting Afghan interpreters. I also had dealings with the embassy.
I took a front-seat approach to assisting with some of the paperwork that these Afghan families were trying to fill out, trying to give them clarity when they were on the ground as to the paperwork requirements for getting on those planes, eventually, and coming to Canada.
At the time, there was quite a bit of conflicting information. I know it was a very chaotic time in Afghanistan in July and August 2021. I witnessed it personally, as these folks were asking me to intervene and contact various members of our government just to get clarity on the requirements they needed to fulfill in order to move through the vetting process and immigrate to Canada.
Just to clarify, Sangeen came to Canada 10 years earlier, in 2012. It was in February 2012, under that special Afghan interpreter relocation program that was offered, I believe, between 2009 and 2012. I could be wrong on those dates, but I know he came in February 2012. He has been in Canada for 10 years. I have had dealings with him and personal contact over the past decade since he's come to Canada.