Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations this morning.
All Canadians are of course extremely concerned about the extreme violations of international humanitarian law, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that have been committed. We're also obviously very concerned about the hundreds and thousands, as Minister Baird mentioned, of displaced persons within Iraq who have left with, in many cases, nothing but the clothes on their back. My colleagues will deal with some of that, but I want to deal with the military aspect of it and the response announced by the Prime Minister. We do need some clarity here, because we've heard numbers such as a few dozen, which you mentioned here today, but we've also heard a hundred, which is a little more than that. You talked about 75 Canadian forces being involved in the airlift, but the announcement on August 15 was about 30.
We'd like to have a little bit of clarity, so I have four simple questions.
First of all, Mr. Nicholson, how many Canadian Forces troops are being deployed to Iraq? Are they special operations forces? Where specifically will they be? What language capability does the Canadian Armed Forces have to operate in the role you mentioned, the advisory role in amongst the Kurds in Iraq? I understand that is where we'll be helping.
I have those four questions first, and if you could keep the answers short, it would be great, because I have a few other questions as well.