Foreign Affairs Committee on Dec. 4th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Good morning, everyone.

Pursuant to standing order 108(2) we are studying Canada's response to the violence, religious persecution, and dislocation caused by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

I want to welcome our witnesses who are here with us today.

We have, as an individual, Mr. Rabea Allos. Welcome, sir, glad to have you here in Ottawa. Joining us via video conference from Oxford, United Kingdom, we have Professor Matteo Legrenzi, who is from the University of Venice. Welcome, sir, glad to have you here. Joining us from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we have from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mr. Andrew Tabler, senior fellow. Welcome, sir, glad to have you here as well.

We'll start our opening statements in that order. After all your opening statements, we'll go around the room for questions back and forth from all the members.

We'll start with Mr. Allos.

[Rabea Allos, As an Individual]

Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, good morning to you all.

I would like to thank you for the kind invitation. I'm honoured to be here today to speak on behalf of the Iraqi Christians, one of the oldest churches and one of the oldest civilizations.

I am here as an individual who has been working as a volunteer over the last few years helping Iraqi refugees resettle in Canada through the private sponsorship programs through the office for refugees, affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.

I was working mainly with Iraqi Christians who have fled Iraq to neighbouring countries, mainly Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. The program was started by the Honourable Jason Kenney, the former Minister of Immigration back in 2009, and so far more than 20,000 Iraqis have been resettled in Canada. Those are refugees looking for new beginnings, looking to start a new life, and a future that will only be brighter.

Since last July, the situation in Iraq took a turn for the worse after ISIL took over the city of Mosul and the neighbouring Nineveh Plain villages, where the majority of Iraqi Christians reside. Within days, Christianity that had existed from the first century in that region disappeared. All Christians, except for a handful, escaped for their lives and faith. They made a decision to give up their lives, their jobs, their savings, and flee to keep their faith. Unfortunately, this is happening in the 21st century.

The main reason for the rise of ISIL and similar groups is the politicization of Islam; groups who represent the minority of Muslims, who are bullying the rest of mainstream Muslims as well as non-Muslims, Christians, the Yazidis, Mandaeans, and other minorities. Some Muslims label those who politicize Islam as Islamists. We should make this distinction clear: not all Muslims are Islamists, but certainly those Islamists should be considered, like the Nazis, hate crime groups. These groups are not a threat to the region of the Middle East only. They are a threat across the world. We have clerics in Canada who are Wahabis, Muslim Brotherhoods, and other similar groups, who are teaching young kids hatred of anything that is different from who they are. There are reports that hundreds of young individuals from Canada, the U.S., and many European countries are joining ISIL to fight for the Islamic State.

According to the Koran, under the Islamic State the people of the book, mainly Christians and Jews, are allowed to keep their faith as long as they pay the jizya, which is the tax. However, atheists and people of other religions have the choice of conversion to Islam or the sword. Basically, under the Islamic State, atheists, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and others will face death.

There is certainly a need to stop ISIL and this will need collaborative efforts by many parties, regional and international. The coalition, led by the United States and of which Canada is a part, is certainly needed, as well as air strikes and military advisory support to the Iraqi army and the Kurdish regional army. ISIL forces need to be weakened through military air strikes while the Iraqi and Kurdish armies fight them on the ground. At the same time, international pressure is needed on some of the regional players to stop the financial and the logistic support to ISIL, whether it is coming directly from governments or from individuals. To defeat ISIL quickly, there is a need to enlist the support of the land forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey, countries that are mainly Sunni Muslims. There is a need to show that the extreme fanatic splinter groups of Sunni Muslims are fought by moderate Sunni Muslim forces, not Shia Muslims, and certainly not crusaders.

There is a need to impose restrictions on clerics who preach hate and we need to stop the Internet fatwas. Those clerics and their fatwas are driving young kids from around the world to follow the path of terror and will continue to do so.

As for Canada's response to the crisis in Iraq, joining the coalition is certainly needed. ISIL is not going to be defeated by being idle. The effort to fight ISIL should involve regional forces, but it has to be led by an international coalition to give comfort to all parties in the region. The tensions and sensitivities between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims have reached very high levels and only international intervention can stop it from ballooning.

As for the humanitarian supports, the Canadian government has been very generous in its support to the internally displaced. The Canadian ambassador has been on the ground in the Kurdish region, personally following up and making sure the aid is reaching those who need it. Unfortunately, we are hearing reports that Christians who are staying in the churches, monasteries, or schools are not seeing the support. However, the Canadian ambassador recently visited the Iraqi bishops to get more first-hand information about the aid needed. Continued help will be needed, especially since winter has started. There is a need to open schools and medical centres, as well as a need for psychological support to women and children who have suffered mentally through this crisis.

I believe Canada should look at the possibility of accepting a few thousand refugees directly from Iraq, especially those who have families in Canada. The program, if channelled through the private sponsorship program, will minimize any costs to the Canadian taxpayers.

One last suggestion on how Canada can help is for Canada to host an international conference inviting ministers of foreign affairs in the region along with top Christian and Muslim clerics to discuss the situation, and Muslim clerics and muftis should declare that the persecution of Christians and other minorities is not acceptable and not permitted.

Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're now going to move over to Professor Legrenzi, who's joining us from Oxford.

Professor.

[Matteo Legrenzi, Professor, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, As an Individual]

Thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to be back in Ottawa, where I lived for quite a few years.

I'd like to start by saying that there is not an exclusively military solution to the challenge of the Islamic State, because in the short term, military action may well be necessary to prevent the collapse of the central Iraqi government as well as the Kurdish regional government, but in the longer term, a political solution needs to be devised.

Military strikes by coalition forces, albeit necessary, provide recruits for the Islamic State, since civilian victims are inevitable. The essential political problem in Iraq has been the character of the rule by the previous government for at least, let's say, five or six years. The removal of al-Maliki as prime minister is definitely a step in the right direction. Still, a lot more needs to be done by the current Iraqi government in order to deserve allied support.

Simply put, the sectarian and exclusionary nature of rule by the central government in Baghdad makes a large part of the population in the areas controlled by the Islamic State receptive to a message of liberation, however misguided and brutal. They need to be convinced they would be safe if there were a return to central government control.

The military personnel of the Islamic State include many former Baathist officers who have proven to be very effective on the ground, certainly more effective than the bulk of the Iraqi army stationed in Mosul in the north of the country. Let's ask ourselves why three divisions of the Iraqi army simply melted away. In large part it's because they were not there. There are in excess of 50,000 ghost soldiers in the army, and this estimate is by the Iraqi government. Why did the ones who work there not actually fight or even sabotage their equipment before fleeing in the face of the enemy?

The challenge, therefore, requires a long-term political solution and a profound rethinking of the nature of rule by the Iraqi central government and a marginalization of sectarian gangs aligned with the government. They were the ones who, paradoxically, were brought up from the south to actually prevent Baghdad from being overrun. They were the ones who could be counted on to fight, and yet they exacerbate the problem.

We should also not forget that everything that is going on requires a sustained development and educational intervention. From these points of view, Canada should be very proud of the role that it has fulfilled so far.

All of this is happening in the context of our having failed to meet the challenge of preventing another generation of conflict, just to quote a book by David Malone, my friend who is now in Tokyo. The security-development nexus has to be taken into account without neglecting either aspect.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Professor.

Andrew Tabler, I believe you were here before when we talked about Syria. Welcome back, glad to have you.

I'll turn the floor over to you.

[Andrew Tabler, Senior Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy]

Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here with you today, Mr. Chairman and ranking members. It's always easier to go last, but hopefully I can add more to the discussion, for what's likely to be a long discussion today, in a series of discussions going forward into the coming months and years concerning the threat posed by ISIL. It is perhaps the most complex threat facing Canada and its allies in the foreign arena certainly, and will be for years to come.

Following from the previous comments, I think bombing your way, or bombing one country's way, out of this problem will not be sufficient. This is where I think until recently...which has been the high-profile bombing campaigns in Iraq and Syria, combined with the arming of some groups inside of Iraq, most notably Kurds. This is part of the containment aspect of ISIL.

Some of that has been outlined in terms of protection of minorities, which is a major concern not only for those of you in Canada but in the United States and the world over, and justifiably so. ISIL's tactics are extremely severe. They not only pose an existential threat to these minorities but they also challenge the world on whether it will stand by in the face of such atrocities.

The problem going forward will be in this political solution that has been mentioned previously—how it will actually take place, and what shape it will take. All of these, ISIL and other Jihadist groups who are inside Iraq and Syria, are a product of wars inside Iraq, and most recently in Syria, as those states broke down, mostly because the central authorities in those countries did not include the majorities in each country. That's the reason why, until now, the basis of the strategy in Iraq, at least for the United States but I think also for Canada, has been to try to empower the new Iraqi government under Prime Minister al-Abadi to try to be more inclusive to Sunnis, Kurds, and others in the country and not simply benefit a Shia-dominated government backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In Syria we do not have those kinds of options. The government in Syria, the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad, is a completely minority-based, inflexible system at its core. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have majority Sunni who are attached to it, but it has proven to be, at its core, one of the least effective countries in the region at any kind of reform—political, economic, or otherwise. It's a considerable challenge to expect that the regime will reform under such circumstances in the foreseeable future.

That makes this settlement in Syria that much harder to attain. I think you've seen recently the efforts by the UN representative, Staffan de Mistura, to try to bring about a ceasefire, or rather a freeze, around the city of Aleppo, where the government is poised to yet again encircle and siege a city, this time arguably Syria's largest city in one way, shape, or form. The freeze is an idea at the moment. There really are not substantial plans attached to it as of yet, although there are lots of other ideas. Like all of these efforts, they'll take a long time to roll out. In the meantime, unfortunately, a lot of minority populations in areas that are controlled by ISIS will suffer.

The complexity of the solution in Syria is particularly difficult for the international community to grasp. It's there where we actually need to bring about two things that seem inconsistent. One is the defeat of ISIL. The other is the transformation, in one way, shape, or form, of the Bashar al-Assad regime into something that takes into account the country's majority Sunni population. Sunnis in Syria represent roughly 75% of the population—it depends on how you cut it and which census you use—that is the base of ISIL.

The only way to really politically deal with it and to politically undermine ISIL is to bring people who support that organization or are forced to support that organization, Sunnis, away from those organizations and jihadists into some other kind of political arrangements in those areas, or concerning the Syrian central state. That requires a political settlement inside the country, and unfortunately, that remains very far off.

I would encourage all of you to follow the news, read scholars like those who are testifying here today, and work together to try to come up with a real political solution that does not simply have a military foundation. We need to find something that goes beyond the current efforts by the western countries that can try to bring peace to these very troubled lands.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to start with our first round, which will be seven minutes for each party.

I'm going to start on my left with Mr. Dewar for seven minutes, please.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you to our witnesses. I believe that we have heard some of these points underlined in our study so far.

I should start off by saying, for information for our witnesses, that our study is going to be with recommendations. If there are things that you have perhaps forgotten, please feel free to send in some of your points and recommendations to our team here.

Mr. Tabler, I want to start with you. You provided us some great insight when we were doing our study on Syria—and thank you for that—and it connects to some of the other points that were made today on the political solution. I think there's a slight disagreement in this country about actions that were just recently taken with air strikes. Put that aside, and I think most people agree on the robust humanitarian support, protecting minorities, and dealing with those who have suffered from sexual violence.

I think everyone in this room, in this country indeed, who cares about this issue knows that the military solution in and of itself will not solve the crisis there. That leads us to the point—and we're the foreign affairs committee—how can we be involved in diplomatic ways to deal with Iraq? Let's focus on Iraq for now, but you're quite right to touch on Syria.

There are some groups involved in the Sunni awakening who have still not been brought in. I think some of the leadership is in Turkey right now. There are groups who have not yet been integrated. I know there is a new Prime Minister, and we have to give him some time, but we also want to make sure we're vigilant to ensure this is going to be a real transition to a real inclusive government.

What do you think of the idea of bringing some of those leaders together? We heard from one of our witnesses here in Ottawa about bringing some of those key actors together to do some confidence building, to do some relationship building as a first start, be it here in Ottawa or somewhere else. If that's the case, what should the goals be? We've seen these attempts made before, where sometimes the agenda's too open and not focused enough.

I'd just like to have your take on that.

[Andrew Tabler]

In terms of Iraq...but I guess it could apply to the process in Syria as well, bringing different actors together. In the case of Iraq, it's hard to say this but actually the situation is markedly better in that you have the semblance of a state, one that controls more territory arguably than the government does in Syria. It depends, of course, on how you look at this. Because we have the ability to change governments in Iraq, and Iraqis have the ability to elect new leaders, it gives us some political flexibility in a process that we are used to here in the west and can plug into, so to speak.

I think bringing people together is an excellent idea, and it's something that happens periodically, not only in the Middle East as a whole, going back to the peace process or even earlier, but in other aspects, and it's a good thing to bring people to the table. In all the 20-some years that I've been dealing with the Middle East and writing about it, I think actually that these efforts oftentimes are a process for a process's sake. What's missing oftentimes is the part of the story here of what creates necessity for each side to make real concessions.

One of the takeaways from living in the Middle East for a long time, or maybe from just getting a little older in general, is that I don't think people really change fundamentally unless they have to, and I think the same can be said of regimes and governments as well. People and governments don't change unless they're in a dilemma...a real choice between equal goods or the lesser of two evils. To get into the heart of your question about how to make this more effective, I think we can think about how we can create necessity here in the international community for different parties to make hard decisions. It's perhaps there that the full tool box of diplomacy as well as military force could be best used at certain key moments, rather than simply trying to bomb or degrade a group, and at the same time, as one of the previous guests had mentioned, bombing into areas that are full of civilians and making the situation that much worse.

I'm afraid in Syria and Iraq that's oftentimes what we're involved in, even though we're actually trying to defeat these groups that are diametrically opposed to our interests.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I don't know if I have time, Chair, but I'd like to hear from our other guest in Venice and our guest here in Ottawa.

[Matteo Legrenzi]

Very briefly, I would say I agree with what has been said. My concrete policy advice would be to be very tough with the Iraqi government because right now Canadian lives are on the line. They cannot shield behind sovereignty. We saw this coming. It's not that these people came out of a desert as it is sometimes portrayed in the press. We knew it was going to happen. We told them. They told us not to worry, that they had everything under control, and then their army melts away.

So if you have Canadian lives at arm's-length, you have a right to be very tough and to demand specific action of the Iraqi government.

[Rabea Allos]

Certainly I'm against war but there is an immediate need for those internally displaced refugees to go back home and go back to a normal life, and the only way to do that is to defeat ISIL immediately. At the same time we need to go through the process of reconciliation. We need to go through the process of nation-building. Unfortunately, in the Middle East, third world countries, in general, and Iraq, in particular, have tribal societies. People do not have loyalty to the state. They have loyalty to their tribes. They have loyalty to their religious leaders, but certainly not to the states.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

If I may, because my time is running short, you brought it up, and I actually like the idea of Canada being involved in some form of that reconciliation, noting what we just heard from our previous witnesses about not just having dialogue but a very focused process to really get some results on the ground.

[Rabea Allos]

One of the witnesses mentioned the ghost soldiers. I heard about this back in September when I was in Istanbul. Some of the colleagues I met with who came from Iraq mentioned this. There are certainly more than 50,000.

What's happening is for a general to become a general, he has to pay a bribe, and this could go up to the prime minister's office, sometimes up to a million dollars, and to make it up, they recruit soldiers and tell them, “Stay at home, we'll pay you half the salary and I'll keep the other half.”

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

By the way, the 50,000 is an important point. It is from Iraqi sources, so that's a good point.

[Rabea Allos]

Exactly.

That's why the army, even those who were at the bases, were not trained properly, because even then they were bribing so they'd just sit around and do nothing. They were not prepared.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Yes, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Hawn, sir, for seven minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all our witnesses for being here.

You've all talked about the necessity for military action but, obviously, not only military action.

Professor Legrenzi, you talked about the 50,000 ghost soldiers. I'm led to believe there are about 20,000 real, flesh-and-blood soldiers who are at a reasonable level and could be trained into a reasonable division with appropriate support.

Canada has a lot of experience in training foreign forces like that, in Afghanistan in particular. Do you think it's something that Canada should look at? I'm told by people who have done this kind of thing that with a training force of about 350 and in about six months, they could do a pretty good job of getting an Iraqi division of about 20,000 soldiers ready to take on a more meaningful role.

Do you have a comment on that?

[Matteo Legrenzi]

Nobody doubts the professionalism of Canadians who are involved in this process, but the problem is the will to fight.

We train, if not the ghost soldiers who are at home...we place a lot of taxpayers' money into training Iraqi forces. We were told that a specific weapons system needed years of training and it was taxpayers' money that went toward that training. Then we do have ISIS forces who are able to turn around those guns and use them against the Iraqi army within a week.

Nobody doubts their professionalism, but certainly before you put Canadians there, and before you invest resources, you have to make sure there is a will to fight on the part of these men. Even more importantly, that they do not then start to terrorize their own population as they often did in the areas that are now controlled by the Islamic State.

It was the Iraqi army that set up checkpoints around their population, probably to pay the general who had recruited them in the first place.

The professionalism of Canadian forces is beyond doubt, but we need to put them in a position to be effective.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Agreed.

Was part of the problem with the melting away of the Iraqi army that they were primarily Sunnis who were being asked to fight Sunnis under the leadership of a very weak and unpopular Shia president? Did that play any role at all?

[Matteo Legrenzi]

Well, this sectarianism is oftentimes overplayed. I would say that if you look at the economic incentives, the widespread corruption, and the fact that many of these people thought that their job in the army was a sinecure, you get much closer to the actual reasons for them to not pick up weapons and fight.

Even someone as jaded as I am, who has been looking at this for a long time, was very surprised to notice the fact that they didn't even bother to sabotage the equipment, so that equipment was then quickly turned around and utilized against the Iraqi army.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Tabler, I agree wholeheartedly with your comment that when you get people together, people won't change unless they have to change. People won't change unless they can be made to believe that it is in their national interest or in their personal interest to change.

We can say that about Putin in Russia. Until we convince him that it's in Russia's national interest to stop doing what they're doing in Ukraine, it won't happen.

This is obviously a loaded question that you can't answer quickly, but how do you convince people in that part of the world, the Middle East—Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and so on—that it is in their national and personal interest to knock it off?

[Andrew Tabler]

Well, it would depend on the process.

First of all, I would agree with Professor Legrenzi's statement. There's no sense in investing in something, unless the basis of it is sound, unless it makes sense. The problem with Iraq and Syria is that they don't make any political sense, and the responses of the governments oftentimes make less sense, not only overall by western standards, but by global standards as a whole. Corruption is certainly a big aspect of it, and I think that was raised in why these states are ineffective.

Getting to the point of your question, I think what has to happen is that we need to put in place, both in Iraq and in Syria, a process that really settles this and takes into account all of the communities inside both countries. We need a process that provides a basis of safety for them, and a basis of protecting their human rights, and also taking into account their political aspirations. As I said, in Iraq, it is slightly easier because you have a government in place; there's some flexibility in the composition of the government. They're susceptible to outside pressures, not only by Canada and the United States, but also by Iran, which is next door.

It's in Syria where the real problem still remains, and I think probably will remain for years because you do not have that transition of government there. No one else has ruled Syria but a member of the Assad family since 1970, longer than I've been alive.

It's there where we do not really see concessions from the government, and I think it's there that the international community is going to have to come up with a settlement that tries to put the pieces of Syria back together again, along with their neighbours in Iraq. Or, at a certain point in the future, and I think this is really only in a de facto sense, but in a de jure sense...we're going to need to think about the modalities of de facto partition of these countries. I don't advocate it as an end state; I think it would be better if they could come back together.

In the meantime, we're going to have to think about these countries as divided entities, as broken states, and we'll have to think about what to do in the short term. The only thing I know to do in the short term is to bring different parties together to see if you can hammer out arrangements that will at least lessen the violence. In order to do that, you will need political will on both sides in terms of the international community—and here I'm speaking between the United States and Russia—to force both sides to make real concessions. I'm not sure that each side is either willing or capable of doing so. We'll have to see what comes in the coming months, as more diplomatic attention is paid towards dealing with ISIL from the ground up.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Hawn.

We'll move over to Mr. Garneau, sir.

Seven minutes, please.