Thank you to our witnesses for their superb overviews. Each of you kind of complemented one another, as if you had coordinated this. The component parts that you are each looking at, be it understanding the history, understanding what the appeal is, and understanding what the messaging is and how ISIL or Daesh has manipulated all of that, is incredibly important to the work we're doing. Just to let you know, as a committee we're looking at making recommendations to government to better understand what we can best offer to the coalition of around 60 countries dealing with this.
I want to thank particularly the Stimson Center for the work you have been doing. I was involved tangentially with the work you did in 2009, when you had identified the issues that we're all waking up to now. As we heard from our last witness, the emptying out of minority groups has been ongoing and continues.
I want to start with either of our guests from the Stimson Center.
Just around policy options, I really appreciate and we've heard from other witnesses that we can't impose a solution, be it in northern Iraq or Iraq, but we obviously need to do what we can to help. We've had a lot of experiences as a country on governance issues; the whole framework and flexibility frankly of federalism is something that's interesting for me, at least to see how that can be an offer or something we can help with.
Also, I think the point made on education is extremely important. As we've heard, when you get a siloed view of the world through education it really foments and allows for the kinds of recruitment that we've seen.
I'd just like to hear from our friends at the Stimson Center, what are some of the policy prescriptions you can see coming from a Canadian perspective that you think would be important, both in the short and medium terms and in the long term, in dealing with that ongoing issue in Iraq? To focus on Iraq, when it comes to governance, we've seen the new government in, and hopefully this will hold the revenue-sharing agreement in Kirkuk on oil with the Kurds and Baghdad that was announced recently.
What are some of the things you think we can concretely help with and support? That would be most helpful for us.