Yes. As I indicated in my opening statement, Chair, the Royal Canadian Air Force, as of last week, has flown over 1,000 sorties altogether. I understand that the Hornets have struck just over 100 ISIS targets. Typically, they do so in firing two munitions at each target, so I believe we've expended over 200 munitions.
I mentioned the volume of aviation fuel that has been delivered through aerial refuelling through our Polaris aircraft, and our modernized Auroras, as I was briefed when I was in the region, have been regarded as an extremely effective platform for aerial reconnaissance, which has been very rich in providing targeting information to coalition headquarters.
I could also inform the committee.... Mr. Harris, understandably, I think, for partisan political reasons, mischaracterized our visit to Erbil as a “stunt”. In fact, I think it is hugely important to actually get on the ground and to get a tactile sense of the context of what's really happening.
As for what we could see in talking to our relatively junior officers of the SOF, the forces who are actually doing the training, they were able to describe to us the kinds of tactics that they have been able to transfer to the peshmerga, the kinds of tactics that they perfected during their own operations, their Canadian operations in Afghanistan. They told us that the peshmerga who they've been dealing with are eager to learn and are very quick to pick up on the principles of the training they have received. We would infer, from the relative success of the peshmerga both defensively and offensively against ISIS in that region, that the training has been effective.
One might even go a step further and infer that it has been more effective than some of the conventional military training provided to Iraqi army units in southern Iraq, which have been, shall we say, less effective in maintaining their territory.