From the ground up, if you will, the scope has not changed. The essential fabric of the mandate is absolutely as it was, and that is to stabilize the region, to improve security, to assist with other partners in inclusive governance and to isolate and counter the VEO threat. From an Operation Inherent Resolve perspective, again it's unchanged: degrade Daesh, enable Government of Iraq security and governance—OIR does the same for Syrian security and governance—and finally, to provide for partner nation defence.
There has been no change to the core mandate. Of course, all of the activities were suspended immediately after the strike, because we were very uncertain of what was happening on the ground. I implemented a full stop. We call it “get in the squat”. It's a “hunker down, look out to make sure you're not going to be attacked and defend yourself” sort of thing. In the days that immediately followed, we started repositioning non-essential people out of Iraq into Kuwait to minimize the footprint of how many people were in certain locations if other missiles were going to be launched. I can say that staying in the squat only lasted for a number of days for the Lebanon and Jordan missions, and then I allowed them to resume their core training. In Iraq, we remained in that posture. At the end of January, the chief of the defence staff for Iraq sent a letter to the coalition saying they were prepared to have us resume counter-Daesh operations.
I would hasten to add that, while we were not helping the Iraqis, they were prosecuting certain counter-Daesh operations alone, which is in itself a metric for some success that we should all be reminded of.
There has been limited work that has recommenced in the counter-Daesh space since the end of January, but we are still not in the space where we have recommenced core training and capacity building. That remains suspended for the time being.