Mr. Speaker, just on that last comment, I have to correct the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence. Our Armed Forces know that they got the equipment they needed when they needed it, and that last comment was completely out of line.
I am rising on a question that I raised back on April 11 when General Jonathan Vance, our chief of the defence staff, said that the battle against ISIS has no end in sight. He went on to say that Canadians should prepare for more Canadian Armed Forces casualties with the expansion of the mission on the ground in Iraq.
I questioned the Minister of National Defence on whether or not the withdrawal of our CF-18s was a mistake, since they had already played such a significant role in protecting Canadian special operations forces on the ground during battle and in actually eliminating the jihadi genocidal death cult that we call ISIS.
I want to remind the House, and Canadians who are watching, that Falah Mustafa Bakir, who is the foreign affairs minister for the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, said in reference to Canada that:
We would like to tell them that the air strikes have been effective, they have helped us a great deal. They have helped save lives. They have helped to destroy the enemy....
And if it were for us [to decide], we request that to continue.
Therefore, they knew that the CF-18s provided much-needed support to the Kurdish peshmerga on the ground and the Canadian special operations forces who were there. That was again reiterated last fall by Jabar Yawar, who is the chief of staff for the Kurdish Regional Government and the peshmerga ministry. He said, “It is a bad news for us. Canada was a major partner in the coalition and it was a great help to Kurdistan”.
Unfortunately, we saw the air strikes quit and the risk factor to the Canadian Armed Forces increase with the increased number of trainers that are now on the ground.
I want to go over what happened after we announced that we were pulling out the CF-18s.
On February 8, the Government of Canada announced that the CF-18s were coming home. On February 22, they were withdrawn. In anticipation of that, on January 29, the Dutch government decided to pick up the heavy load and carry what Canada was sloughing off. The Dutch put six of their F-16 fighter jets into the air campaign and expanded it so that it also covered Syria as our CF-18 jets had been doing. Then, on April 21, Denmark, another very dependable coalition partner, added in seven of their F-16s to go into Syria and Iraq to cover the shortfall left by Canada pulling out our squadron of CF-18s.
The air strikes are still having a major impact. The governor of Kirkuk is now saying, on the attack that is coming up on Fallujah and taking back ground in Mosul, that if they do not have air strikes, they probably will not be able to take the city. He is saying that the Kurdish peshmerga and special operation forces from Canada and coalition partners have to have it.
The air strikes, just last week, reported on Iraqi TV that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is the leader of ISIS, was actually wounded in an air strike in northern Iraq. Therefore, the air strikes are having an impact and we should be doing everything we can to support our troops on the ground and to support our coalition partners. Rather than backing off the combat mission, we should be more engaged.