Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here this evening for this debate and to speak on behalf of a government that is committed in full across these benches and the country to doing what is necessary to support the people of Iraq. It is a government that is committed to doing what is necessary to stop, contain and, if possible, eliminate this scourge of terrorism from a proud region and a world that is many decades into its history of considering terrorism in various forms of Islamic extremism a top threat to peace and stability not just in Iraq but in many countries, a world that deserves better. It is a world that deserves to say that for once we are working together, not just Canada with its allies but with partners across the Middle East and around the world, to ensure that terrorism will never again usurp state authority, take over, replace the authority of a state. It did that in Afghanistan in the 1990s and it has been threatening to do it in Iraq in recent days and weeks.
It was with pleasure that I listened to the member for Westmount—Ville-Marie who endorsed the government's actions and difficult decision to support the military strategy being pursued under the leadership of the United States, but with the participation of dozens of countries. It was with some consternation that we were subjected to the partisan tirade from the member of Parliament for Vancouver Quadra. She did not say much about Iraq, but made a variety of unsubstantiated allegations and comparisons that I will not dwell on because these issues are too important.
For the member for St. John's East, the legal authority they are under is very clear. We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. We are there at the invitation of the Kurdish regional government. We are there with the strong support of the Iraqi people, who fear this menace as much as we do. This time in Iraq, it is a situation that very much mirrors the invitation and welcome that Canadian Forces received in Afghanistan in 2001, 2002 and then again on a larger scale in 2003 when faced with similar circumstances.
Let us look briefly at the roots of this terrorism that is causing us disquiet when we watch our television screens, which is causing deep concern to the Iraqi people and which is costing lives. In Syria, it has cost almost 200,000 lives over the past three years. In Iraq, the numbers are growing to those kinds of proportions because of the presence of this absolutely perfidious terrorist entity.
In the 1980s, al Qaeda, founded in Pakistan and operating in Afghanistan, brought part of this ideology to the fore. Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, neither of them are with us today, were inspired by the teachings of Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, someone who championed the idea that states were not necessary for Islam, in his perverted understanding of it, to be practised and, when necessary, enforced in Pakistan, Afghanistan and countries of the Arab world.
Before it is too late, Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the outstanding member of Parliament for Calgary East, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who will have much more substantive comments to add.
We know that al Qaeda almost consumed the destiny of an entire nation, thanks to the Taliban, its affiliate, ally and franchise, that ran Afghanistan for five years. This ideology of al Qaeda also flourished in the Chechen war and in other smaller conflicts in the Middle East over the past 20 years.
Then in Iraq in 2003, following a U.S. invasion, following the liquidation of the Baathist state, following the dismissal of Iraq's army and police, we in Afghanistan saw a huge phenomenon of hardened terrorist fighters, some Afghani, some Pakistani, many from dozens of other countries around the world, literally going to Iraq to fight the United States, Shiites and moderates of all kinds. They have been there ever since, building on that legacy, to the point where in Syria, after 2011, after the U.S. had succeeded in restoring state authority through most of Iraq found a new state teetering on the brink of collapse, established new spaces in which to train, build and base themselves to continue the fight against President Assad and to then resume it across the border in Iraq.
We find ourselves today with major two countries, Syria and Iraq, countries facing a common threat from a terrorist organization that is now fighting on a scale that we have not seen before. I do not think there was ever a time in Afghanistan when 20,000 to 25,000 foreign fighters with this kind of training and this kind of fire power were arrayed against the Afghan state. They certainly were not ever a threat to two states at once.
We are in a very worrying predicament. We are in a situation that poses a major threat to international peace and security. Let us remember the complicity of certain other states in allowing things to go this far. There was a chance last year, as the parliamentary secretary and the Minister of Foreign Affairs well know, to do more in Syria to counter these menaces.
Vladimir Putin decided that this was not a good idea and that it was better to ensure that the suffering of the Syrian people, and later the Iraqi people, would mount to new heights, and to prevent the international community from coming together to take decisive action to prevent this terrorist menace from growing to the scale that we now see.
This is not just an organization that represents a danger to us all. It is an ideology. They do not want to just replace the Syrian and Iraqi states; they want to replace states all the way from South Asia to Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. This is their dream, this is their ideology and this is our nightmare. It is combined with terrorist capacity, not just small arms and fast trucks, but a willingness to indoctrinate young people to literally give up their own lives to take lives from innocent civilians, suicide bombers.
There is the use of weapons of mass destruction, if they can get their hands on them. We have seen that. We have seen efforts by al Qaeda, by groups inspired by it, to try to get hold of chemical weapons and dirty bombs. Thank goodness they have not done so to date.
We also see this ideology of takfirism, something that is absolutely foreign and antithetical to the true values of Islam, which is the doctrine embraced by the so-called Islamic state in Iraq, that it is the right of Muslims, in their dark vision, to take the lives of either Muslims who do not share that vision or of non-Muslims. It is an arbitrary decision.
We have seen it practised time and again, recently, not just in executions but in the murders of Yazidis and religious minorities, and the massacres of populations across Iraq.
That is why we are proud to be taking action. We are proud to have deployed the Canadian Forces to advise and assist. We are proud to be delivering relief supplies from a stockpile Canada had the foresight to create in the UAE. We are proud to be a leading contributor already to humanitarian assistance, to have been there on the ground, present in Kurdistan, with our Minister of Foreign Affairs and members of the opposition to see the gravity of the situation first hand, and to provide security programs, as well as to assist in the delivery of military equipment from Albania and other countries.
Our goal is to prevent and deter terrorism worldwide. Our goal is to prevent Canadians from being involved more than they already are. The Combating Terrorism Act has done that. The new citizenship act has done that.
Our action in the region will do more than any of our previous efforts to finally start to build the coalition, the capacity and the international will to ensure that this terrorist threat does not continue to grow and is ultimately brought to yield.
