Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to join in this debate on extending our vital, military and humanitarian mission in order to help the innocent in Iraq and Syria, who are victims of this terrorist and genocidal organization, the so-called Islamic State, also known as Daesh or ISIL.
Let me be clear. Canada has always had a sense of moral obligation to act in concert with our allies when faced with grave threats to our security and to global security. We also believe in a moral obligation, wherever possible and prudent, to defend the innocent from the deprivations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, as is the case today in Iraq and eastern Syria.
Let us understand, first of all, the nature of the enemy, I would say the common enemy of humankind, in the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIS, or Daesh. It is hard for some, perhaps with the enlightened western paradigm, to grasp the nature of this organization, because it is profoundly irrational in its entire ideology, in its motivations, and in its actions. This is an organization that is motivated by a dystopian vision of imposing, through violence, a caliphate: the idea of a theocracy grounded in a particularly violent iteration of seventh century Sharia law.
This organization and its fellow travellers regard anyone who does not share their dystopian vision of a caliphate as a kafir, as an infidel, as an enemy, as someone who is marked for, at best, slavery, dhimmitude, or at worst, death, and often a particularly gruesome one.
This is an organization that, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and various independent human rights observers, is responsible for some unthinkable depravities. They are responsible for beheading children; for mass sexual slavery of girls as young as eight; and for targeting gay men by, in one instance that is recorded on film by them, throwing a gay man off of a tower, and when he did not die, stoning him to death.
This is an organization that has sought to erase from the face of the earth the small and vulnerable minority community of the Yazidis, an ancient religious and ethnic community. ISIL has sought to obliterate the ancient Assyrian Chaldean peoples of the Nineveh plains, who are the indigenous people of that region of Mesopotamia, whose ancestors have been there for thousands of years, and who, for the better part of 1,700 years, have observed the Christian faith but for even longer have spoken their own ancient tongue, Chaldean and Aramaic.
ISIL is an organization that has quite literally no regard for the sanctity of human life, that regards girls and women as property rather than people, that regards minorities not as people worthy of protection and respect but rather of obliteration and elimination.
Let me share with members one specific example of its barbarity that was related to me by Archbishop Louis Sako, the leader of the Chaldean Iraqi church. He told me that after ISIL invaded Mosul, the second-largest city of Iraq, and issued a fatwa of death or conversion or dhimmitude for the Christians of Mosul, they fled with their possessions, the rest of which were all taken by ISIL. However, a handful of infirm, handicapped, elderly Christians were left behind in hospitals. They could not move, as they did not have relatives.
The Daesh, ISIL, went into these hospitals and after the allotted 48 hours had passed for the fatwa, they approached these infirmed handicapped elderly Christians in their hospital beds and told them that if they did not convert on the spot, they would be killed, they would be beheaded in their hospital beds. Let there be no doubt about the kind of barbarism, the kind of evil, with which we are dealing.
In light of this, I believe it is incumbent upon us to act for humanitarian reasons. I believe doing so is consistent with the principle of the responsibility to protect. Admittedly, the actual incarnation of that doctrine at the United Nations requires the approval of Vladimir Putin and the Chinese politburo. However, we ought not to encumber Canadian policy with the approval of Vladimir Putin. We should be able to act independently to prevent genocide, to prevent yet more victims from being claimed.
We also have a national security imperative to do so because, as members will know, ISIS has explicitly declared war on Canada, has called on its supporters to kill Canadians wherever they find them. It is rather evident that the two terror attacks on Canadian soil that took Patrice Vincent and Nathan Cirillo in October of last year were at least inspired by the barbarism of ISIL.
Had the world not begun to act, had the coalition of some 24 countries involved in the military combat against ISIL in Iraq and Syria not begun last September and October, had the other 40 allied countries supporting non-military action against ISIL not done so, had these things not occurred, it is clear that ISIL would have continued to gain more territory in Iraq, more resources, more oil fields, more wealth, more armaments and, most worrying, more legitimacy in the eyes of those who are susceptible to radicalization.
It is one of the threats to Canada. More than 100 Canadians have gone to Syria and Iraq to join this terrorist organization. Obviously, when they return to Canada, they pose a threat to our security. This is also the case in almost every developed country.
We have to show those individuals who are likely to be radicalized and recruited by the group known as the Islamic State that it is not the champion of a caliphate but rather a crazed organization.
That is why the Government of Canada has committed the Royal Canadian Air Force, with six CF-18s, one Polaris aerial refuelling aircraft and two CP-140 modernized Aurora aircraft, to join the allied air combat mission against ISIL targets. It is also why we have committed 69 special operations forces members to an advise, assist and training mission with the Kurdish peshmerga near Erbil in northern Iraq. I am pleased to report that, thanks in part to the brilliant work of our men and women in uniform and our allies, we have moved ISIS from being on the offence of gaining new territory last summer and fall to being on the defence of losing territory now.
We now note ISIL moving some of its heavy equipment that has not yet been struck by allied aerial bombardments from Iraq back into Syria. We hope that, with the assistance of allied air support, Iraqi security forces will in due course launch an effective ground combat counteroffensive in which we will not participate on the ground but which we will support from the air.
All of this indicates that in due course the centre of gravity of the fight against ISIL is likely to move westward into eastern Syria, which is the centre of its operations. Its capital is located in Raqqa in central east Syria. This is an area that for all intents and purposes the brutal Syrian regime has ceded sovereignty over to ISIL.
We therefore believe, pursuant to legal advice received from our own Judge Advocate General and the position taken by President Obama's administration, that we have every legal prerogative to pursue the ISIL targets in eastern Syria, in part at the invitation of the government of Iraq under article 51 of the United Nations Charter to give practical expression to the collective right of self-defence.
I believe this modest expansion of the mission and the one year horizon proposed in the motion provides precisely the kinds of rules of engagement that our military need to play a meaningful role in this international coalition.
We ought not to expect others, like the Netherlands or Australia, France or Britain or our Arab partners, to do all of the difficult heavy lifting. This is a responsible democracy. Our country is a champion of human dignity and freedom. We must act now, as we always have though our history, to defend those values and indeed our own interests.