Courtesy of DND Canadian special forces are shown in this photo helping Kurdish troops in northern Iraq. Courtesy of DND
National Post/Ottawa Citizen: Canadian special forces on the front lines with Kurds aiming to retake Iraqi city from ISIL, U.S. says
U.S. military officers say that Canadian special forces are on the front lines of a new offensive in Iraq to retake villages from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant east of Mosul.
The coalition troops were spotted with Kurdish forces as they prepared for battle on Sunday.
As many as 5,500 Kurdish troops are attempting to seize villages located about 20 km east of Mosul. Heavy fighting was reported Sunday.
Soldiers with the Canadian Special Operations Regiment from CFB Petawawa in the Ottawa Valley are in northern Iraq to train and advise the Kurds.
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Update: U.S.-led coalition troops seen near front line in new Iraq offensive (Reuters)
WNU Editor: Canadian forces are there to train and advise the Kurds .... not to engage with ISIS forces. Hmmm .... apparently the mandate has changed and no one has bothered to tell the Canadian public that it has changed.
"No one has bothered to tell the Canadian public" because the CF don't take their direction from the Canadian people any more than the Government of Canada does.
ReplyDeleteObviously, Sun Tzu did not cover Trotsky and human stupidity.
ReplyDeleteI would think that our boys would learn more about fighting from the Kurds.
ReplyDeleteThe Kurds are among the best fighters on earth. Our boys, in my case meaning American, could learn much from them as well. If there ever was a hopeless cause worth fighting for, it'd probably be the Kurdish one.
ReplyDeleteSince the cause is a hopeless one, the Kurds aren't going to fight along side us if/when we are invaded, there's little we can do except at the margins, and there's others who can hurt us should we refuse to cooperate with them whereas the Kurds cannot it'd be unethical to force someone to fight alongside them who didn't want to.
With that said given the Kurdish situation in the early 1990s I doubt anyone would have expected them to still be standing today and they have had a number of little victories of late. As has been pointed out elsewhere on this site, little victories add up.