By Scott Taylor

Earlier this month the Toronto Star published an exposé complete with graphic photographs depicting horrific torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. What made the story and images so shocking was that this barbarism was not the handiwork of Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL) evildoers, but rather that those atrocities were blatantly perpetrated by the Iraqi Emergency Response Division (ERD).

The ERD is considered to be an elite counter-terrorism unit under the command of the Iraqi government’s Ministry of the Interior. The ERD has been a critical factor in the allied effort to recapture the city of Mosul from Daesh.

Canadian Special Operations Forces Command soldiers are working closely with Kurdish militia in that same vicious struggle to retake Mosul. While Canadians are not directly in support of the ERD, the soldiers in this elite unit are very much Canada’s close allies in a common struggle.

That is why the images of the ERD’s torture victims is so disturbing. The photos were taken by Ali Arkady, a photographer embedded with the ERD troops who seemingly had no qualms about allowing themselves to be filmed putting knives to prisoners heads, pressing fingers into eye sockets, or beating trussed up captives suspended from the ceiling.

Even more bizarrely, the ERD soldiers actually provided Arkady with a video depicting the execution of a terrified captive. In other words, there is no shame or guilt associated with their ruthless brutality; these guys are happy to have their violent exploits broadcasted for all to see.

Last week, General Jonathan Vance, Canada’s chief of defence staff, reacted to the torture revelations in an interview with the Toronto Star. “It doesn’t even fall into the category of understandable. In fact it mirrors what Daesh is doing, and you lose if you don’t maintain the moral high ground in this kind of war,” Vance said.

Vance also conceded that Canadians might question why Canada’s military is involved in a conflict wherein our allies are committing the exact same atrocities as those evildoers we are fighting against.

However, instead of questioning Canada’s role, Vance saw the ERD’s brutal behaviour as further proof as to why Canada should stay in Iraq. “They’re horrible. They need training, advice, and assistance,” he said.

To his credit, Vance apparently gets the fact that the ceaseless cycle of violence in Iraq’s interfactional conflict will continue unabated as long as reciprocal revenge is waged.

What Vance does not understand is that this level of barbarity is not going to be stopped by a few more lessons in a classroom, taught by good old Canadian combat soldiers with a firm grasp of the Geneva Convention. We do not have a training plan

that stresses the fact that prisoners are not to be beheaded, eye-gauged, or chained to the ceiling for days at a time. Some things we tend to simply take as a given.

Another problem with Vance’s assertion that training and assistance could turn the ERD around is the fact that they are not some “ragtag militia” as he asserted to the Star. The ERD are among the best-trained and motivated units available to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad.

When Daesh first rolled out of Syria and captured a vast swath of Iraq in 2014, the U.S.-trained and -equipped Iraqi army collapsed without much of a fight. Tens of thousands of soldiers defected en masse, leaving their weapon arsenals and vehicle fleets at the disposal of Daesh fighters.

The only thing that prevented Daesh from seizing Baghdad was a desperate call-out for volunteer Shia militias to stem the Sunni Muslim fanatical Daesh.

Those same Shia militias are still in the fight against Daesh and, therefore, are also ostensibly Canada’s allies in this fight. Unlike the Iraqi government’s ERD unit, these Shia militias are truly ill-disciplined and ragtag.

They are also fighting for purely factional-based revenge against Daesh’s Sunni supporters.

If a photographer embedded with an elite Iraqi government unit can uncover rampant occurrences of torture and execution, one can only imagine what sort of revenge abuse is being meted out by Canada’s even more notorious allies — the Shia militia.

Vance was right in his first assessment of the torture revelations: Canadians should seriously question why we are taking sides in this barbaric bloodletting.

By Scott Taylor

For those closely following the battle to defeat Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL), it has become evident that there is presently a lull in the allied offensive to recapture Mosul.

Although very little news is reported about specific Canadian military involvement in this battle, we do have a couple of hundred special forces operatives assisting Kurdish militia and, from photos that occasionally pop up on the internet, our Canadian commandos are right in the thick of the fight.

An estimated 100,000 allied ground troops have been besieging Mosul since October 16 and, to date, they have managed to capture only the eastern half of the city. Some 3,500 Daesh fanatics remain, bunkered down in the western side of Mosul, just across the Tigris River.

While the battle to retake Iraq’s second largest city from Daesh evildoers is taking longer than anyone had predicted, the overwhelming superiority of the allied force combined with the U.S.-led aerial armada flying overhead means that the eventual defeat of Daesh is not in doubt. It was never a case of will Daesh be defeated, but rather when.

With that being the case, I read with some surprise last week a media report that the U.S.-led coalition was starting to organize, recruit and train an Iraqi police force to secure the Mosul area after Daesh is eliminated.

The Associated Press story described the scene at a Spanish army training centre for Iraqi police recruits: “The young men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, have had no previous training or experience. Many carried dilapidated Kalashnikov-style rifles, slung over their shoulders with rope or rubber-coated wire.” A Spanish army trainer told the reporter, “We start our program at a very basic level. When [recruits] arrive, they don’t have any skills.”

The Spanish army program is designed to spit out these ragtag recruits into a professional police force in just a five-week training course. Angel Castilla, the brigadier-general in charge of the Spanish training mission, admitted that this amount of training was inadequate, but blamed the “condensed timetable” under which he was obliged to produce a police force.

So the U.S.-led coalition knows that a professional police force is essential for ensuring long-term security in Mosul once Daesh is defeated, and their own commanders know that five weeks is about two years short of the timeframe necessary to train a professional policeman … yet they proceed with the program.

Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Has nothing been learned from the mistakes made previously in Afghanistan and Iraq?

If we are only prepared to invest five weeks of training into an Iraqi policeman, we are going to produce a gaggle of armed thugs who are woefully ignorant of the laws they are entrusted to enforce.

This problem was magnified in Afghanistan, where the vast majority of police recruits were illiterate teenagers. They could fire a weapon, apply handcuffs and march somewhat in step. But as they could not read textbooks or blackboards, Afghan recruits only received two weeks of training before getting their badges. Most could not read an identity card let alone actually solve a real crime.

However, they did understand that they had authority provided by their badges, and also by their weapons. This hastily trained and negligibly supervised force soon became the most hated faction in Afghanistan. Police stations were often attacked — not by insurgents but by enraged citizens, tired of being abused at the hands of the police force that NATO trained and equipped.

We would never put a policeman on a North American or European street with just two to five weeks of training. We also do not use our soldiers to train our police. Those are two very separate and unique professions. Yet that is exactly what Canadian soldiers were tasked to do in Afghanistan for years.

If the U.S.-led coalition is serious about securing Mosul, or any other sector of Iraq, then it needs to invest the proper resources and time to build an actual police force. We don’t need another mob of untrained, demoralized cannon fodder in uniform.