Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes/Files NEW YORK – Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he is considering increasing Canada’s direct military involvement in the fight against the Islamic State terror army in Iraq.
“We haven’t ruled out anything,” Harper said Wednesday in response to a question about whether he would be make a direct military contribution. “We are wanting to see this be successful and we want to be supportive as best we can.”
Harper said that the United States government in the last couple of days requested in a official letter that Canada expand its military involvement. He would not reveal exactly what kind of military support the U.S. has requested. Canada currently has 69 military advisers in Iraq and has been transporting ammunition and arms and humanitarian aid to that country.
“The United States just recently has asked for some additional contribution and we are weighing our response to that,” Harper told more than 300 people at a Q&A session at Goldman Sachs headquarters.
He noted that Canada has the second largest force of military advisers after the U.S. in Iraq.
“i think all the elements that need to be done are there,” he said. “Obviously they need to be built on. We do need to make sure first and foremost the terror entities cannot operate in the open on bases. We need to push them to the fringe and make their base of organization and logistical organization very difficult. A lot of that can be done from the air.”
“I do not believe that we can watch a terrorist caliphate, essentially what has become a quasi state establish a regime of mayhem over an entire region,” he said.
He said, however, he opposes putting fighting troops on the ground. If regional forces are unable to defend their own countries and to drive out the Islamic State (also known as ISIL or ISIS) and hold their ground, then there is little reason to believe that western forces could do it, he said.
“It would be very hard for us to secure an area if the local population can’t secure it themselves,” he said.
He continued that he would like to see more done in the Islamic world “to really fight the spread of the terrorist ideology.”
“It’s nothing more than a fringe view, but it’s a fringe view that often is not confronted” by Middle East countries, he said.
Later in the afternoon, Harper delivered a short speech to the United Nations Security Council on the issue of foreign terrorist fighters. He said that the growing number of foreign fighters joining the Islamic State terrorist army poses the risk that they ultimately will bring their battle to the streets of their native countries as part of a global war.
To this end, he said, “it is essential to support the effort of prevention to fight violent extremism.”
He noted that Canada’s security and intelligence agencies “work well and work most particularly well with our Muslim communities in identifying terrorist threats.”
He added that Canada has made it a crime for Canadians to join terrorist groups in foreign countries and has passed laws allowing Canada to revoke their passports.
He said Canada also is attempting to cut off funds to terrorist groups.
Harper was asked earlier at Goldman Sacks about the problem of young people taking up a terrorist cause. “It’s a phenomenon we don’t fully understand, what causes a Korean kid in London to become an Islamic terrorist,” he said.
He added, however, that many of the foreign fighters have only a “tangential” connection to Islam.
“A surprising number of these people have no background in Islam whatsoever,” he said. “They are individuals who for whatever reason drift to these kind of causes. Even in people who have backgrounds in Islam, they are often people who in fact are not participants in mosques or churches. They are off on kind of a radical, political fringe and in fact I think our security and intelligence people will tell you that in our country good relations with our Muslim people has actually really helped to identify a lot of these threats before they have become more serious.”
wmarsden@postmedia.com
No comments:
Post a Comment