Did Canadian exchange officers participate in U.S. Iran strike planning? DND says no, but questions linger
A former senior Canadian general says it’s highly likely some Canadian military members, on exchange with the United States, would have been involved at some level in the planning and co-ordination of air strikes on Iran — something the Department of National Defence disputes.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has said he supports U.S. actions to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. On Saturday, speaking in Mumbai during his four-day visit to India, he said Canada as a country is not participating militarily and that the federal government was “not party to the military buildup or planning.”
His statement, however, did not specifically address the fate of exchange officers currently serving with the U.S. military.
The Department of National Defence website shows that as many as 18 military personnel with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are attached to Operation Foundation, working at the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and at the Combined Aerospace Operations Center (CAOC) at Al Udeid airbase in Qatar.
Their job, according to DND, is to “provide a link between the headquarters and the CAF” and those serving at CAOC have responsibility for “aerospace control units.”
In a late Sunday statement, DND said Canadian military members had “no involvement in the United States’ Operation Epic Fury, nor were any CAF members involved in its planning.”
Exchange officers would have had to have been ordered to not engage
The Defence Department initially did not answer questions about the status of those personnel when they first were posed by CBC News on Saturday. An official said on Sunday that the department was having email trouble.
The question of whether the exchange officers were asked to step back or take another role — or were excluded from the U.S. portion of the campaign planning — has yet to be answered by the Defence Department.
Ordering them to take a step back would have had to be a political decision.
Retired major-general Denis Thompson, who served as a Canadian task force commander during the Afghan war and led a multinational peacekeeping force in the Sinai, said it is a long-standing policy to have Canadian service members participate in exchanges with the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).
“Unless the Canadian government said, ‘No, you cannot be directly engaged in this conflict,’ then … typically, when we attach officers to another military and they go to war and the prime minister endorses this attack, then it’s quite likely that they’re actively engaged in the targeting process,” Thompson told CBC News.
He said Canada has members of three branches of the military — army, navy and air force —attached to CENTCOM and “we specifically have staff officers inside what’s known as the Combined Aerospace Operations Center … so, they are going to be directly involved in targeting.”
A combination of satellite images from Jan. 17, left, and Feb. 1, right, shows an increase in the number of aircraft at the Al Udeid airbase, near Doha, Qatar. (Handout/Planet Labs PBC/Reuters)
Hundreds of strikes in first hours of attack
This isn’t the first time Canada has faced this kind of dilemma. While the government of former prime minister Jean Chrétien chose not to participate in the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq, it did allow more than 100 exchange officers serving with American and British forces to remain in place and take part in deployments and operations.
American and Israeli warplanes have been waging the air campaign since early Saturday and, according to data from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the combined forces carried out nearly 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours.
According to a U.S. official speaking to Fox News, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) claimed to have struck 500 targets alone inside of Iran. The attacks took place across 17 provinces in the country.
A screengrab from a video released by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) shows a missile being fired from an unknown location. The image was released Feb. 28 and obtained from social media. (CENTCOM/Reuters)
In its daily briefing late Saturday, ISW pointed to an Axios report where a senior U.S. official was quoted as saying American strikes are focused on Iran’s missile program and missile launchers while Israeli strikes are focused on senior Iranian officials and the missile program.
A massive explosion was reported early Sunday in Tehran as the Israeli military confirmed it had resumed bombing the Iranian capital.
Canada condemns retaliation on Gulf states
The attack came one day after the U.S. and Israel reported they had killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in an air strike.
Iranian state television and the state-run IRNA news agency confirmed the death of the 86-year-old early Sunday. U.S. President Donald Trump had announced his death hours earlier.
Iran has fired missiles at several neighbouring Arab Gulf states, causing waves of explosions and sending people rushing for cover. Those attacks have potentially far-reaching consequences.
Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, all of which have a U.S. military presence, reported intercepting Iranian missiles after Tehran vowed retaliation for the American-Israeli campaign.
“Canada stands with the Iranian people,” said Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand. “We strongly condemn the attacks of the Iranian regime against our partners in the Middle East. These attacks must stop.”
Damage to a building in Manama, Bahrain, hit by an Iranian drone attack launched in the wake of the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran. (Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters)
Thompson said a lot of the longer-range missiles Iran might use against Israel “have been degraded as a result of the past campaigns and the current campaign.”
It does, however, have a bigger stock of short-range ballistic missiles — perhaps hundreds — and those are the kind Tehran can fire at its neighbours.
“They’re going to have a good deal of a problem trying to take out all of those short-range ballistic missiles,” Thompson said. “You could have a wider war across the Middle East.”
He also pointed to reports that the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned the Trump administration that it could run low on munitions.
“One of the risks is they’re going to burn through a lot of their high-value defensive measures, like the Patriot missile batteries,” said Thompson.
That, he said, could have knock-on effect for Ukraine.
“That’s where they’re needed more. They’re needed in Ukraine to defend the Ukrainian people,” Thompson said. “If this war had not happened, then there would be an ability to shift more interceptors into Ukraine and help them in their conflict against Russia.”
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