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Since the announcement by Justin Trudeau that Canada would be withdrawing its CF-18s from the coalition bombing campaign, there has been an incessant media drumbeat demanding that he rethink this decision. The demand only intensified after the Paris attacks, as if the decision to change Canada’s role in the coalition was based on a misunderstanding of the threat and not on a desire to be more effective.

The federal government can be rightly castigated for not articulating more forcefully its reasons for wanting to adjust the role. But this does not excuse the failure of the Canadian media to consider the actual effect on the ground of the bombing campaign.

The so-called coalition “victories,” in which cities such as Kobane and Sinjar in Syria, and Ramadi in Iraq, are “liberated” with the help of massive air strikes, have resulted in the destruction of these cities. They are reduced to rubble, leaving nothing to house or sustain returning populations. Yet the American secretary of defence has made clear that this is his plan for cities such as Raqqa in Syria and Mosul and Fallujah in Iraq. If this plan is carried out, then the almost certain result will be far fewer habitable cities and far greater numbers of displaced, destitute populations.

But what about Canada’s intention to increase its training of local Iraqi forces? Surely that is another step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the devil is in the detail. Training the Peshmerga, which Canada is already doing, puts us in the position of helping fighters whose goal is not to liberate Iraq from ISIL but to create an independent Kurdistan. Particularly troubling are credible allegations from Amnesty International that Kurdish forces are engaged in “ethnic cleansing” of areas they retake from ISIL.