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“The mission is complex, as you can imagine, with people all over the place,” Bowes said. “What we have to go through is a very human process of identifying the people and matching them to the positions and then giving themselves sufficient time to prepare themselves professionally with pre-deployment training.”

As well as weapons and other specific military training, those troops selected for what the defence department calls Operation Impact would undergo cultural training specific to their assignments with the Iraqi Kurds or Iraqi Arabs.

“Be mindful that ours is a small mission,” that should not be compared with the much larger combat operation that Canada undertook in Kandahar, Bowes said, adding that not only the military was involved in Iraq but there were “significant whole-of-government initiatives underway in Ottawa to support the mission.”

Bowes was upbeat about the somewhat expanded ground duties that Canada was taking on in Iraq.

“No fears and nothing that keeps me awake,” Bowes said. “What I think about a lot is whether I am doing everything I can to enable the chief (Gen. Jon Vance) and other leaders to ensure that our (political) leadership in this country understands the environment in which we have deployed personnel.”

The general’s mornings began early, reading reports from international news organizations such as Al-Jazeera before attending classified briefings with his staff who monitor everything from volcanoes to terrorist attacks and conflicts and potential conflicts worldwide, especially in eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“You can’t just look at northern Iraq, or Baghdad or Kuwait in isolation,” he said. “You have to be able to look at the region. You have to be able to monitor what is going on around it and understand how things can shift. On the political level this is an extraordinarily complex part of the world.”