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During interviews conducted in the autonomous region’s capital, Erbil, and in two location at the front, five Kurdish Peshmerga generals and a slew of junior officers and foot soldiers praised the elite commandos from the Canadian Special Operations Regiment and Joint Task Force 2. This was not simply the Peshmerga being polite to a visitor. They stressed again and again how immensely grateful they were to Canada for the unique role CSOR and JTF2 have been playing in the war against ISIL.

An infantry general responsible for a stretch of the front near Kirkuk told me he was envious because the Canadians were deployed with a fellow general he had visited near Mosul. Another infantry general told me “the Canadians are among our most important guys.”

American and French advisers have been on the front lines from time to time, the Peshmerga told me. But the consensus was that Canada has been more willing to go deep into the field to help them than any other country.

The difference between Canada and its partners in this fight against a resourceful, particularly vicious foe, is in how Ottawa has defined its training and mentoring role with the Peshmerga. Like Britain, Australia and New Zealand, among others, Canada has offered a range of courses inside protected training bases on how to fight.

But as near as I can tell — and this is a world where operatives seldom confirm anything — Canada is the only nation in the U.S.-led coalition that has regularly sent teams of military spotters far forward to identify ISIL targets and the only country whose observers have used lasers to pinpoint those targets for coalition warplanes to destroy.