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ANALYSIS

IRBIL, Iraq — Moments after climbing into a bunker manned by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird looked behind him and gestured, saying, “Paul and Marc, come on.”

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Seconds later, amid the sandbags, Kurdish fighters and media cameras, he was shoulder to shoulder with two of his toughest political opponents — Paul Dewar and Marc Garneau, the foreign affairs critics for the NDP and Liberals.

Together, they gazed out at a blip on the horizon, about 150 fighters from the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, hunkered down a kilometre away across the desolate northern Iraqi plain.

The two opposition MPs joined Baird this week on his two-day, 26-hour trip to Iraq. Throughout their frenzied dash through the palaces and political offices of Baghdad and Irbil, the heavily armed checkpoints, the sun-baked refugees camps as well as this front-line bunker, the often-combative foreign affairs minister ensured that Dewar and Garneau were literally at his side.