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We rushed through the front doors into the main lobby, where a tired-looking middle-aged man in a white coat waved us towards a stairwell offhandedly, as though such occurrences were routine, and it were no big deal for Western journalists to barge into his desperately under-equipped hospital as it coped with a mass-casualty bombing. Up we went to the burn ward.

There they lay, three survivors, every inch of their bodies except the whites of their eyes charred black with third-degree burns. They rested on filthy cots, too agonized to make a sound, their arms outstretched as though frozen in place by the burning. I could see they were alive, because they blinked. The smell of their burned flesh filled the room and the hallway outside. Their relatives milled nearby, some weeping, others smoking. We got the details we needed and quickly left.

The story I wrote that night was trimmed for length and buried in the next day’s back pages

I could not stop thinking, as we raced back towards KAF, that someone had done this to these boys deliberately — had conceived, planned and executed it with such ferocity and zealotry that they were happy to die themselves in the act. The story I wrote that night was trimmed for length and buried in the next day’s back pages. No Western troops had died, making this attack of secondary news value. Just like, one can’t help but remark, the slaughter of fellow Muslims by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

Of course, ISIL is not the Taliban of a decade ago. As I’ve argued previously, it’s worse. Unlike the Taliban, who were content to massacre their own, ISIL is an exporter. “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s claim to legitimacy, within the addled confines of radical Islamist dogma, rests on his holding territory. He will continue exporting death and maiming, it stands to reason, until ISIL is destroyed and its territory taken away.

The current best effort to achieve this, led by dovish U.S. president Barack Obama, is by Western air power in support of local ground troops. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can struggle, as he did again Wednesday in Davos, to explain why the as-yet-undefined expanded training mission is more within the scope of Canadian capability than flying bombing runs that protect Canadian allies. He can struggle, but he can’t succeed — because the policy makes no sense. Breath taken.