TORONTO (AP) – Canada is expanding its military mission against the Islamic State group to include airstrikes on targets in Syria, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Tuesday.
Harper told Parliament that he will not seek “the express consent” of the President Bashar Assad government for the airstrikes, but will work closely with allies who have been carrying out such airstrikes against IS over Syria in recent months.
Canada will be the first NATO country, other than the United States, to conduct airstrikes in Syria. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have also done so.
Canadian airstrikes have been limited to IS targets in Iraq thus far. Canada also has 69 special forces soldiers training Kurdish peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq. The IS group controls a wide swath of territory across the Syrian and Iraqi border.
“The government recognizes that ISIL’s power base, indeed the so-called caliphate’s capital, is in Syria,” Harper said, using an alternate acronym for the militants. “ISIL’s fighters and much of its heavier equipment are moving freely across the Iraqi border into Syria, in part for better protection against our airstrikes. In our view, ISIL must cease to have any safe haven in Syria.”