Former soldiers say they fear Iraqi trainees committed war crimes with allies' weapons

Canada not only trained suspected Iraqi war criminals in 2018, it distributed western-made weapons and protective equipment to them — likely coming from U.S. stockpiles — says a former soldier who was among the first to blow the whistle on videos that implicate the trainees in atrocities.

The Canadian soldiers who were conducting the training in northern Iraq complained at the time to their superiors on the ground. They warned that their Iraqi students — many of them veterans of combat against Islamic State militants — had videos on their cellphones of torture and extra-judicial killings. Those warnings took three full years to make their way to senior military leaders in Ottawa.

Despite that, a Canadian military police investigation concluded this fall that no one involved in the training mission did anything wrong and confirmed that no one has been held accountable for the glaring lapse in reporting, which has implications under international law.

It all amounted to a startling effort to downplay or cover up an incident that placed Canadian troops in a moral quandary — and possibly a legal one as well — said retired sergeant Mike MacInnis, who took part in the training mission and spoke publicly about the matter for the first time to CBC News.

"We're training these guys and we're divesting them equipment," said MacInnis, who wrote a memo to his superiors following his return from the training mission in Iraq almost five years ago to outline his fears and those of his troops.

"We're giving them small arms, we're giving them personal protective equipment after the fact, [and] they're gonna go back to the unit with a significant level of training.

"We just spent a month making these people significantly more efficient at what they've already been doing. And what they've already been doing was committing war crimes."

MacInnis said he's not sure where the weapons came from, only that they passed out the equipment at the end of course.

One other former soldier who took part in the training deployment spoke to CBC News but requested anonymity, fearing retribution against his pension. That soldier backed up MacInnis's account of how the mission was handled.

In 2018, Canadian troops were sent to a U.S. base at Qayyarah, near Mosul in northern Iraq, to train Iraqi security forces as part of an international effort to stabilize the region after the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Despite assurances from both Canadian and NATO commanders that no Shia militia members would be trained, both soldiers said that several Iraqis in the very first class of trainees identified themselves as members of the notorious paramilitary groups.

Both Canadian soldiers paint an account of institutional and political indifference. Their remarks and eyewitness testimony also raise disturbing new questions about how closely the trainees who worked with Canadian soldiers were vetted by the U.S. forces running the base — and whether the Iraqi trainees went on to commit further war crimes.

The cell phone videos were proudly displayed by a number of Iraqi trainees on the very first day of training, as Canadian troops attempted to determine the trainees' combat experience.

MacInnis said a trainee named Waheed walked right up to him and showed him cell video of what appeared to by a lynching.