At Canadian Forces Base Petawawa, members of the Canadian Special Forces go through a variety of training exercises, including a live-fire drill. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star)
PETAWAWA, ONT.—They deployed to Vancouver in 2010, ready to intervene if terrorists took aim at the Winter Olympics.
When
a gunman murdered a soldier at the National War Memorial and stormed
Parliament Hill in 2014, these soldiers readied their gear and
helicopters prepared to move the team into action.
They
are Canada’s insurance policy against the worst-case scenario when a
terror strike proves more than local police forces can handle.
Joint
Task Force 2 is the oldest and most skilled of Canada’s special forces
units. Its experienced members — the average age is 37 — are known as
“assaulters” and if they’re coming in your front window, it’s a bad day
for someone.
In April, the Toronto Star and
CTV News were given exclusive access to Canada’s special forces mission
in northern Iraq, where Canadians are training Kurdish peshmerga
soldiers, and later to their training facilities at Garrison Petawawa.
With
its counterterrorism mandate, JTF2 is at the heart of what Maj.-Gen.
Mike Rouleau calls the “home game” for the Canadian Special Operations
Forces Command, which he heads.
JTF2, along
with the unit trained to handle chemical, biological, radiological and
nuclear threats, make up the “national mission force,” to respond to a
domestic terror incident.
“JTF2 is always on a pretty coiled spring to be able to respond,” said Rouleau, himself a former JTF2 member.
“We can see the nature
of crises, the Paris attacks, what happened in Brussels. These things
happen very quickly. The modus operandi of the terrorist is actually to
kill as many people in as short a time as possible,” Rouleau said.
Yet
Rouleau cautions that JTF2’s involvement in any crisis would come only
after consultations with cabinet ministers and it was clear that the
incident was beyond the ability of local law enforcement to manage.
“We’re not first responders,” he said.
“You
don’t use military force of that description unless you’ve exhausted
what’s available in the law enforcement portfolio. Clearly, using JTF2
in a counterterrorism sense means that the situation has gotten to the
point where you need that level of tool for the problem,” Rouleau said.
He
offered the example of a hijacked aircraft at Toronto’s Pearson
International Airport as one scenario that might call for an
intervention by JTF2.
“That is a very,
very complex problem to go and rescue hostages in a structure like that.
. . We train for that rigorously,” Rouleau said.
“We
are capable of assaulting what we call any stronghold in Canada,
whether it’s a train, an airplane, a ship, a building, moving vehicles,”
Rouleau said.
“That’s the domestic counterterrorism mandate for that worst-case scenario, should it ever happen,” he said.
Even
as Rouleau took the wraps off some elements of special forces
capabilities and personnel, JTF2 was kept firmly in the shadows. But in
an interview, he offered some details about the unit, which he calls the
“jewel in the crown” of the special forces command.
“It
is the one that has the most highly specialized and precise skill sets
in CANSOFCOM (the acronym for Canadian Special Operations Forces
Command). Precision shooting, moving, communicating, intelligence
support, sustainment. All of it is extremely precise. It has enormous
value added in a non-lethal sense as much as a lethal sense,” Rouleau
said.
“It’s a unit that can be deployed
against a wide spectrum of issues or crises. It can be very low
signature. It can be very clandestine in the way that it is used,” he
said.
One source familiar with JTF2 said the skills of the unit’s members come from the time devoted to training.
“What
makes JTF2 good is the training. The missions are demanding and the
intensity in planning is much more demanding,” the source said. “When
you’re not on mission, you train.”
Operating
from their base in Dwyer Hill, just outside Ottawa, JTF2 dates back to
the early 1990s, when the military took over the role that had been done
by the RCMP’s special emergency response team.
In
those early days, JTF2 had fewer than 100 people. By 2006, its
capabilities and manpower had significantly expanded, primarily as a
response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
Today,
Rouleau describes it as a “very big unit” though he doesn’t disclose
numbers. It’s organized into squadrons — several of them assault
squadrons — while others provide support in areas such as technology.
From
its original domestic mission, JTF2 has done missions abroad in places
such as the Balkans and Rwanda. Its members protect the prime minister
and other high-level VIPs when they visit hot spots such as Iraq.
JTF2
soldiers have also readied for potential rescue missions when Canadian
citizens have been taken hostage abroad. Yet JTF2’s role, if any, in the
release of kidnapped Canadians has never been publicly disclosed. Nor
will the military discuss whether JTF2 troops were in the Philippines,
where two Canadians were recently killed by their captors.
Rouleau
says it was in Afghanistan that JTF2 proved its mettle and earned the
respect of allies. JTF2 first deployed there in the immediate aftermath
of the 2001 terror attacks and remained for almost a year. During that
first tour, the unit was largely unknown among other allied soldiers.
“At the beginning, people said, ‘Who the f--- is JTF2?’ ” one soldier recounted to the Star’s Allan Woods in a 2010 interview.
JTF2 returned to Afghanistan in 2005. Their task was often what Rouleau describes as “kill and capture” missions.
“We
would work essentially only at night, basically doing raiding on
specific targets of interest, bomb makers, commander and control
facilitators, key commanders with a view to capturing them so that they
could be exploited for their intelligence value,” Rouleau said.
Similar
raids by American special forces soldiers proved controversial at times
when Afghan leaders complained that innocent civilians were being
caught in the crosshairs.
Rouleau, who
commanded Canadian missions in Afghanistan, said the work of special
forces troops saved many Canadian lives by “chipping away at the IED
networks and the command and control structure of the Taliban and Al
Qaeda.”
“There’s no question about it that JTF2 really earned its international bona fides after 9/11,” Rouleau said.
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