Bassam and Zahra's studio in Damascus.

In one room of their tiny apartment in a suburb of Damascus, Iraqi artists Bassam and Zahra have set up their studio. It has all the necessary trappings scattered around in a colourful mess: sketches, wooden easels, tubes of pigment, paint brushes soaking in plastic buckets filled with water.

Some of Bassam and Zahra’s finished paintings decorate their apartment walls, some are for sale at a Greekowned gallery in Souq Al-Hamadiyye, and some are for sale at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The couple are refugees who fled to Syria to escape the war in Iraq. They scrape together a living by selling their paintings to tourists. It’s much cheaper to live in Damascus than it is in Baghdad, but even so, they can’t get by without occasional gifts from relatives to make ends meet.

When the war broke out in Iraq in 2003 and work was hard to come by, Bassam began painting portraits for American soldiers. After his neighbourhood was occupied by the Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, he quickly became a suspect. A friend of Bassam’s who ran a bootleg liquor store was killed. After his death, Bassam says life in Baghdad became “like being in a movie, no life and no feeling.” Terrified of the violence, Zahra did not set foot outside of their home for three months.

Paint brushes in Bassam and Zahra's Damascus studio.

As the situation in Baghdad deteriorated, educated, middle-class individuals and students—Zahra’s father, now 75, graduated from Oxford University and was a successful engineer; Bassam’s mother was an accountant—were in danger, either of kidnapping for ransom or of being perceived as collaborating with the American military. So, in 2006, like many other Iraqis, Bassam and Zahra made the difficult decision to leave their families and escape across the border to Syria. Bassam describes a huge sense of relief when they passed into Syrian territory, like he could finally breathe again.

Neither of them have been back to Baghdad since 2006— nor do they want to return. The couple says life before the war was like being “choked.” Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime was oppressive, but stable. Today, sectarian violence is rampant, and neither Zahra nor Bassam believes the situation in Baghdad will improve any time soon.

Some of Bassam's comics.

As refugees in Damascus, they live in perpetual fear of being kicked out of the country and having to return to Iraq. Both of them continue to harbour the dreams they shared when they met at art college: Bassam hopes to have an exhibition of his paintings and perfect his work as a comic artist; Zahra, who laughs easily and is seldom seen out of her Converse sneakers, smiles at the thought of having children. But both are too worried about deportation to consider a family right now.

A phone call from the UNHCR with the promise of resettlement to a Western country is their best chance at finding a normal, stable life. However, they have no illusions that it will happen soon—Syria is home to an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees just like them.

Surf’s up in Ashkelon. So I hop on the train in Tel Aviv bound for the southern Israeli city with my surfboard bag in tow. The bag, stencilled with Boards Not Bombs, attracts more than a few stares and the interest of Israeli state security at the train station. The bag is scanned, the board is tapped up and down its length, and the question has to be asked:

“You came here to surf in Israel?”

Well, yes.

“And what does this mean,” says the security soldier “Boards Not Bombs? You know we take bombs very seriously here in Israel.”

Don’t I know. I went to Israel in February 2009, during the biggest military operation in Gaza in more than a decade. Israel had launched an enormous offensive reply to years of Hamas bombs on southern Israeli towns like Ashdod, Sderot, and Ashkelon. On January 2, foreigners were ushered out of Gaza. On January 3, Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza to begin a ground offensive. A month later the death toll in Gaza was estimated to be close to 1,000 civilians.

So you can be forgiven if surfing is not the first thing you think of when Israel, Gaza, or the Middle East is mentioned. Neither is peace. But there is a thriving surf scene in Israel and an emerging one in Gaza, and both are part of the global brother- and sisterhood of surfers united by the waves that connect us all.

The members of the Gaza Surf Club

I’m a Jew—but my true religion is surfing. I had come to Israel because I was increasingly disturbed by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and it was precisely because the situation had become so bad that I felt it necessary to see it myself. I believe surfing and peace are related: surf-ers everywhere know the peace that can come from riding a perfect wave. So I went to Israel in the hopes of delivering wetsuits to members of a loose-knit group of surfers known as the Gaza Surf Club, along with the T-shirts I made with the (now-notorious) Boards Not Bombs phrase printed on them. Call it fun over fundamentalism.

The security guard is still waiting for an answer to his Boards Not Bombs question.

“Ever hear of the Beach Boys?” I ask him.

“Of course,” he says.

“Well, it’s true,” I tell him, breaking into song. “Catch a wave, and you’ll be sitting on top of the world.”

He shakes his head like I’m meshuga and sends me through, anyway.

Once on board the train we travel south for an hour through a jumble of expressways extending out of Tel Aviv, lined by orange groves, the occasional camel, Arab and Jewish villages, and the faint blue line of the Mediterranean and its fickle waves.

On the train I meet Avram, a young Israeli soldier in uniform who is curious about my board. I tell him of my plans to surf in Ashkelon and then, hopefully, Gaza.

“I surfed Gaza,” says Avram, to my surprise. He served there during the second intifada and smuggled his board in on a troop vehicle.

“There were a few soldiers in the water and a few Gazans. Some of us lent them our boards.”

You see? I think, there it is—the aloha spirit! Not so fast. “In Gaza they said we were stealing the waves,” says Avram. “We told them, ‘learn how to surf.’”

For all the laid-back spirit of surfing, there is also a testy localism, a result of limited carrying capacity: too many surfers, not enough waves. Territorial conflict, already abundant in the Middle East, apparently extends to the beach, too. Sometimes I think the Middle East is a case of localism gone crazy—spiralling out from the Old City of Jerusalem divided into its quarters of Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian. Jerusalem is more carved up than Bobby Orr’s knee.

Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz

In 1956, eight years after the formation of the State of Israel, surfing arrived with the American surfer and physician Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, the undisputed father of Israeli surfing. He brought his 10-foot Hobie surfboard with him. Four years later he returned with six surfboards, each emblazoned with the Star of David. Aiming to repopulate the world with Jews, he raised nine kids out of a 1949 Studebaker and then later in an RV, while chasing waves; his life was recently vividly captured in the feature documentary Surfwise. Paskowitz was like Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai: Thou shalt surf.

The first surfer Paskowitz taught on a Haifa beach happened to be an Arab boy. He’s been trying to bring Arabs and Israelis together to surf ever since.

The sport grew slow and steady in Israel: in the late ’70s, a group of hardcore surfers were centred in Tel Aviv. In the early ’80s, Shaun Thomson, a Jew and world champion surfer, came to Israel to teach a surf clinic. He was treated like a rock star and thousands of Israelis watched Thomson from the beach. The next year Tel Aviv played host to a stop on the World Surfing Tour.

Today there are close to 30,000 surfers in Israel. In Gaza, the scene is much smaller, with perhaps 50 or 60 surfers— equipment being one limiting factor. For instance, Salah Abu Khamil is considered the first Palestinian surfer in Gaza: now in his 40s and working in Israel, he first saw surfing on Israeli TV in the early ’80s and started out on a homemade board he painted himself. Lacking anything else suitable, he used knives for stabilizing fins.

The train station in Ashkelon has a quiet, eerie quality. The city does not see many tourists these days. In early March 2008, rockets fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip hit Ashkelon, wounding six and causing property damage, marking the first time that Hamas had been able to reliably strike the town. In May 2008, a rocket fired from the northern Gazan city of Beit Lahiya hit this shopping mall in southern Ashkelon, causing significant structural damage and a number of injuries, but amazingly no deaths. Outside the train station is a big-box discount store. Though it’s open, the parking lot is almost empty.

Pulling up to meet me in his Toyota Corolla with a short board strapped to the roof is Chico Maayan. Maayan, now 42, a diminutive former Israeli surfing champ, has lived here in Ashkelon, a coastal community of 120,000, for 30 years. We are off to Delilah’s to check the waves there. Delilah’s is a popular beach named after the legend of Samson and Delilah, which played itself out here on the shores of Ashkelon and Gaza 15 kilometres to the south. We drive through a maze of modern white three- and four-storey apartments with red-tiled roofs separated by patches of green, the building style typical of much of Israel.

Ashkelon’s current slow pace means the waves are not crowded today. That suits Maayan fine for now, but he runs a surf school in Ashkelon, and since the bombing, business has been in the toilet. He tells me about a surf lesson he was teaching a while ago that ended abruptly.

“I was in the army, so okay, I know combat,” says Maayan. “I hear this whistling. I know it’s a rocket. I tell the kids, ‘Get down! Get down!’ The bomb landed 100 metres from us, a mushroom of smoke. We were shocked; this is the middle of summer. All the parents call me and tell me to bring the kids home. Since then it has been a problem.” (In surf lingo, catching a big wave is called “riding a bomb.” So you can imagine that Maayan’s experience brings a whole new meaning to the idea.)

This year the celebration of Purim—the festive holiday where children and adults dress in costumes that commemorate the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman’s plot to annihilate them—was cancelled in Ashkelon. “No one comes here,” says Maayan. “It’s a ghost town.”

Maayan’s parents are from Chile and came to Israel around 1960. They are proud Zionists. “My mother will kill anyone if they say anything bad about Israel,” he chuckles. Maayan served in the army during the first intifada. He describes himself as a patriotic Israeli. “Israel didn’t do enough in its recent war in Gaza,” says Maayan. “Not until we see a white flag from Hamas should we stop.”

And yet Maayan believes in a twostate solution and that Israel should support the more moderate Fatah party in Palestine. I ask Maayan how he feels about the Gazan civilians during the operation going on not far from here. “Really it didn’t bother me very much,” he says. “Sometimes I get a clinch in my heart; it’s a pity, but really, the Israeli army dropped flyers warning people to clear the area. We did our best. Hamas has got a policy that they hide behind their citizens…. Fatah is more reasonable; they recognize Israel. They are more suitable to rule. If not, then it’s like having Iran next door.”

And yet, Maayan is optimistic. “Things will get better. I love Ashkelon, I love the place, the people; I know the beaches, and this is my home.” I tell Maayan that tomorrow I plan to go to Gaza in hopes of hooking up with the surfers there and delivering some equipment. He looks at me and says, vaguely, “So you are like that, I see.”

The next day I plan to enter Gaza. Mohammed Alwayn is my surfing contact there: Alwayn is an agronomist who works for Care International. “When you surf, you don’t think about the situation,” he tells me over the phone. “When surfing, we feel free.” Alwayn and I made plans to meet up and and he’d introduce me to some of his surfing friends. All I had to do was get across the border.

My friend Arthur Rashkovan is to drive me to the Gaza border. Now 30, Rashkovan grew up two blocks from Israel’s famed Hilton Beach, home to some of the best surf in the country, and has lived there his whole life. A former Israeli skateboard champion, he’s a first-generation Israeli whose parents are from Moldova in Eastern Europe. I asked him what brought his parents to Israel and he told me, “The usual: anti-Semitism.”

Rashkovan grew up in what he calls a “mini-California, a surfer’s paradise.” Despite the conflicts, life continues as normal in Tel Aviv. It’s an extremely safe city. With a population of 400,000, street crime and homelessness are virtually nonexistent, children are free to play in the streets and parks by themselves, and women can safely walk the streets late at night in a city that never sleeps.

“Tel Aviv is in a bu-ah, a bubble,” says former Israeli surf pro Maya Dauber, 36. “For me, the last war with Gaza was like a reality TV show. You feel removed.

“You have to understand. This is not the first war we ever had,” says Dauber, who served in the military while being allowed to compete as a surfer in the World Qualifying Series. “Every few years we have a war. Every few years I know a soldier who died or was hurt because of a war. You start to develop a thick skin. You start to protect yourself more and more. You don’t want to hear about it. That’s why Tel Aviv is one of the best cities to hang out in in the world. Because people want to forget. They want to go out and have fun, to drink to clear their minds. Surfing,” she says, “is an extension of that.”

During his youth Rashkovan would “surf my brains out. I lived like a true beach bum. Nothing else mattered.” When he turned 18, Arthur had to serve in the military. “I realized I need to serve my country, and I didn’t want to get out of the army. So I had a goal of getting the best job I could have and keep on skating and surfing.” So he took a desk job not far from home. “My experience in the military was a lot of skate injuries,” laughs Rashkovan. “I broke my arm twice and my ankle from skateboarding. Luckily you get a very long leave to heal up, so I went on two surf trips to San Diego. The third time I got injured the army had no use for me, and they released me.”

After Rashkovan left the army he gradually became one of the prime movers and shakers in the burgeoning Israeli surf industry. In 2004, Doc Paskowitz came to Israel looking to meet some Arab-Israeli surfers. Rashkovan was in a position to help him out. Paskowitz and Rashkovan gave impromptu lessons to Arab kids on the beach between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, a spot where Israelis and Arabs surf together. “At that moment, I realized, hey, why not organize the first surf event for Arabs and Israelis?” says Rashovan. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to show that surfers can overcome barriers such as religion and politics.”

The 2004 Arab-Israeli surf contest was just the beginning. Last year, as part of something he describes as beginning as a “lark,” Rashkovan got together with Doc Paskowitz and surfing god Kelly Slater (who is of Syrian descent) to teach surfing clinics to Arabs and Israelis. They dubbed it Surfing for Peace. Young Arab girls in hijabs and young Israelis with yarmulkes caught waves with Slater looking on. Fun versus fundamentalism.

Then, pushing his luck, Doc Paskowitz, along with his sons David, Josh, and Jonathan, headed for the border to deliver some surfboards to Gaza. Despite there being a total blockade on entry, Doc managed to cajole some border guards into letting him exchange the boards with some waiting Gazans. “Kissing was the secret to getting across the border,” says Doc. “All the guys that want to shoot me, I grab them and kiss them.”

Nobody believes that you can actually bring peace simply through the act of surfing. But you can create moments of peacefulness, create some friendships, and demystify your so-called enemy. Or, as Doc says, “God will surf with the devil if the waves are good enough.”

“That day when we delivered the boards was a very magical day,” recalls Rashkovan. “We were swamped by the media. Everybody was calling me: the New York Times, the L.A. Times. I had newspapers call from Germany, South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil—really everywhere. The funniest part is we had maybe one or two minutes on Israeli TV. People are turning cynical here and indifferent. Because on one side we have war all around and we have gotten a bit insular. You get used to what’s going on around and just get on with it. The whole world was excited and Israel was like, ‘Whatever.’”

Friends asked Rashkovan why he was bothering with Surfing for Peace. “I want to prove that there are large populations on both sides who want to live their lives peacefully,” he says. “The problem is they are controlled by politicians who have other interests. Peace is a political process, but luckily friendship isn’t. Initiating actions on the grassroots level between common people is a much faster way to move things. Surfing as a peaceful way of living is just perfect for this goal. Why not just go out and forget about our worries for a moment? This what the Arabs in Israel do when they go surf, this is what the Israeli surfers do when they go out, and it’s the same for the guys in Gaza.”

Rashkovan is determined to keep Surfing for Peace grassroots and out of politics. “We know there is a huge population in Gaza that wants to live its life quietly, but it’s controlled by extremists,” he says. “I wanted to show the Gazans on the other side that there are a group of people here who want to have the same life. And maybe through the common ground of surfing show the world something else. We just want to make friends with a few guys on the other side.”

As you get closer to Gaza the highway winnows down to two narrow lanes surrounded by farm fields and overhung by orange groves. There is a sweet perfume of orange blossoms in the air. The pastoral landscape is abruptly interrupted by a clearing covered in asphalt and a big sign that reads Welcome to the Erez Crossing. The Gaza crossing looks like a hangar in a mid-size airfield with plenty of parking spaces. There are many people milling about their cars—simply waiting.

The gate has a parkade shed with a gate. At the gate Lior, a friendly, engaging young Israeli soldier, greets me. The surfboard makes him smile. I tell him surf’s up in Gaza and I want to join my Palestinian brothers on the waves.

“Not today.”

“Come on, I heard it’s as big as Indo in Gaza.” He laughs at my reference to the surf mecca of Indonesia. I spend about a half-hour trying to charm and disarm the young soldier, but there will be no getting into Gaza today—or on several other attempts I make. Hamas and Israel are still lobbing bombs at each other and things are just too hot.

Having come all this way from Tel Aviv, we stop at the Arab port of Jaffa instead to visit Rashkovan’s friend Abdallah Seri. An Arab-Israeli, Seri lives with his family in a simple flat with a patio garden. His father, a fisherman, joins us over strong Arabic coffee while a soccer game plays on the TV.

Abdallah Seri with one of the "Boards Not Bombs" T-shirts

Seri, now 28, learned to surf at the age of 12 and is part of the Surfing for Peace project. He talks about his love for Doc Paskowitz and for surfing and how it can bring people together. But then he turns serious. “The people in Gaza are not an autonomous people,” he says. “They don’t know how to think for themselves anymore, and they can’t tell right from wrong anymore. They’re victims of both the Israelis and their own Arab brothers and sisters.”

Seri’s father points to the soccer players on the screen: “Look at these guys. They’re from all over the world, playing together as a team. That is what sport can do. That is what surfing can do.”

Using surfing as an approach to solving an intractable problem like the Middle East conflict involves a leap of faith. In fact, many writers have questioned whether surfing itself is a faith. Does God reside in a double-overhead wall of blue? (The ancient Polynesians prayed over tree trunks to their god of surfing before shaping them into surfboards and built temples dedicated to the sport.)

Rabbi Nachum “Shifty” Shifren, aka the Surfing Rabbi (he wrote a book of the same title), is a deep believer in the divine peace that surfing can bestow. “I think if there is anything that can bring about peace, it’s surfing,” Shifren, a former lifeguard and triathlete, tells me by phone from Santa Monica, California. “What I am advocating is a synthesis between the physical and the spiritual. I believe that surfing is the answer to modern man’s dilemma of stress, of lack of security, of lack of self-esteem, and even in the search for peace. Surfing is a spiritual connector. It’s like a conduit where one could appreciate God and the forces of the world.”

Divine conduit or not, surfing does seem to help individuals overcome barriers to understanding. Despite his selfdescribed hardcore rightwing views, Chico Maayan also took part in the Surfing for Peace operation. “We started Surfing for Peace because we thought of it as not connected to politics—it is connected to the ocean,” he says. “We’re surfing. The Gazans are surfing. We should surf together. It won’t bring peace, but we will see the enemy differently.”

Back in Tel Aviv, I call Alwayn in Gaza to tell him I hadn’t been able to get past the border. He was hardly surprised. “Have faith,” he says.

A week after I got back to Vancouver Island, Arthur Rashkovan emailed to tell me that a German-based journalist had received permission to get into Gaza and took along four of the wetsuits I had left behind. He also took some photos of the surfers unpacking the suits in delight.

So I keep the faith. Searching for waves and peace in Israel and Gaza may be an act of faith, but this is a region, after all, that hosts three of the world’s major religions. Faith is all we’ve got, and surfing is my religion. I do believe that hope resides in a double-overhead wall of blue. Or as Chico Maayan told me, “As long as there are waves, there will be a type of peace.”

Images of the Gaza Surf Club courtesy Alex Klein, director of God Went Surfing With The Devil. Below is the trailer for that documentary:

Think we never went to Iraq? Think again.

In March 2008, when the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” marked its fifth anniversary, Canadian media outlets were in a self-congratulatory mood: “Canada isn’t involved” there, one reporter wrote. “The further we get away from the actual date, the better Canada’s decision to not get involved with the U.S. invasion of Iraq looks,” wrote another. Another referenced the anti-war demonstrations that “stopped the Canadian government’s support for the invasion of Iraq.” It was a fact to be proud of: “We didn’t go to Iraq.”

Didn’t we? In fact, Canada has been involved with the Iraq conflict in many ways—political, economic, military—some subtle, some overt. But the notion that Canada “didn’t go to Iraq” is, at best, wishful thinking. And though the war has slipped off the front page of the newspaper, Canada’s involvement in Iraq hasn’t decreased—in fact, today we’re in it deeper than ever.

Since the beginning of the Iraq invasion, a handful of Canadian military personnel have served with the U.S. and U.K. military as part of ongoing troop exchanges. When it originally emerged in November 2003 that Canadian General Walt Natynczyk was going to be serving in Iraq (along the fast track to becoming Chief of Defence Staff), NDP leader Jack Layton expressed his outrage in the House of Commons.

“When it comes to having someone in charge of thousands and thousands of troops in a war which is illegal and should never have happened … this makes us complicit in the unilateral philosophy of George Bush and his administration,” he told the House.

The denunciations stopped, but the arrangement carried on. This owed as much to the media’s indifference toward the issue as it did to the Liberal government’s playing it down: such troop exchanges were defended in the House of Commons as being “routine.” But it later emerged that keeping Canadian soldiers on exchange in Iraq was actually part of a political commitment that Ottawa made to Washington immediately following the formal announcement that Canada would not join the coalition forces going to Iraq.

Today, Liberal Party foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says that commitment made sense, and still does: “Because of certain agreements between Canada and the U.S., there were some Canadian officers who served in Iraq, in the U.S. Army,” he says. “This is different from Canadian troops serving in the country. To have ended all military co-operation between Canada and the U.S. would have been a mistake. To have sent troops to Iraq would also have been a mistake.” In an emailed statement, the NDP’s foreign affairs critic, Paul Dewar, disagrees: “Since the beginning of the war our party has spoken [out] against the hypocrisy of stating that we’re not in this war on the one hand, and then sending some of our troops and generals to the war on the other.”

Even the Liberal defence minister at the time of the invasion, John McCallum, later admitted to authors Janice Gross-Stein and Eugene Lang, when interviewed for their bestseller, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, “It was pretty untenable not to be a part of the Iraq war but to have soldiers in Iraq.”

In a rare but extensive article about the topic in 2006, Maclean’s referred to what was becoming Canada’s “dedicated presence” in Iraq: “From the very first days of the U.S.-led Iraq war, Canadians have been deeply involved: setting up crime-fighting units, working as engineers with coalition forces, serving with the UN, flying planes that help guide missile attacks, even fighting. There are anywhere from 100 to 200 working in the country. Iraq may be an unpopular, troubled conflict, but it is a place everyone, from soldiers to high-ranking officials, acknowledges Canada cannot, and has not, ignored.”

Canada’s military involvement in Iraq, however, is dwarfed by the presence of Canadian private industry. Dozens of Canadian companies have benefited from the war and occupation with at least the tacit support of successive Canadian governments. Many of these companies, especially in the military-industrial sector, do so indirectly, through sales to the U.S. military or other militaries that are occupying Iraq.

Canada’s miniature Iraqi military-industrial complex has two prongs: oil companies and the private security firms that protect them. At least 15 Canadian-based companies have signed some form of exploration, production, or production-sharing contract with Iraqi or Kurdish-Iraqi officials since 2004.

Those companies require logistics, security, transportation, and equipment to operate, and Canadian companies are deeply involved on that side of the business too. In various, significant ways, Canadian companies have been providing private, for-profit “mission critical” support to the U.S.-led occupation since the very beginning of the invasion.

As many commentators have noted, thanks to the Iraq war and the accompanying spike in oil prices, the Canadian tar sands became economically viable. In turn, the U.S. officially recognized the tar sands as oil reserves, culminating in Prime Minister Harper’s proclamation that Canada is now an “energy superpower.” Among other benefits, the political capital that these circumstances have generated for Canada has at least indirectly assisted Canadian oil and gas companies in gaining a foothold in securing access to Iraq’s vast, untapped oil fields, especially in the relatively stable Northern Kurdistan Region, which is governed by the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

There is also reason to believe that, with its own strategic interests in mind, the U.S. has given its northern ally a green light to sign contested oil contracts. Writing in Report on Business, Paul Christopher Webster suggests that for obvious reasons of perception, the U.S. has taken a back seat on commercial development, instead allowing non-U.S. companies to do the work for them. “America needs oil,” Webster writes, “but the optics of American oil companies invading Iraq wholesale are not good. Far better, Iraqi and American officials seem to be signalling, that companies from elsewhere predominate in the first wave.”

Eight Canadian oil companies, either alone or with partners, have signed production-sharing deals with the KRG. One of the first to do so, Heritage Oil, recently discovered upwards of 4 billion barrels of oil ready for pumping and export. Other Canadian companies have made discoveries, have begun active exploration, or, like Addax Petroleum, are ready to begin exporting oil and expanding existing production. (Addax may not be Canadian much longer, however, since a Chinese oil company offered an $8.3 billion takeover of the company in June 2009.)

Greg Muttitt, from the U.K.-based oil industry watchdog Platform, summed up the complex political manoeuvrings that these Canadian firms are caught up in, with the Kurdish authorities fighting to maintain oil contracts that the central Baghdad government wants to scrap: “It’s a very serious concern that there’s absolutely no transparency on these contracts, that there’s not even a bidding process; these are just done through closed negotiations and the KRG consistently refused to … disclose any of the terms. There’s no way of checking out that everything is above board.” (KRG officials did not respond to an interview request to discuss their contracts with Canadian oil companies.)

Official U.S. policy under President George W. Bush favoured the establishment of a mutually acceptable hydrocarbon law, and the White House publicly sided with Baghdad in opposing the KRG’s unilateral signing of production-sharing contracts with foreign oil companies. The Canadian government, and Canadian oil executives, remain silent on the details of their operations in such a politically sensitive environment. “Canada maintains full diplomatic relations with Iraq, and respects Iraqi sovereignty. We recognize the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as a sub-national component of the Iraqi federal system,” a Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade spokesperson told me. “We encourage Canadian firms to participate in the economic development of Iraq, while fully respecting Iraqi sovereignty and the jurdisdiction of central Iraqi authorities.”

And participate they have: the public record, along with private interviews and leaked documents obtained by This, shows a pattern of steadily escalating Canadian involvement throughout Iraq since the invasion.

Fewer than six weeks after the invasion commenced in March 2003, DFAIT sent then-Minister of International Trade Pierre Pettigrew a memo (obtained through a Freedom of Information request) saying that when the dust settled in Iraq, DFAIT “anticipate[d] important opportunities for Canadian companies, particularly in the oil and gas sector.” This memo, dated April 28, detailed an internal meeting earlier that week “to plan coordinated actions and ensure synergy between key departments and agencies that can provide assistance” to companies interested in Iraq. Canada’s embassy in Damascus, Syria, was to “be actively supporting Canadian companies interested in doing business in Iraq,” while exhibiting “a firm commitment … to assist businesses in any way possible to penetrate the market.”

Shortly after, on May 5, 2003, Pettigrew himself sent a letter to Canadian CEOs regarding “emerging export opportunities for Canadian companies in Iraq.” The thrust of Pettigrew’s letter was that while the war made the situation in Iraq “complex,” there was, nevertheless, good reason for optimism, to the extent that “the longer-term prospects for Canadian successes in that market are very good.” Canada’s support of the “reconstructing” efforts in Iraq, said Pettigrew, “is recognized with appreciation by the United States administration.” He wrote that “additional opportunities … will emerge for our exporters in Iraq … especially in such sectors as oil and gas.”

That prediction has come true: today there are more than 12 Canadian companies operating in Iraq’s oil and gas fields. Neatly coinciding with President Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech in May 2003, several large Canadian oil and gas companies let it be known that they had “sent scout teams into Iraq to look for potential projects,” including Nexen, Talisman, and Ivanhoe. Nexen (whose board of directors now includes former Deputy Prime Minister Anne McClellan) has patiently waited for the situation to stabilize while maintaining good relations with Baghdad as one of 30 foreign oil companies short-listed to bid on future contracts. Ivanhoe has signed a number of contracts with the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad. Talisman, on the other hand, has taken the riskier route of forsaking Baghdad in lieu of signing a contested contract with the KRG.

It has been difficult to determine the extent of Canadian government support for oil companies that are seeking contracts in Iraq. Most companies whose spokespeople were reached said that they have neither sought nor received support from Canadian officials. Only one company, Calgary-based OGI Group, confirmed any beneficial interaction with Canadian officials. DFAIT’s O’Shaughnessy said, “The Government of Canada does not participate in commercial negotiations between business firms and foreign governments.”

OGI, a private company that does not disclose its board of directors, has won several contracts from Baghdad going back to 2004. A spokesperson with OGI, speaking on condition of anonymity, says they are “doing the full operations … right from exploration, development, right through to construction.” The spokesperson also con-firms “we have pipelines in there that we’ve designed and [are in the] process of building.” Just how the deals get done is not clear, but government help is, apparently, forthcoming: the source inside OGI says the Canadian officials “provide us with an opportunity, if we need to meet with some dignitaries.”

There are no smoking guns here, no conspiracy theories. Oil and politics have always gone hand in hand, and such deals always hinge on tangled networks of privilege and inside knowledge; it’s the nature of the business. As such, it is not unusual to find former political figures working for oil and gas companies as consultants and advisers. Nexen and Talisman, for example, have hired the services of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien whose “international standing opens doors” and who is able “to pick up the phone and speak to a series of ambassadors, presidents, prime ministers, ministers.” While Chrétien’s oil diplomacy has been publicized in the case of conflict-ridden Nigeria and authoritarian Turkmenistan, it is not known if he has “opened any doors” for his clients in Iraq. The same cannot be said for one of his (and Paul Martin’s) former top cabinet ministers, Pierre Pettigrew.

Up to the defeat of Paul Martin’s Liberals in the January 2006 elections, Pettigrew ran the foreign affairs portfolio. As Pettigrew himself boasted to me during an interview, he is the only MP in Canadian history to have had all three foreign affairs portfolios— international cooperation, international trade, and foreign affairs. Few people in Canadian government would be as familiar with Canadian interests in Iraq as Pettigrew.

Upon losing his seat in January 2006, Pettigrew re-entered the private sector. Before the year was out, he joined a little-known merchant bank, Forbes and Manhattan, as an advisor. F&M manages a network of more than 20 junior resource companies that span the globe and employs numerous retired politicians, diplomats, military officers, and intelligence professionals as advisors and board members.

In late 2008, Pettigrew joined the board of directors of Vast Exploration, an F&M-connected firm that has an oil production deal with the Kurdish authority, and he speaks proudly of how his connections, built up during his time as cabinet minister, have now proved useful to Vast. Pettigrew refused to discuss the Iraq-related memos from 2003 or Liberal government policy toward Iraq while he was a Minister. But, he says in an interview, he has “a pretty impressive network around the world. I have a rolodex like few Canadians have.”

“We’re perceived differently because we’re Canadian,” said Stephan Cretier, president of Garda World Security Corporation, in 2007. “It’s a good flag to work under.” Among Garda World’s many clients in Iraq, their 2009 Annual Report notes that the company “provides security services for one of the…Canadian companies exploring for oil in the region.”

As one of the world’s largest private security firms active in Iraq and many other hotspots around the globe, Garda World was, at the time of Cretier’s comments, on a public relations campaign, setting about to distinguish itself from “the stereotypic image … of big black SUVs with guys hanging off them with guns,” an image notoriously exemplified by the U.S. mercenary firm Blackwater. The company’s decision to undertake a public branding campaign—with its Canadianness at the core of the message—“came about because of the controversy that had broken out around Blackwater and the sort of popular notion that they represented the way all of these firms operated—which is not at all true,” company spokesperson Joe Gavaghan says.

Cretier’s comments about Garda World’s Canadian advantage, according to Gavaghan, served two purposes. First, to “distinguish us and the approach that we take from Blackwater—which just happens to be an American firm.” Second, “there was also acknowledgement that Canada did not participate in the Iraq war.” But isn’t Garda World simply profiting from an illegal war and occupation? Gavaghan says his company sees Iraq as being “post-conflict.”

“The Iraqi government and international aid organizations are all trying to rebuild that society, rebuild industries, rebuild infrastructure and, you know, we are assisting companies who are engaged in those activities,” Gavaghan says. “So we don’t regard that as being part of a conflict or a war.”

Of Canadian companies active in Iraq that rationalize themselves as benevolent-but-armed aid workers supporting “reconstruction and democratization,” Garda World is merely one among many.

Armoured cars are one of the key pieces of equipment being employed by the Iraqi counterinsurgency and the private security firms that support it. Armoured car sales thrive not on the shock-and-awe phase of conquering a country, but in the dirty, protracted street-level conflict that follows, and in that sense, Iraq has now furnished the ideal sales climate for half a decade. I contacted four Canadian armoured-car companies, all of whom offered similar takes: their products are defensive-only and save lives.

The Streit Group of Companies, based in Innisfil, Ont., has shipped at least 700 armoured cars to Iraq, and while a company spokesperson, Don MacMillan, refused to name Streit’s customers, he acknowledged that the U.S. military is top of the list. “Troops that are over there and private security firms,” MacMillan says. “We are doing all that’s possible to help protect them.” Toronto-based INKAS Armored Vehicle Manufacturing, Toronto-based International Armored Group, King City, Ont.–based Armet Armored Vehicles— all three gave variations on this response.

“Should our customers not use armoured vehicles and be exposed to high risk or not to provide services in [Iraq]?” asks INKAS spokesman David Khazanski. “Our product is designed strictly to protect passengers and shipments from ballistic and blast threats. No features on our vehicle make it a product for offence.”

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, dismisses the explanations. “Any company that facilitates the U.S. occupation of Iraq is by default ‘pro-war,’ because they are part of a system that continues to trample on the self-determination of the Iraqi people and support a foreign occupation,” Scahill says. “Companies that provide armed men for hire, or weapons and other equipment to these mercenaries, are the worst of the lot.”

The Canadian company that appears to be most deeply involved in Iraq—although given the nature of the business, such measurements are difficult to make—is Toronto-based SkyLink Aviation, and it is also the most tight-lipped about its operations there. A 2006 newsletter from SkyLink Arabia, the company’s wholly owned and operated Iraq-based subsidiary, describes some of its activities, including transporting armoured vehicles and parts into Iraq, and performing final assembly on armoured cars at its Baghdad warehouse. (Armet Armored Vehicles spokesman Bill Whyte confirmed that his company used to employ SkyLink for these services, but now only uses them to transport vehicles in and out of Iraq.) The newsletter had originally been posted on a SkyLink affiliate’s website, but was taken offline after I called seeking comment.

SkyLink’s Canadian location is no coincidence. The firm’s owners located their headquarters in Toronto because Canada is, according to company co-founder Walter Arbib, “an ideal location” because “it’s a sort of neutral country, like Switzerland, and Canada is known for its peacekeeping.”

The company promotes itself as a “humanitarian aid delivery firm” and “one of the world’s leading providers of aviation and ground logistics in unsecured and hostile environments.” The company’s slogan is “Doing difficult jobs in difficult places.” SkyLink’s co-founders, Walter Arbib and Surjit Babra, were awarded B’nai Brith’s Award of Merit in 2006 for their company’s “strong ethical code” and their “caring, philanthropic efforts.” The keynote speech at the awards ceremony was delivered that evening by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who began by thanking Arbib and Babra “for all you’ve done and all that I know you will do to help our great country in the future.”

With the addition of former Liberal minister of defence turned senator Art Eggleton to their company’s advisory board, SkyLink has not only airplanes, but powerful political allies, in high places. (Both Arbib and Babra were among the guests at Eggleton’s wedding in 2008. A spokesperson for Senator Eggleton says “he has nothing to comment on” regarding the company and that, in his capacity as a member of the SkyLink Group of Companies advisory board, “he’s not involved” with any of their Iraq operations.) Immediately following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, SkyLink signed a lucrative USAID contract to manage Iraq’s airports. This contract, which would fetch them more than $17 million, would in turn translate to multiple other “mission critical” contracts in the war-torn country over the next six years. All my queries to SkyLink were directed to the company’s public relations firm, which provided a single-paragraph response by email: “For the past five years, Skylink has been operating commercial flights, managing airports and providing ground handling in Iraq. More recently, it opened an office in Erbil, providing airport services to help oil companies expand. ‘Skylink is committed to helping Iraq rebuild,’ said Jan Ottens, CEO of Skylink Aviation Inc. ‘We are familiar with Iraq and can make a real contribution in the reconstruction and rebuilding of its economy.’” (Ottens himself, reached on his mobile phone, refused to be interviewed for this article.)

For several years, SkyLink’s Canadian headquarters tried to distance itself from its affiliate companies’ operations in Iraq. As the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2004, the U.S. subsidiary active in Iraq, SkyLink Air and Logistic Support (USA), “turn[ed] to a public relations firm to help deal with the media and distance itself from the Canadian sister company.” A public relations spokesperson told the center, that “the two companies are financially and operationally independent.”

A recent lawsuit has offered a possible glimpse into the company’s operations. A former consultant to the company and part-owner of the Iraq-based arm, SkyLink Arabia, Richard Galustian, is suing Arbib and Babra in a Toronto court for several million dollars, alleging fraud and other mistreatment. Galustian’s affidavit alleges that Arbib and Babra defrauded him of a promised stake in the company and that they conspired to create a fake Iraqi arrest warrant to force him out of the country.

Galustian’s affidavit goes on to say that SkyLink is under two separate investigations, by USAID and the U.S. Army, related to its activities in Iraq. (Reached for comment, both USAID and the office of the U.S. Army’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction could not confirm or deny any such investigations.) The suit is ongoing and none of the parties will comment. But it is clear that Galustian believes SkyLink is finding Iraq a lucrative place to do business: from January 2007 to March 2008, Galustian’s affadavit alleges that SkyLink Arabia’s total revenues were approximately US$100 million.

With little or no scrutiny of their operations either by an indifferent media or a public that believes it won a considerable victory in 2003 by forcing the Liberal government to “stay out” of Iraq, it is unclear what will be the implications, if any, of Canada’s miniature “mercenary-oil-industrial complex” in Iraq. The war itself has cost upwards of one million Iraqi lives, the country is considered among the most corrupt in the world, and the war, and occupation, are far from over.

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.

How big is the internet in Iran?

There are more than three million internet users out of a population of 70 million, which is not bad. They’re mainly students and middle- and upper-class. The access is now much easier than it was six, seven years ago. For the past five years, there are different ISPs, private ISPs, and they have calling cards that they sell. Ten hours of internet access is 10 bucks. It provides people with anonymity, because that’s a big thing for internet users in Iran. And it gives them an option not to stick with one ISP; if the service goes down and anything happens, they can change to another ISP. But recently there have been regulations passed, both in government and the judiciary, that want to limit this anonymous access through these cards. This is a very important development, and it could harm the increasing number of internet users in Iran.

Is it fair to say that the government sees the internet as a threat?

The government is good toward the internet. It’s not controlling it. It’s helped to develop the infrastructure and they’ve allowed private ISPs to operate. But there is another part of the regime, which is more powerful than the government. The leader himself and security organizations have been trying to shut down the internet or, as much as they can, prevent people from accessing the political opposition websites or anti-religious websites.

How bad is web censorship?

Since [May], it’s stepped up very, very heavily. You can say that almost every popular website, whether it’s political or entertainment, has been filtered and has lost almost half of its users. Several years ago, on July 9, there was a student protest. Every year, on the anniversary of that day, [the regime] gets paranoid. They always think that the CIA or [Israel’s intelligence service] Mossad is conspiring against them. On the eve of this day, or one month before that, they start to shut down everything, to effectively disconnect Iranians inside from the outside world.

Does the Iranian regime consider you a public enemy?

Unfortunately, yes. That’s why I can’t go back. I mean, I can go back, but it’s risky. One of my friends was arrested—he was a blogger and journalist—and now he’s in Holland, because he escaped after he was held for 20 days. We have had phone conversations, and he said they were interested to know about his relationship with me, and the part that I’ve been playing in promoting these weblogs, who’s supporting me, what kind of family I come from. It wasn’t good news for [the regime] when they heard that my family was very religious. For example, my uncle was among the top officials. In the beginning of the revolution, he was killed in a bombing. He was very close to the party of the current leader, the hardliners. When they heard that I came from that kind of family, they were disappointed, but still very suspicious. They can’t believe that one person with his laptop can still start this whole thing.