Family, friends, commanders and colleagues gathered in Ottawa this week to bid a final farewell to Sheila Anne Hellstrom, a Royal Canadian Air Force veteran and the first woman to reach the rank of brigadier-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. Hellstrom was known for her confidence, compassion and fortitude in a male-dominated profession where women had long been relegated to secondary roles. She mentored women, opened doors for them, and oversaw sweeping changes in the roles they would assume both inside and outside the military ranks. A native of Lunenburg, N.S., she died last Dec. 7. She was 85.   Judy Harper, now a retired navy captain, first met Hellstrom in 1980, when Harper was a newly minted major under the combined services of the day and Hellstrom—a lieutena...

March 13, 2002 The 3PPCLI Battle Group launches Canada’s first combat assault since the Korean War on a mountain called the Whale’s Back, overlooking a valley near the Pakistan border. The soldier in the foreground is a Canadian sniper in specially designed British combat fatigues. Taliban and al-Qaida fighters attempting to escape into the mountains to the east came under heavy bombardment from American B-52s and F-16s. Scaling elevations up to 2,650 metres, 500 Canadians, along with U.S. Navy Seals and infantry from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division, spent five days clearing caves and gathering intelligence among the rocks and crevices.   March 16, 2002 Canadian snipers set two distance records while on operations with American forces in March 2002. Here, a sniper team loo...

Osama bin Laden had more in mind than inflicting incidental death and mayhem when he dispatched 19 al-Qaida terrorists to strike at the heart of American economic and military might two decades ago. With hatred rooted in real and perceived abuse and exploitation, he aimed to lure the West, specifically the United States, into a protracted and costly war of attrition on home soil, where devout jihadists would be motivated and readily available. Bin Laden spoke of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” By doing so, the son of a Saudi construction magnate believed he could engineer the moral and economic collapse of his enemies by bleeding them dry, both in human lives and treasure. The strategy is detailed in al-Qaida manuals and a 2004 al Jazeera broadcast in which bin Laden sp...

The graveyard of empires appears to have claimed another victim. But why couldn’t a high-powered coalition that included the United States, United Kingdom and Canada defeat a radically fundamentalist group of murderous zealots? Many said from the beginning that the post-9/11 invaders of Afghanistan were doomed to follow the Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Britons (three times) and Soviets—none of whom managed a permanent presence or far-reaching impact in the parched and willfully independent land of deserts, mountains and open plains. A successful campaign of liberation relies as much on winning hearts and minds as it does on strategic military successes. Winning over Afghans, as the recent collapse of their national army suggests, was far easier said than done. There...

Canadian Paul J. Tomelin’s photograph of a young private waiting for medical aid after battle stands among the Korean War’s most compelling photographs. A sergeant in the Canadian Army Film and Photo Unit, Tomelin was deployed to the Korean Peninsula for one year in 1951-52. He managed to wrangle another six months in-country, during which he said he got some of his best images. None was better than his June 22, 1952, photograph of a bloodied and battered Private Heath Matthews of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, wounded by shrapnel and looking old beyond his 19 years. Matthews, a signaller, was standing outside a medical tent awaiting attention after a company-strength raid the night before on an enemy position near Hill 166, the dominant feature on the Ch...

While the world fights the coronavirus pandemic, families displaced by war in Yemen are combatting malnutrition and rampant disease, most of which has long been eradicated in the West. Recent reports from inside the embattled country say increasing numbers of children living in displaced-persons’ camps are coming down with malaria, cholera, polio and diphtheria—and often dying. In Bajil, a district in western Yemen bloated by uprooted civilians, 35-year-old Amal is among thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) struggling to support a family while a particularly brutal civil war approaches its seventh year. More than four million Yemenis have been forced to flee their homes, making the country “home” to the fourth largest internally displaced population worldwide. Amal ...