Social-Cultural-Deviation

They chose their destiny. Whatever and whoever it was that recruited their interest and their commitment to jihad led them to make that choice, but it was their choice to make. As part of the human condition, all matters of personal experience and perception, values and priorities aside -- or perhaps more accurately, because of those intimate idiosyncrasies, they chose of their own free will to leave the life that was most familiar behind.

They chose to leave the emotional comfort of family concern, and to embark on a journey that some of them would never return from.

They were three unexceptional, quite ordinary kids of immigrant stock, living a complacently secure and, one assumes, stable life in small-town Canada, among their peers. The three boys, Ali Medlej, a Lebanese Muslim, Xristos Katsiroubas, a Greek Roman Catholic, and Aaron Yoon, a Korean Christian, were all Canadian-born kids living in London Ontario, attending the same high school, London South Collegiate Institute.

They were friends, although their personalities were quite different from each other; Ali Medlej, a boisterous large-bodied extrovert, and the other two, unimposing introverts. Ali aided his friends in their decision to convert to Islam. And learning about the traditions of Islam became a passion for the two young converts, as so often occurs among converts to any religion.

They left their high school years behind them with seemingly little regret. And they eventually travelled abroad, to Morocco, and to Mauritania, where Aaron Yoon was caught in a government security dragnet whose purpose was to identify, put on trial and incarcerate those whom government agents and the judiciary were certain were involved in terrorism.

While Ali Medlej and Xristos Katsiroubas went on their way, separate from Aaron Yoon, to make common cause with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more specifically an offshoot militia, one that planned a viciously audacious assault on a large Algerian gas extraction complex in a remote part of the desert. An assault that would leave them among the dead. A count that included 38 foreign In Aminas workers and 29 jihadists.

On word that Canadians had been among the In Aminas Islamist attackers, the RCMP dispatched a team to Algeria to confirm identities. And the RCMP in Canada recognized the names of the two friends, Ali and Xristos, as young men who had aroused their suspicion as far back as 2007, when they first began making enquiries about them. In the wake of the Algerian attack, the RCMP are back to making enquiries.


"Xris was a much more serious Muslim than Ali", confided one of their high school acquaintances, a young man who had been on the high school football team with Ali. "Ali certainly was not. He was a kid who drank and smoked, but I never saw Xris with any of those things."

"I was surprised when I read about Aaron studying Islamic texts -- Aaron study?" according to a former classmate at Cartier Public School. "He could never even remember when Confederation was."

Ali's personality is recalled by the many who knew him as dynamic, loud, amusing, and physically intimidating. Several of his former classmates described him as a bully -- in the words of one, a "wannabe thug". "He was definitely a bully in the sense that if he thought you were weak, he didn't respect you", claimed one former friend, and that characteristic is common in the Arab Middle East.

When Xristos Katsiroubas converted to Islam in 2004 he surrendered his given name in favour of Mustafa, more representative, he obviously felt, of his religious choice's origins. "I think he started going to the mosque because he was close with Ali. I think after a little while he felt at home there."

Ali began wearing traditional Islamic dress following high school, while Xristos grew a beard and in 2007 they both moved to Edmonton to look for work. That's where they got involved in petty crime, like shop-lifting. They eventually travelled to Morocco, then to Mauritania where Aaron began to study at an Islamic school or centre that authorities feel may have facilitated their curiosity about joining a jihadist group.

A senior fellow at the Fondation pur la Recherche Stratgegique in Paris explained that some Islamic schools serve as recruitment grounds for armed Islamic factions: "What you call a madrassa can be a very mainstream organization, but with one individual inside doing radical proselytism. You need to have the chance to meet someone, then convince him about your motivation without being monitored by the police."

When the In Amenas attack began on January 15, with 32 gunmen flooding into the gas plant, they took 800 foreign workers hostage. And began executing some of them. Eventually the majority of the hostages were set free. The Algerian military was held off for four days by the well-armed militants. The intention had been to destroy as much of the plant as they could by explosives.

On the last day of the siege an explosive charge was set, and it was responsible for the death of most of the hostages, as well as their attackers. Algeria's prime minister spoke afterward of the nationalities of the attackers: Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Malian, Nigerian, Mauritanian - and Canadian.

Ali's family let it be known that their son had died in motor accident. The families of the two London-area men in their early 20s are bereaved and devastated. They have nothing to say to the media and their private grief has not been intruded upon, even while everyone else in the area who might possibly throughout the years, come in contact with them, has been questioned.

This dramatic deviation from normalcy, this berserk and dangerous adventure that their sons embarked upon in their passion to be involved in something far bigger than merely living out their days in leafy, bucolic London, Ontario was nothing they could ever have envisioned for their sons.

And it most certainly was nothing that Canada could imagine might one day result from this country being caught up in a violent stand-off between democratic civilization and Medieval-era religious conquest.