Existential Angst?

"It's very difficult for us, actually, to tell who in fact is over there. This individual has disappeared and we don't believe it's simply because he's gone to visit relatives in Europe.
"There could be hundreds of people dying in the course of a battle and the bodies are buried and that's the end. We don't have a police presence that would be able to say, 'All right, let's sort out the dead here."
Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews

Photo: EPA

 

American intelligence experts estimate that from the period July 2012 to May 2013, 60 citizens of Libya, 47 from Tunisia, 44 Saudi Arabians, 32 Jordanians, 27 Egyptians and 20 Lebanese nationals died fighting with the rebels in Syria. In total a number of 280 militants from various countries are estimated to have been killed in the raging sectarian violence ongoing in the country between the regime and the opposition.

 

The vast majority of the militants fought for the terror group Al-Nusra Dzhebhat, according to a report released by the Washington Institute on the Near East and the New York-based thinktank Flashpoints Global Partners, specializing in terrorism research. Most slipped into Syria from neighbouring Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East. And some were sourced elsewhere.

 

Canadian intelligence has an approximate idea of the numbers leaving Canada to travel overseas to where the action is. Some have surfaced dead, as in Algeria, and others are suspected to be in places like Tunisia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan -- and, of course, Syria. Syria is where a young man whose activities brought RCMP attention to his whereabouts is likely to have engaged himself with Al-Nusra. The RCMP think so, and the young man's mother now thinks so as well, for they have informed her.

 

A Canadian was one of several rebels killed by regime forces on May 31. There were also British and American fighters who met their deaths at that time. Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a television documentary showing a Canadian going by the name Abu Muslim raising an assault rifle in Aleppo. He was with the brigade called Katiba al-Muhajireen, comprised of foreign fighters. The interviewer asked about his parents' opinion of his activities.

 

"On the one hand, they are happy I'm taking my own path, doing my own thing and helping people. At the same time, they don't understand entirely why I'm here", he responded. Does he, himself? The Alberta mother of a missing convert to Islam informed by the RCMP her son is not in Europe as she thought, but rather in Syria, fighting with the rebels, is decidedly not happy that her son is taking his own path. She would prefer he remained in Canada.

 

"He had a rough go. He has a higher than normal IQ so his intelligence level and emotional intelligence level did not meet when he was going through those teen years, obviously, and he didn't feel like he fit in anywhere", she said. He became depressed, attempted suicide by swallowing antifreeze. Released from hospital he began considering converting to Islam. How that presented as an antidote to his angst is a mystery.

"And that's when everything started changing. He started bringing up stuff about the rest of the world. He started getting a little bit more forceful when he was talking about the religion and how important it was, certain beliefs that all of a sudden he started coming across about having more than one wife, and just some not-so-Western cultural type things where he was kind of going off the wall a bit."

In Syria, fighting with the rebels now -- not where he assured his mother he had gone to. But he called home on occasion. As he did in late February. "He just said he had priorities and that there are women and children being tortured there, and it couldn't go on anymore and he had to do something productive with his life, which was better than he was doing here in Canada, and that he couldn't stay in Canada with the way things are, the way the world is, and that the afterlife is a better place to be anyways so if that's what his destiny is then that's what he needs to do."

"He was born and raised -- I was born and raised -- here. I mean, I'm as Canadian as Canadian gets. And it's a struggle to understand it and it's hard. The longer it goes on the harder it gets. You just get worn down."