Religious Musical Chairs

"The ski masks here aren't for the cold." You know, it's different in Canada. It is cold here, we do tend to bundle up for the cold. In places like the Middle East it can get cold, they can get snow, but even in the clement months of summer and spring there are those who effect the Canadian-winter look. Very dashing. Actually, sinister in their implications. And that's precisely the perception that is meant as the takeaway when confronted with some dark haired man jauntily clad in battle fatigues, wearing a face mask.

A murderous Islamist group called ISIS is obstructing Syrian rebels in their battle against President Bashar Assad's regime. The Free Syrian Army seems barely able to put up a fight in the face of their brutal tactics. Here, a photo posted on the group's Facebook site.

In fact, the man who made that facetious statement would know about ski masks as opposed to those affected by Islamist jihadis, since he is Canadian. A young Canadian who converted in his teens to Islam, and who now can be considered to have finally reached the desire of his aspirations, to become a martyr for Islam. Remotely, his death has been reported; 22-year-old former Calgary resident Damian Clairmont, aka Mustafa al-Gharib, or alternately Abu Talha al-Canadi.

He's been in Syria for a year. And he has kept in touch with his mother, who had no idea her son was planning to travel to Syria; his destination, he had informed her, was to be Egypt, where he planned to study. He has also been amenable, while in Syria, to intermittent contact with the news media in Canada to keep them abreast up to a point, of what he has been perceiving, though not what he has actually been doing. Obliquely it was clear he was engaging in Syria in the conflict ongoing there.

"Things are just about the same as they were before. Those groups [al-Qaeda] have been present a very long time but have just increased their numbers significantly. The infighting is minor and usually lasts a day or two if not hours. This usually consists of groups removing other groups that kill, rape, steal, use/sell drugs, and often even collaborate with the regime so few people are actually complaining here on the ground.
"As for those al-Qaeda types, they are clearly dominant everywhere you go but they do not steal or rape or sell drugs or murder or kidnap for ransom and so on. They are also the most effective fighting forces here and are in many cases single-handedly holding off the regime and their friends in many places while many others sit in the bases getting fat off crime and foreign money/aid. They do not bother me or my friends on top of all of this, and so I cannot bring myself to complain about them even if we have differences in opinion in several matters", he offered a journalist.

DPA  This photo provided by the Syrian Arab News Agency shows Syrian soldiers on patrol in Aleppo. The rebels are 

being ground down by a war fought on two fronts, with Assad in front and the jihadists behind. 

 

The young man had been born in Nova Scotia to an Acadian Catholic family which moved to Calgary and then dissolved in divorce when he was about six. Said to be highly intelligent, he seemed not to 'fit in' at high school, and so slipped out of high school, and spent several years hermetically sealed at home, until he attempted suicide, but found salvation in surrendering to the allure of a religion unlike his own and became a Muslim.

"He's definitely with some kind of jihadist group", his mother had said, angry she hadn't been informed that Canadian intelligence had been investigating his activities and following him for quite a while on suspicion of jihadist sympathies and actions. "How are we as parents supposed to arm ourselves or have an idea what's going on so we can stop as much as we can on our end if they're not going to let us in on it? Because that's what happened to me. They knew all along, they were following my son for two years apparently and they didn't tell me until three months after he had gone."

His mother did have some idea that things were not at all well with her son. She realized that he had absorbed what she termed anti-western views, discerned through his comments. She watched while he became extremely devout as a Muslim. Although devout needn't necessarily lead to fanaticism, it often does. Thought to have been inducted into jihad through a Calgary mosque. And this is what happened to her son; she perhaps might not have wanted to believe investigators had they informed her of their suspicions; she had her own, but appeared to have done nothing to act on them. It isn't easy being a parent.

"The benefit for myself in terms of the worldly life is most certainly back in Canada where I could see my family, indulge in fornication and infidelity legally and limitlessly and stagger around poisoned on intoxicants and then lie to myself and the world about 'Freedom' and how fantastic it is. After all, that is what we were conditioned to believe since our school days, was it not? Challenging those learned assumptions, questioning them and actually being willing to change yourself is always much harder to do. My doing so caused a search for truth and ended in a conclusion that Islam was the answer. With that came Islam's concept of working for an afterlife that never ends. ... An eternity in Paradise cannot be traded for 70 years (if that) of this place."

Not entirely rational, to be sure. Damian Clairmont discovered in Syria that the Muslims he left Canada to join in their moral battle for equality and freedom from the talons of a Muslim Syrian dictator didn't stop those who opposed their murderous tyrant from themselves raping, pillaging, destroying, drugging themselves, becoming intoxicated with the power of life and death over others. What did he gain by transferring his hope from Christianity to Islam other than an early death?

He spurned the opportunity to live to 70 with the Catholic belief that as a good human being he would end up in Heaven, choosing instead to cling to Islam and an early, violent death which made him a martyr deserving of a place in Paradise, to be served by willing virgins. In Heaven he would have debated morality with the spirits of those who had gone before him. In Paradise he can happily deflower females placed there by the divine for his pleasure, perhaps a form of rape, but cleansed in his fevered imagination.

REUTERS  Free Syrian Army fighters carry one of their wounded during a clash with forces 

loyal to President Bashar Assad in Aleppo this November. The balance of power among the rebels

 has shifted. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) has steadily shrunk while waiting in the vain hope of 

military aid from the US, meanwhile jihadist groups like the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" 

(ISIS), an al-Qaida branch that broke away from Osama Bin Laden's successors, is moving in 

with brutal new tactics.