Such a Nice Boy - Ask Anyone!

"We are aware of reports that a Canadian was killed while allegedly fighting [as a member of Islamic State]. We are following the situation closely."
Foreign Affairs spokesperson

"We did have the young man with us for a few years. I have a very vivid recollection of him being a very friendly, very sociable member of the school community."
"The young man was a respectful and hard-working student. He was friendly, sociable, very academically oriented. He was a vibrant member of the community. He was involved in extracurricular activities."
"It is a very difficult and challenging piece of news for us to take. I'm hoping there is a horrible mistake or error because it is very hard to correlate what you say with the person we knew. Something like this, if it indeed is correct, is going to impact a lot of people here. There are a lot of questions."
Susanna Fortino-Bozzo, principal, St.Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, Hamilton, Ontario

"He was very outgoing and confident. He wasn't afraid to speak his mind. Just to run for student council in Grade 9 shows his confidence and ambition."
Jacqueline Fitzmaurice, former student president

"He used to pray but he increased it to 24 hours of prayers, and he was rarely away from mosques."
"He arranged his travel without my knowledge, and then he ended up in Syria."
"All of us are very saddened. We did not expect he would do this."
Father of Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Web   An image of Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, known as “Mo3” to friends in Hamilton, Ont., was posted online with a notice claiming he had died fighting with ISIS.

An all-around good-natured, friendly, fun-loving fellow. He lived with his mother Asha, in Hamilton, and visited with his father who lives in Minneapolis. The last visit was in July when Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud left his father's home to attend the local mosque. And then, somehow never managed to find his way back to his father. Two months later, this good natured young man called his mother to let her know he was now with the "brothers" in Syria.

Reports have it now that he didn't last very long with the brothers in Syria, playing out their lethal game of jihad and martyrdom. While it's not known how much of a dedicated jihadist young Mohamud was, in the sense of whether or how many other human beings he managed to dispatch before he was blessedly martyred, his goal appears to have been reached, and he is now a bit of a celebrity; his name, widely shared world-wide, but not necessarily in triplicate, is on a proud roster of martyrs.

Evidently following the battle between the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham in northern Syria, Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, 20, was killed. Leading a number of other Canadian jihadists plying their jihadist trade in Syria to report on Twitter that they had survived the conflict that could have propelled them into Paradise, but young "Mo3", as he was playfully called, had not. He perished gratefully, it would seem, during Islamic State raids on Kurdish villages close to the Turkish border.

He had been, it appears, hugely appreciative of the entertainment and educational value inherent in video games. Chatting on line about Call of Duty, a popular series of first-person shooter games appreciated for their realistic and intense combat simulation, it would seem he hankered for the real deal. He responded to the Islamist call to duty, becoming a jihadist of determined persuasion. Perhaps imagining that the Kurds he was attacking were no more real than the figures appearing in the video games.