The Struggle for Relevance in a Violent World

"I try not to oversimplify it. I try not to make this about good versus evil. Obviously any human situation is more complicated than that. But at the same time, this is pretty much as close as it gets. I mean, there’s really no compromise with this kind of enemy. There’s no middle ground to be found with this kind of enemy."
"I’m prepared to give my life in the cause of averting the disaster we are stumbling towards as a civilization. A free Kurdistan would be good enough cause for any internationalist, but we are fortunate enough to be able to risk our necks for something more important and more righteous than anything we’ve faced in generations,” he wrote. “With some fortitude and guts, we can purge the sickness that’s poisoning our society, and come together to defeat this ultimate evil. I’ve been fighting this battle in one way or another for my entire life. I hope for success. The rest is in the hands of the gods."
 John Robert Gallagher, former member of Canadian military, former Kurdish fighter

John Gallagher died Nov. 4 in Syria. (Image released by the Canadian Heroes Foundation)

"You could just tell that from the messages that we received back… He had been angry and frustrated and feeling impotent about effecting change, so to be able to go there and do that, he really was glad to go."
"And it wasn’t that he intended to die. He wasn’t going off on some sort of, glory-bound … he didn’t have a live fast, ‘love hard, die young’ kind of philosophy."
Valerie Carder, John Gallagher's mother

People pay their respects to John Gallagher on an overpass where his hearse passed through in London, Ontario on Friday

This was a man with a global sense of responsibility and a vision of nobility; that he would place himself directly in harm's way to become involved in a violent conflict taking place halfway across the world from Canada, where he was safe and warm and loved. He indulged in the kind of introspection that few bother to entertain since human nature emphasizes our own safety and security as a survival mechanism.

His moral sense of right and wrong enabled him to do what most can not; rise above his personal security to commit to help others achieve security.

In the battle between the forces of good and evil he identified evil and he set about working on behalf of good, to try to help embattled tribal people afflicted with the malign presence of a fascist ideology drawing inspiration from Islamic writings on the responsibility of jihad for the faithful tasked with spreading the faith through whatever means conceivable.

The jihadists associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant conceived of atrocities whose brutality shocked the world, just as much as their implacable indulgence in ever more horrendous slaughter continues to do.

Into this maelstrom of human-derived evil strode John Gallagher, 32, a former infantryman with the Canadian Armed Forces, to offer his sympathy and his services to the Kurdish fighters against Daesh in Iraq and in Syria. He fought with the Iraqi Peshmerga, and he fought with the Syrian YPG.

And two weeks ago John Gallagher died, fighting alongside the Kurdish forces, as a Canadian volunteer, one among a dozen of like-minded Canadians from various walks of life agreeing on the need to respond to terrorism wherever it lurks.

Canada's Kurdish community adopted John Gallagher as one of their own. They wanted to honour him and they have done so.

Yesterday, arrangements made by Canada's diplomatic community with help from the military conveyed his body from the Middle East to Canada. With local police and firefighters providing an honour guard, John Gallagher's body was driven down part of the Highway of Heroes, a 105-mile section of  the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway, to proceed to his hometown of Blenheim, Ontario.


Kurdish soldiers carry the coffin of fellow fighter John Robert Gallagher, a Canadian military veteran who died Nov. 4 in battle with Islamic State fighters, during his funeral in Hasaka, Syria, on Nov. 12. REUTERS/Rodi Said

John Gallagher, whose Kurdish fighting name was Gabar Rojava ("He's a Kurdish martyr and he is one of us"), had served in the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry before leaving the Forces in 2005. In April of this year he travelled to Iraq to first fight with the Peshmerga, then crossed into Syria to join the YPG.

He believed he was duty-bound to oppose ISIL, as a humanitarian cause, in a need to deny a totalitarian ideology engaging in mass slaughter, its opportunities to continue.


Kurdish soldiers drive toward the Iraqi border from Iraq with the coffin of fellow fighter John Robert Gallagher, a Canadian who died on Nov. 4. REUTERS/Rodi Said