National Post (National Edition)
‘Complete hell’: Family mourns Canadian fighter killed in Syria
KURDS NEGOTIATED WITH ISIL TO RECOVER 24-YEAR-OLD’S REMAINS
NIAGARA FALLS, ONT. •Sincethe day she found out her son had been killed in Syria, Tina Martino wanted one thing: to bury him at home in Niagara Falls. She got her wish on Wednesday, but it was a long, hard wait.
The ISIL extremists who killed Nazzareno Tassone on Dec. 21 not only posted photos of him on the Internet, they also kept his body like a trophy.
“Complete hell,” was how she described the wait to a reporter before a motorcade left Toronto to carry Tassone’s casket along the shore of Lake Ontario to his resting place. “I would not want to wish this on any mother.”
Following a packed service at St. Andrew’s United Church in Niagara Falls, mourners stood at his gravesite holding roses and Kurdish flags. “May God grant peace to the family,” Pastor Reid Cooke said as a breeze rustled the maple trees.
In an interview, Martino spoke about her six months of anguish and revealed one particular low point: when allies of her son took revenge on a captured Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighter and broadcast it on social media.
“They actually did it live,” said Martino, a Niagara Falls casino dealer. “They shot him and shot him and then they kicked him and booted him and punched him and just said, ‘We did this for you, mama.’ ”
She said she was angered by the act of vengeance; it wasn’t what she wanted. “I told them two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said. “I can see fighting for a cause, but I can’t see the torture. I don’t understand.”
Martino has spent countless hours trying to understand. Her son, 24, an avid video-gamer, had wanted to join the Canadian military but it hadn’t worked out. Short of money and upset about a breakup, he left Edmonton on June 21, 2016.
He told Martino he would be teaching English to Iraqi children but, in truth, he had arranged to join the People’s Protection Units, better known as the YPG, the Kurdish armed group fighting ISIL in northern Syria.
At the YPG training academy, he got an old rifle and a Kurdish name, Agir.
“Seen a lot of s--t here already. But what I’ve seen has made me truly realize … we have to win,” he wrote to a friend, Mike Webster, on Facebook.
He took part in an operation to retake Manbij, and in December, joined the advance toward Raqqa, ISIL’s de facto capital. Tassone wrote to Webster that he was “worried about this one my friend. It’s going … bad.”
According to fellow fighters, Tassone was part of a team of four Westerners. “We joined an assault on a village, but were ambushed,” according to a letter that one of them, who went by the nom de guerre Andok Cotkar, wrote to Martino.
Tassone was killed along with British fighter Ryan Locke and three Kurds. A survivor of the unit, Andy Woodhead, told Martino in a letter that Tassone died “bravely, loading ammunition for his comrades even though already injured in the hand.”
On Jan. 3, Toronto Kurdish community leaders drove to Niagara Falls to deliver the news. They spoke about negotiations with ISIL to recover his body, but after five months, Martino was ready to accept that he would never be found.
She decided to hold a memorial without him. It was to take place on May 20.
The weekend before the service, however, Kurdish fighters contacted her. They said they had found Tassone’s remains. Two days later, the YPG wrapped his coffin in the colours of the Kurdish flag and paraded him to an ambulance for the drive to Erbil, Iraq.
Martino announced on Facebook that, “my son is coming home.” But when she received the autopsy report, she began to doubt it was really him. The Iraqi coroner had described Tassone as 6-3 and mid-30s with blond hair. Her son, however, was 5-10, a decade younger and had what his mother called “mousy” brown hair.
In addition, the coroner found no evidence Tassone was shot, as Martino had been told. Rather, he had died from a skull fracture caused by a blow from a “heavy solid instrument.” The report also said there were cigarettes burns on his body and marks around his neck and wrists that suggested he had been tortured — none of which was visible in the photos and video ISIL had posted.
Martino contacted Global Affairs and the same coroner examined the body again on June 4. The new autopsy report altered the description: He was now 5-7, “blond/ brown hair” and “mid-20s.” Using dental records Martino had sent, the coroner declared a 100 per cent match.
Another autopsy performed after his remains returned to Canada on June 10 confirmed it was him.
Addressing his funeral Wednesday, Tassone’s sister Francine Faulkner said that when her brother left for Iraq, she feared he might lose his life in a terrorist attack. “I never thought it would be because he picked up a weapon and chose to fight.”
The family has discouraged Canadians from enlisting with Kurdish armed groups.
But Martino said that in the photos taken in Syria, she believed her son looked happy.
“He definitely lived his dream. It didn’t last long, but he lived what he really wanted to do.”