THE SECRET MISSION THAT KILLED A CANADIAN
On a recent Saturday, Steve Krsnik made his way to the old manse where Valerie Carder lives with her dog, beside a family cemetery on Lake Erie, in a part of southwestern Ontario where farms sprout giant wind turbines.
Krsnik was slimmed down after 10 months in Syria, the last four as a sniper in a secretive international fighting unit called the 223.
Commanded by a former U.S. Marine from New York known as Servan Amriki, Kurdish for “American Warrior,” the unit’s official name was the Martyr Bagok unit, in honour of Ash “Bagok” Johnston, the first Western volunteer to die in the fight against ISIL. But informally they were just the 223, after Feb. 23, 2015 — the day the Australian was killed.
They were unique in the Syrian conflict: an anti-ISIL combat unit made up entirely of elite international volunteers, hand-picked by Servan.
Krsnik and Carder’s son, John Robert Gallagher, were both in the 223. Both were veterans of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Only one of them made it home alive, which was why Krsnik had to visit Carder, to tell her how her son had died.
When a motorcade brought Gallagher’s body home last November, hundreds lined overpasses along Highway 401. Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory sent condolence letters. “John was a good Canadian boy,” Don Cherry wrote to Gallagher’s mother.
But the circumstances of his death remained murky.
The letter his mother received from the General Command of the People’s Protection Units, under which the 223 fights, said only that “we lost our brave companion” in a “suicide attack” during “the fearless march toward the posts of the terrorist.”
Six months later, however, documents and eyewitness accounts detailing what happened that night in northeastern Syria, as well as interviews with former members of the 223 unit, suggest his death was much more complicated than his family was led to believe.
“I always questioned, why was John put in that position?”
A few weeks before visiting Carder, Krsnik sat in a coffee shop at a shopping mall in St. Catharines, Ont. He had grown up in the city, knowing he would one day be in the military.
At nearby Holy Cross Secondary School, Krsnik shared the hallways with Kuwaiti-Canadian brothers Mohamed and Abdul Rahman Jabarah. In 1999, Krsnik joined the Canadian reserves and the Jabarahs joined al-Qaida.
By the time Krsnik was deployed to Kandahar in 2006, the Jabarahs had already flamed out. Mohamed is now imprisoned for life in Colorado. Abdul Rahman was killed by Saudi security forces.
Krsnik returned to Afghanistan in 2009 for another nine months, then surprised everyone by leaving the military for a woman. He worked construction in Alberta and returned to Ontario to apprentice as an electrician.
But adjusting to non-military life was a struggle. The October 2014 attacks in SaintJean-sur-Richelieu, Que., and Ottawa upset him deeply. At the same time, he was troubled by the West’s lack of military assistance in Syria.
Last May, he flew to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq and crossed into Syria’s Kurdish-controlled region, called Rojava. After two weeks at the YPG training academy, he got his hands on a sniper rifle and was sent to the front line at Sarrin.
“He has a great reputation as a sniper,” said British fighter Steve Kerr, who entered Syria with Krsnik and trained with him. “I have the greatest respect for him because of that.”
Kerr said he heard that Krsnik had 39 confirmed kills. Krsnik’s own count is 37.
Six months into his tour, Krsnik was on the front line when he was told someone wanted to see him. He pulled back to a safe area and waited with a dozen other westerners. Servan Amriki eventually arrived, looking clean cut with short hair, a moustache and a YPG uniform.
Servan said he was a former U.S. Marine, and he was recruiting for an all-western fighting unit. Previously, western volunteers had been embedded with Kurdish YPG units, which had proven frustrating because of language, cultural and tactical differences.
“He gave us the lowdown on what he was doing and how things were going to be better,” said Krsnik, who liked what he heard. “I had hope in his promises,” Krsnik said.
Over coffee, they talked out the details and Servan told Krsnik he wanted him on his team.
Through an intermediary, Servan declined to answer questions. But in a BBC News video he said he had come to Syria in late 2014 after seeing photos of ISIL atrocities, in particular a nine-year-old boy nailed to a cross. “I need to fight ISIS,” he said. “If it takes someone’s life, even if it takes my life, so be it. This is a worthy cause.”
Around the third week of October, Krsnik arrived at the 223 base. As soon as he got there, Krsnik thought he heard another Canadian voice. He approached Gallagher, who said he was from Windsor, and they shook hands. “He was a nice guy,” Krsnik said. “My first impression of him was he was a hippie liberal that supports the military in general but believes that world peace is possible. He had very strong will and he loved to debate everything.”
Gallagher had obtained a master’s degree in political science at York University after leaving the military in 2005. Feeling restless, he had arrived in Iraq in April 2015. In an essay he posted on his Facebook page, he argued that theocratic tyrannies like the one ISIL was trying to impose had to be crushed so that jihadists would “join the modern world.”
“John was an idealist and believed in the cause of fighting ISIL,” said Tony Giddings, a British fire team leader who served with Gallagher in the 223 and has since returned home to the United Kingdom. “I liked him as he was keen to fight.”
“The unit is a good one,” Gallagher told his mother in an Oct. 30 Facebook message. “Right now we’re not worried about the regime, we’ve all sort of teamed up for a little while (to) wipe out ISIS once and for all. Should be fun. My team is really on the ball,” he wrote. “I’m not worried.” The 223 got its first assignment four days later. A Kurdish commander named Herval Farhat needed help clearing ISIL fighters from a cluster of houses southeast of Al Hasakah. Servan assembled a six-man team consisting of himself, a U.S. machine-gunner, an Israeli RPG gunner, a Croatian team leader and a Kurd named Sipan who was embedded with the unit. Gallagher was the point man.
Krsnik went ahead with his sniper rifle to provide cover for the advancing group. When he saw two ISIL fighters planting explosives near the main house where the extremists were sheltered, he relayed the information to Servan by radio, he said.
Giddings stayed at the rear, waiting to be called forward. He later said he thought it was a mistake to divide the unit up like that.
“We should have all gone together,” he said in an interview. But only a few fighters were needed for the operation and Servan was eager for the 223 to prove itself.
The half-dozen 223 fighters set out on foot after dark.
“These were mostly clusters of mud huts, essentially moderately sized villages,” said the machine-gunner, who went by Tex because he was from Texas. “We were slipping constantly because of the mud,” he said in interviews. “I remember John slipped and fell so hard his feet went in the air and we all laughed so hard.”
The 223 team reached a farmhouse and watched an American C-130 gunship pound ISIL for 30 minutes. They began to move again shortly before midnight, pushing along the left side of the village while Farhat’s team of four Kurdish fighters took the right flank.
They stopped behind a building and Tex heard a noise between the trees and the house where Krsnik had seen the ISIL fighters. He informed Servan and fired off two bursts from his PKM machine-gun. “I told John to throw a grenade into the shadow. I covered him as he prepped and threw the grenade,” the machine-gunner said. “It was a good throw.” But the RG34 grenade lets off a pop like a firecracker when it is engaged so it gave away Gallagher’s position. The ISIL fighters would know exactly where he was.
Three or four minutes went by in silence and then Tex saw something odd. Gallagher was on his feet. He was shouldering his rifle and seemed to be talking to someone. “In my mind,” the machine-gunner said, “I’m asking myself, ‘What the hell is he doing?’”
Servan saw it too. Gallagher was talking to an ISIL fighter wearing a suicide vest. He gave the order to shoot and the gunfire began. Gallagher spun back, hit by a bullet fired by the ISIL fighter. “As this was happening John screamed something that I will never forget and still can’t understand,” Tex said in an interview. “He yelled, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
Servan rushed to Gallagher. The ISIL fighter had been shot and lay a metre away but he was still alive. Apparently so he would not be captured or identified, the extremist held a grenade to his own head and blew it off. Although he was wearing a suicide vest packed with hundreds of ball bearings, it was never detonated. “John saved our lives that day,” said Tex, “because if he wasn’t there that guy would have blown us all up.”
The shrapnel from the ISIL grenade hit Servan but he was still able to drag Gallagher back about 30 metres. “I could hear John gasping for air,” Tex said. “I could see they were trying to find his wounds. I let off a couple of rounds at some movement and asked the commander to get on my machine-gun so I could go and treat John.
“I got the commander’s M-16 and went over to John and began trying to work on him. I could see a single gunshot wound to the hip. He wasn’t even bleeding anymore by this time. I checked his pulse. It was weak but it was still there.”
Tex stuffed gauze into the wound and wrapped it tight. Twenty minutes later a Humvee belonging to another unit arrived and they loaded Gallagher inside. “He was not moving or making any sound and did not appear to me to be conscious,” Jim Matthews, the gunner in the Humvee, said. They drove across the fields to a Red Cross ambulance. It took about 20 minutes to reach the ambulance but the Canadian was already gone.
From his position, Krsnik could tell someone had been hit. He heard the gunfire and the code word for a casualty. But he didn’t know until he left his position in the morning that it was Gallagher. Krsnik had the same question as everyone else: Why did Gallagher stand instead of shooting?
“I’m unable to speculate as to why that was,” Matthews wrote in a recent email to Gallagher’s mother. “But perhaps it does him credit, if he was reluctant to open fire in the absence of certainty. Too many people shoot first and ask questions later. And while that approach may have saved his life it appears that John was not of that nature.”
An autopsy found that Gallagher had a 9mm bullet entrance wound in his lower right abdomen. The bullet had passed through him but struck an artery and he died of blood loss, it said.
Following Gallagher’s death, Krsnik said he began to question the 223 unit’s leadership. He also started looking into the commander. His research revealed that Servan was a 42-year-old New York orthodontist and former Marine named Dr. Peter Theodorou. In 2006, the New York Post listed Theodorou as one of the “25 sexiest New Yorkers.”
After a falling out with Servan, Krsnik arrived back in Toronto in early March. He said he had no regrets. Like the Jabarah brothers, the ISIL fighters he saw through the scope of his sniper rifle were on the wrong side. “Those people chose their path and I chose mine,” he said. “I have a pretty clear conscience about it.”
Reflecting on the 223’s disastrous first operation, Krsnik didn’t blame Gallagher, but said he had been out of the military for a decade and had never taken part in a gun battle. “I don’t think he was ready to be put into that situation, to be thrown right into the firefight.”
I DON’T THINK HE WAS READY TO BE PUT INTO THAT SITUATION, TO BE THROWN RIGHT INTO THE FIREFIGHT. — STEVE KRSNIK, SNIPER WITH THE 223 JOHN SAVED OUR LIVES THAT DAY.