Canadian veteran fighting ISIL arrested in Iraq, says mom
TORONTO — A Canadian military veteran who has spent the past six months fighting ISIL alongside Kurdish forces has been arrested in northern Iraq, his mother said.
Michael Kennedy, 32, was on his way to Sulaymaniyah, trying to make it home to Newfoundland for Christmas, when he was taken into custody by Iraqi Kurdish authorities, said his mother Kay Kennedy.
“All I know is he’s been arrested and he’s in Erbil,” she said from Saint Vincent’s, Nfld. She said she got the news from a Kurdish friend of her son’s. “He said nobody knows the reasons.”
He has been held since Tuesday in Erbil, said Kennedy, adding the affair has been hard on her because she lost another son, Pte. Kevin Kennedy of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on April 8, 2007.
It is not unusual for the Kurdistan regional government of Masoud Barzani to arrest Western volunteer fighters as they are leaving Iraq on the grounds they have overstayed their visas and must pay fines.
But Kennedy’s visa was valid until January, said his mother. She said she last spoke to her son Monday when he was in Dohuk and he told her he was coming home through Sulaymaniyah, Dubai and Toronto.
Several dozen Canadians, many of them military veterans, are among the hundreds of foreign volunteers assisting Kurdish militias on the front lines against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Ottawa has verbally discouraged Canadians from taking up arms against ISIL but has not stopped them from travelling, although some have been questioned by the RCMP.
Kennedy served in the Canadian Forces for 13 years, including a Navy deployment in the Gulf of Aden, she said. Three months after leaving the military in March, he made his way to northern Syria.