Canadian veteran fighting ISIL is held in Iraq
Arrested while heading home for Christmas
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 in an interview Sunday.
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 Ken- nedy, 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 i n 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.
She said he was at a restaurant with friends and sounded upbeat but when she called him back later that night, his mood had changed. “I could tell by his voice there was something off.”
Several dozen Canadians, many of them military vet- erans, 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 or arrested them upon their return, although some have been questioned by the RCMP.
Kennedy served in the Canadian Forces f or 13 years, i ncluding a Navy deployment in t he Gulf of Aden, she said. Three months after leaving the military in March, he made his way to northern Syria.
“He decided to go over there in June. He decided to go fight ISIS after reading about what those Kurdish people were going through,” his mother said. “Michael decided to do this as sort of a humanitarian thing.”
He fought initially with the YPG militia in northern Syria. About a month ago, he crossed into Iraq and has been fighting around Shingal, his mother said. The area is where ISIL kidnapped and murdered hundreds of Yazidis.
“Then he decided, ‘After six months there, mom, it’s time for me to come home, I’m exhausted,’ ” she said, adding he had told her, “I’ ll be home f or Christmas, mom.” She said she had contacted Global Affairs Canada over the weekend and was told “they’d get back to me.”