DOING OUR DUTY

THERE WILL BE MORE OMAR KHADRS IN CANADA’S FUTURE. WE NEED A PLAN TO DEAL WITH THAT

Omar Khadr gave an address at Dalhousie University earlier this week. He spoke on a panel discussing child soldiers. Nothing he said was particularly interesting, but the reaction was — Canadians remain locked in on their views of Khadr. To some, he’s a traitor, who fought against the Western alliance in support of al-Qaida, reportedly killing a U.S. soldier, Army medic Christopher Speer, in 2002. To others, he’s the product of an abusive family, indoctrinated by a terrorist father into radicalism at a young age, only to be abandoned by the Canadian government after he was wounded and captured by U.S. forces at age 15, left to rot in Guantanamo Bay because bringing him home, as was Canada’s legal duty, was too politically dicey for prime ministers Liberal and Conservative.

Both positions are accurate, which is why there’ll never be any progress on the issue. It’s true that Khadr was failed by his family and government, it’s equally true that he took up arms against that government, and despite saying upon his release that he wanted to give Canadians a chance to understand he’s not a violent man, he’s done nothing to explain his version of events, or how they changed his perspective. Until he does, if ever, no minds will change.

But the focus on Khadr, his cash settlement, his views on jihad, all obscure a bigger, ongoing problem. Canada has learned nothing from Omar Khadr’s experience. And the proof of that can be found in Syria today.

Let’s boil Khadr’s story down to its barest essence: he was a Canadian citizen, fighting against Canada and its allies as a member of a terrorist group. If he’d been killed in battle, that would have been easy, a clear if violent end to a thorny issue. (This is why so many of our allies see value in killing their terrorist citizens with drones — less paperwork that way.) But Khadr lived, was captured and became a legal nightmare. And the same thing is happening today with foreign fighters, including Canadians, who travelled overseas to fight with the Islamic State.

This is a new normal. It’s been generations since Canada waged a ground war against another nation-state. There were battles, yes, during peacekeeping missions, and the air campaign against Serbia in the late 1990s, but no sustained pitched ground combat against other nation-state forces since Korea. For now and the foreseeable future, Canada is as likely, if not more likely, to be fighting irregular terror groups than properly constituted national armies. And there’s a very good chance that some of those combatants will be Canadians, or citizens of allied nations.

In 2002, when Khadr was captured, though Canada’s legal obligations were obvious, the government could at least plausibly claim to have been dealing with a novel situation. It’s a weak excuse, because the same was true for all the Western nations that found their citizens interned at Gitmo, and most of those responded much faster and better than Canada did. Still, whatever truth there was to that claim in 2002, it’s long gone by 2020. There will be other Khadrs — in fact, there are other Khadrs, or people akin to him, right now.

Last week, Kurdish officials in Syria announced that they would begin local trials for a thousand men captured during battles against the Islamic State. Some of the men are local. But many are from foreign countries, and there are also women and children being held by the

Syrians, relatives of these men. Global News reported last week that among these thousands of prisoners are dozens of Canadians. The Kurds have been begging the international community to step in and take their detained nationals home for prosecution. Canada is not doing anything to bring them home, claiming it has no legal obligation to do so, and that the area is not safe enough to send in Canadian officials, anyway.

We don’t know what kind of trials the Kurds intend, how they’ll be carried out, and what sentences will be levied. We’ve washed our hands of this, and if the Kurds decide to machine-gun them all against the nearest wall, one gets the feeling that Canadian officials would tut-tut, but be privately glad that it’s over and done with.

But the Kurds might just decide to hurl all the prisoners into dungeons, to rot for a few decades of abuse and despair, but then let them all out. Or a change in government may result in a future Canadian PM deciding to bring them all home from said dungeons. At which point, we’ll end up signing a bunch more compensation cheques. Or maybe the Kurds will just let everyone out, or are unable to contain them, and a new Islamic State forms around these prisoners, who likely haven’t been deradicalized much by their time in prison camps.

The problems are predictable, and certain. The best answer is for Canada and all other advanced nations to own up to the problem of their jihadist citizens, bring them home and punish them. There are legal challenges here — we don’t always have a lot of evidence to use in a trial for crimes that occur off our soil — but the challenges here are at least challenges we can deal with. It won’t be easy, and will require sustained political will, but it beats any of the alternatives.

But we haven’t shown much interest in doing this. So we’ll ignore the problem, and hope that some prison break doesn’t create a new terror state or that no one lives long enough to sue us. It’s not much of a plan, and if it blows up in our face (perhaps literally), no one can claim we weren’t warned.

IT WON’T BE EASY, AND WILL REQUIRE SUSTAINED POLITICAL WILL.

FADEL SENNA / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES / FILES These men suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State group are being held in a cramped prison cell in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakeh. Kurdish officials say they are prepared to start putting the prisoners on trial.