John Gallagher goes home on Highway of Heroes
Canadian killed helping Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIL
John Gallagher travelled more than 9,000-kilometres to northern Iraq and then Syria to fight for what he believed in. On Friday he made the long journey home to southern Ontario on the Highway of Heroes.
Just over two weeks after the former infantryman was shot while helping Syrian Kurdish fighters expel ISIL, his mother, Valerie Carder, placed a white rose on his flag-draped casket in Toronto.
She hugged her family and wept, surrounded by military veterans and a large crowd of Toronto Kurds, who had come to pay their respects to Gallagher, 32, the first Canadian volunteer to die fighting alongside Kurdish forces.
Following the wreath laying ceremony, held under a blustery blue sky, dozens of cars and trucks decorated with Canadian flags and posters of Gallagher in uniform set off from a Toronto funeral home at noon under police escort.
“Kurds consider him a hero,” said Dojan Dojan, a Kurdish-Canadian who held a yellow sign showing Gallagher, who was identified by his Kurdish fighter name Gabar Rojava. “He’s a Kurdish martyr and he is one of us.”
Hundreds lined overpasses, saluting, waving flags and holding Thank You signs as the procession followed Highway 401 west to Blenheim, Ont., where a private service was to take place. Local police and fire fighters were to provide an honour guard. A public memorial was to take place in Toronto at a later date.
In Chatham-Kent, the procession was met by a crowd of people who released balloons, while many others who turned out displayed pictures of Gallagher.
A family member tweeted that a Second World War veteran in his 90s joined the motorcade.
“It’s so touching even just to see the lone people who have stopped in fields or have their hats to their hearts,” Gallagher’s brother Tweeted from his car as the procession neared its end. “There are people wrapped in blankets in ChathamKent who have been waiting all day. For us. For John.”
It’s so touching even just to see the lone people who have stopped in fields or have their hats to their hearts.
Sinam Mohamad, co-chair of the Council of Democratic Society Movement-Rojava, which represents Syrian Kurds, said while Gallagher was helping defend Kurds from ISIL atrocities, the Paris attacks showed the conflict was broader “because these barbarians, they are threatening everybody.”
Gallagher had served in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry before leaving the Canadian Forces in 2005. He left for Iraq in April and fought with the Iraqi peshmerga before crossing into Syria to join the YPG.
In an essay that seems prescient following last week’s terrorist attacks in France, Gallagher explained that he had decided to fight with the Kurds not only because their cause was worthy but because he believed he had a duty to oppose theocratic movements like ISIL.
“Slavery, fascism, and communism were all bad ideas which required costly sacrifice before they were finally destroyed. In our time, we have a new bad idea: Theocracy,” he wrote. “We are all on the front lines of this conflict, whether we know it or not.”
Before dawn on Nov. 4, Gallagher was near Al-Hasakeh, Syria, where the YPG was retaking a village from ISIL, when he was shot. He was one of about a dozen Canadian volunteers fighting ISIL on the front lines.
An autopsy at the Al-Malikiyah international hospital found he had a 9mm bullet entrance wound in his lower right abdomen. The bullet passed through him but struck an artery. The cause of death was listed as “bleeding due to an injury of gunshot.”
Fellow fighters paraded his casket through the streets before he was transported to Irbil, Iraq. With the assistance of Canadian diplomats, he was flown to Amman, Jordan, for repatriation flights to Montreal and then Toronto.
“He lived by a soldier’s code,” said Sgt. Brent Shriner, chair of the Canadian Heroes Foundation, who was on hand for the ceremonies. Even after leaving the military, Gallagher continued to honour his duties, he said. “When people were hurting, John acted on it.”