Heroes honours for Gallagher questioned
He was a volunteer fighter in a war in which Canada has no regular troops on the ground.
The group he fought with has murky ties to a group Canada officially lists as a terrorist organization.
John Gallagher, 32, who grew up in Southwestern Ontario and died fighting alongside Kurdish forces against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant in Syria, will get a hero’s welcome home Friday when his body is returned from the Middle East.
His death — and the Highway of Heroes-style salute planned for him — opens a new chapter in Canada’s military story, one highlighting the shifting nature of allegiances and the tricky job of honouring those who serve.
“He used to be in the military,” said Casper Koevoets of the Royal Canadian Legion’s Victory branch in London. “He was fighting the right fight that he believed in. I think he deserves a hero’s welcome home,”
Gallagher was killed Nov. 4 in Syria by an ISIL “suicide attack” on Kurdish fighters with the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a group that actively recruits Englishspeaking fighters.
Canada has Special Forces advisers working with Kurdish peshmerga forces in northern Iraq, one of whom — the first casualty of the fight against ISIL — was killed in March in a so-called friendly fire incident. Canada also has military jets flying raids against ISIL as part of a U.S.-led coalition, a mission Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to suspend.
Gallagher, though, was different — a Canadian offering his services on his own, who’d retired from the military a few years after Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan began.
His body will be driven Friday from Toronto to Blenheim, southwest of London, with OPP and other police forces providing escorts along the way.
The Canadian Heroes Foundation is asking Ontarians to line overpasses and roadsides along the nation’s busiest super-highway, Highway 401, when his body journeys home.
“Canadians have fought in foreign wars for a very long time. Some did it for noble reasons, others not so much,” said Peter Denton, an adjunct associate professor of history at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont.
“For this kind of public call to remember and honour, who makes the decision as to which ones (and which people) should be highlighted? While I honour (Gallagher) for his past service to Canada, the murky boundaries of these kinds of conflicts makes it harder to tell who is on the side of the angels than in other wars. And things change, too, as alliances shift.”
Because he was a volunteer fighter, Gallagher is not entitled to a full-blown military repatriation.