Canada's Terrorists Are Canada's Problem.

The Kurds should not be made to look after Canada's jihadist adventurers. At long last, a federal judge is holding the Trudeau government's feet to the fire.

This newsletter should give you all the backstory you need about a federal court ruling last week that should finally force Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to live up to his high-drama 2015 election proclamation that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”

I say should. We’ll see. For four years, Ottawa has dodged and weaved and manufactured alibis and bogus excuses in order to keep a couple of dozen Canadians (half of them children) in prison camps in the Kurdish-held territory in Syria, most of them at al-Roj, near the Iraqi border.

I took this photo at al-Roj on my way to the Kurdish front back in 2014. The camp was already filling with thousands of Yazidis, Kurds and Arabs displaced by ISIL’s terror.

Last week’s decision by Justice Henry Brown slammed the door on Ottawa’s last-ditch attempt to run away from the constitutional issues involved. That’s the the subject of my column this week. We’ll see if the Trudeau government figures a way to climb through a window.

After years of litigation and agitation, and with the federal court decision looming, Ottawa said, okay, we’ll take the women and the kids. The judge said, no, that’s not good enough. The four men are entitled to the same consideration. They’re entitled to passports or emergency travel documents delivered by an official Canadian representative.

I sympathize with the “let the men rot” sentiment out there, but only with the sentiment. Yes, there are all sorts of national-security and criminal-prosecution questions raised by repatriation. But a serious country doesn’t unload its jihadist riffraff onto some misbegotten administration in a rebel-held territory where the good guys are already surrounded by enemies.

I hope you forgive my attitude but I’ve been on this story for quite a while. Here’s an in-depth inquiry I carried out for Maclean’s magazine nearly two years ago, before Maclean’s turned into a bourgie Toronto Life replica. By then, I’d already been covering the Syrian disaster for several years - the democratic revolution, the massive refugee crisis, the rise of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), the Kurdish struggle, and the Yazidi pogrom that drew NATO into the fray.

I’d made it into Northern Syria with the Kurdish resistance, met with the Syrian democratic leadership in Ankara and the Free Syrian Army underground in Amman, spent time in the refugee camps in Jordan, and traveled across Eastern Turkey and Northern Iraq to the shadows of Mount Sinjar, where the Yazidis were being butchered like sheep.

Here’s a full-page frontline report on the Yazidi pogrom I filed to the Ottawa Citizen. Here’s a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal from Syria’s Kurdish territory when the battles were still raging, before the siege of Baghuz Fawkani. At the time the ISIL caliphate had captured about seven million people and controlled at vast swathe of Syria the size of the American state of Virginia. Here’s a history of the Kurdish struggle I wrote for World Affairs Journal, No Friends But The Mountains: The Fate of the Kurds.

Covering these stories changes you. You will find you have little patience with comfortably plump North Americans who say, well, terribly sad and all that, but it’s not our problem. It has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with us.We aided and abetted in the carnage, at every corpse heap along the way.

During ISIL’s ascendancy, the foreign-fighter dataset developed by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College in London identified 41,490 fighters from 80 countries who had poured into Syria in service of jihad and the ISIL cause. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reckons that foreign jihadists far outnumbered Syrian jihadists in the casualty rolls in the first three years of al-Baghdadi’s caliphate.

At least 90 Canadians traveled to Syria and Iraq to enlist with Daesh and other jihadist fronts over the years. At least 23 are believed to have died there, while the rest have either made it back to Canada or moved on elsewhere or have ended up captured by the Kurds. And some have been convicted, like Mississauga’s Mohammed Khalifa (Abu Ridwan Al-Kanadi), now serving a life sentence in the United States.

Fun story: I once got picked up by Turkish undercover cops with my American colleague Zack Baddorf; the cops thought we were jihadists trying to sneak our way across the Syrian border to begin new lives as Daesh throatslitters. Zack wrote a story about it here.

So how do we deal with returning jihadist bedlamers? Kyle Matthews is a really smart guy. He surveys the terrain here: Justice for the Victims: How Canada Should Manage Returning “Foreign Fighters”. And don’t for a minute think that the “ISIL brides” are all just innocent dupes and it’s only the men we need to worry about. Read this: Canadian Women in ISIS: Deradicalization and Reintegration for Returnees.

It’s important to remember that Daesh hasn’t simply gone away. True, the leadership has been hit hard lately. Last February, the Daesh big boss Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was killed in a U.S. operation in Atmeh, Syria, near the border with Turkey and just a few kilometres from where ISIS godfather Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was taken out by the Americans in 2019. The top job went to Abu al Hasan al Hashimi al Qurashi last February, but Abu al-Hasan was killed by the Free Syrian Army way down south near the Jordanian border, in Dar’a, just a couple of months ago. So now the outfit’s being run by the too-similarly-named Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi.

The Islamist sociopathology that vomits up organizations like al Qaida and its offshoot Daesh aren’t going away any time soon. Daesh remains on the rampage from Africa to Central Asia, and persists in competition with the Taliban for the Most Barbaric Slaughterers prize in Afghanistan, where it’s known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province. There’s a good backgrounder on that here.

In the meantime, I’ll be keeping my eye on how Judge Brown’s decision plays out here in Canada.