Mystery still surrounds the fate of a former Canadian soldier detained in Iraq after a stint fighting Islamic State militants in Syria alongside Kurdish militia forces.
Canadian foreign affairs officials confirm that a Canadian man is being detained in Iraq but refuse to provide additional information citing privacy concerns.
“We are aware of the arrest of a Canadian citizen in Iraq,” said Rachna Mishra, a Foreign Affairs spokeswoman. “Canadian consular officials at the embassy of Canada in Amman, Jordan, are providing consular assistance as required. Due to the Privacy Act, further details on this case cannot be released.”
Canadian volunteer sounds alarm
The man’s acquaintances in Syria started sounding the alarm bells after he was arrested in northern Iraq in late October along with five other Westerners.
The National Post reported Tuesday that the Canadian man in custody left the military in 2014 after 4½ years of service.
The Vancouver man was not identified by name in the Post’s report.
The newspaper cited Hanna Bohman, a Vancouver woman currently with Kurdish forces, as saying the arrested Canadian had volunteered with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
In a Facebook post on Oct 28, Bohman said the Canadian man was detained along with a Swede, two Spaniards and two Americans, by “Barzani’s peshmerga,” referring to the Iraqi Kurdish forces of Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.
Complicated rivalries
It appears the Canadian army veteran and the other Westerners have fallen victim to a long-running feud between various Kurdish factions in the region.
The Syrian Kurdish militias of YPG are closely linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Barzani’s long-time rivals. The PKK has set up bases in the mountains of northern Iraq from which it has waged a decades-long campaign for an independent Kurdish homeland in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq.
Barzani accuses the PKK, which Canada considers a terrorist organization, and its Syrian cousins in YPG of undermining his efforts to create an internationally recognized Kurdish entity in northern Iraq by constantly provoking Turkey into military operations in Kurdish-populated areas of Turkey and Iraq. PKK and YPG in turn accuse Barzani of collaborating with the Turkish military and security forces and betraying the larger goal of creating a unified Kurdish homeland, spanning parts of northern Iraq, Syria and southeastern Turkey.
The feud between Barzani’s forces and the YPG means that the volunteers who want to fight ISIS in Syria have to be smuggled into the country covertly, but face detention when they return to Iraq.
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