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The mother of a former Canadian soldier killed fighting in Syria this week recalled Thursday night when her son first decided he wanted to fight in the Middle East.

“It was just around New Year’s that he actually started talking about ‘Well, what I’d really like to be doing is going to the Middle East,’” recalled Valerie Carder, the mother of John Gallagher, 32, who was killed Wednesday in Syria, where he was fighting with Kurdish fighters.

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“And I said ‘Don’t you go to the Middle East, that’s crazy talk.’”

Carder spoke in the living room of the old farmhouse near the shore of Lake Erie east of Wheatley that had served as Gallagher’s home base since he was 16.

His mother recalled a clever, even precocious little boy, reading books on his own from a very young age.

“From the time he was a very tiny little boy he knew all the dinosaurs, he could pronounce them much better than we could,” said Carder, an English teacher at Blenheim District High School.