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Gentle and soft-spoken, Tarek Ben-Kura wasn’t a fighter by nature, but when the Arab Spring came to Libya, he couldn’t just watch from Canada as the regime forces crushed the revolt. He wanted to be there on the frontline.

“Hamid, have you ever fired a gun before?” he asked his pal, a Montreal student who was also thinking of joining the fight. Clad in a Habs t-shirt and a sideways ball cap the colours of the Libyan flag, Hamid shook his head. The only shooting he had done was in video games.

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“I played Call of Duty,” he offered.

Mr. Ben-Kura had never fired a gun either. He was a Montreal-born business student at Bishop’s University. But after arriving in Benghazi, he signed up for basic weapons training and set off to help the Libyan rebels topple Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Three years later, the Mad Dog of the Middle East lies in an unmarked grave somewhere beneath the desert sand and Mr. Ben-Kura is back in Canada with a new mission. Four days a week, he visits an Ottawa physiotherapy clinic, building his strength so he might one day get out of the wheelchair he has needed since a soldier’s bullet severed his spine. He struggles with post-traumatic stress. He is 25.