Caner Temel, who was shot dead in northern Syria in January, trained as an army sapper before going awol in 2010

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A Sydney man killed in January fighting in Syria’s civil war has been revealed as a former Australian soldier who went absent without leave from the army in 2010.

Caner Temel, 22, from Auburn in Sydney, was killed during a siege in Saraqeb, a small town near the embattled city of Aleppo in Syria’s north, reportedly while fighting with an al-Qaeda offshoot militia, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as Isil).

The ABC reported in January that Temel was fatally shot in Saraqeb by a sniper from another militia group, as part of infighting that has plagued opposition to the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad.

Australia’s assistant defence minister, Stuart Robert, said Temel had been identified as a former Australian soldier after media broadcast his name and picture in January.

“From his name and from the photo that the media showed, that matched the name and photo we had of a young soldier who served three years ago.

“He went absent without leave in September 2010 … If you go awol after 28 days and we can’t find you, we’ll discharge you,” Robert told ABC radio.

Temel had served 17 months in the defence force as a sapper working in a construction squadron. Robertson acknowledged the young recruit would have undergone arms training and “a limited amount of explosives work”.

But he said the Department of Defence was “still working through the issues” of when and why Temel left for Syria, noting that the civil war did not start until six months after Temel disappeared from his Brisbane barracks.

“At present the department has no knowledge of any other serving military personnel from Australia who are over in Syria fighting,” he said.

He said the immigration minister, Scott Morrison, was exploring options to cancel the Australian passports of dual-nationals fighting in the war. Twenty men from western Sydney had their passports cancelled in December after the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (Asio) accused them of preparing to “engage in politically motivated violence”.

How many Australians are fighting in Syria is unclear, but a December 2013 report by Aaron Zelin, a fellow at Middle East policy think-tank the Washington Institute, put the number at between 23 and 205.

An Australian woman was killed with her Syrian husband near Aleppo in January under unclear circumstances, and an Australian jihadist is believed to have carried out a suicide attack in Deir El-Zor in September.

A terrorism researcher at Monash University, Andrew Zammit, said Syria’s civil war, now in its third year, had dragged in neighbouring countries with large communities in Australia, including Lebanon and Turkey.

The Turkish border provided budding fighters with relatively easy access to the war zone, while the daily reports of massacres had “generated widespread outrage and allowed the most extreme jihadist groups to present themselves as the best capable forces to defend Sunni Muslims and to attract people who may initially have had no intention of joining these groups”, Zammit said.