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The interview with Sajjan is one of many with Canadian soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and revealed in an engrossing documentary series, War Story: Afghanistan, premièring this week on History channel.

The patrol ran into a large, organized Taliban force and engaged in an intense firefight on Aug. 3, 2006.

Vaughan Ingram, Christopher Reid, Kevin Dallaire and Bryce Keller died in the fighting; others were wounded.

“I was just as upset as everybody else because in knowing something that might happen and then it comes true, it weighs on me and weighed on me for many years,” Sajjan said.

He also said the Taliban’s ability to recruit jihadi fighters was helped by local government corruption and Western nations’ complacency.

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“A lot of those villages and tribes in those areas had already become so disenfranchised with their own local government that they returned to the Taliban. The corruption fuelled the insurgency. We arrived at a time when recruitment was well under way,” said Sajjin.

“What ended up happening was we didn’t look at the root cause that caused this whole issue, so the population went back to supporting the Taliban, and the Taliban came with even great resurgence.

“Because they said, ‘See, you thought they were going to help you, they didn’t again did they?’ ”

In 2013, the day after the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing that killed three and injured hundreds, Trudeau was pilloried for saying, “We have to look at the root causes” of the attack.

“There is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded; completely at war with innocents, at war with a society. And our approach has to be, where do those tensions come from?” Trudeau said.

During the election, the Conservatives mocked Trudeau’s comments, suggesting he was soft on terror.

National Post