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TORONTO—John Gallagher travelled more than 9,000-kilometres to northern Iraq and then Syria to fight for what he believed in. On Friday he made the long journey home to southern Ontario on the Highway of Heroes.

Just over two weeks after the former infantryman was shot while helping Syrian Kurdish fighters expel the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, his mother Valerie Carder placed a white rose on his flag-draped casket in Toronto.

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She hugged her family and wept, surrounded by military veterans and a large crowd of Toronto Kurds, who had come to pay their respects to Gallagher, 32, the first Canadian volunteer to die fighting alongside Kurdish forces.

Following the wreath laying ceremony, held under a blustery blue sky, dozens of cars and trucks decorated with Canadian flags and posters of Gallagher in uniform set off from a Toronto funeral home at noon under police escort.

“Kurds consider him a hero,” said Dojan Dojan, a Kurdish-Canadian who held a yellow sign showing Gallagher, who was identified by his Kurdish fighter name Gabar Rojava. “He’s a Kurdish martyr and he is one of us.”