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Sumaida, who runs a construction company and is married with grown children, told the National Post in a phone interview the lack of a resolution does not weigh on him.

“It’s been 28 years. I have my life, I have my family, I have my business,” he said. “I’ve established myself in Canada. … It’s home.”

Not everyone takes a generous view of his situation. A recent column in the Toronto Sun said Sumaida had “gamed” Canada’s refugee system long enough.

“After almost three decades of this nonsense, isn’t it time this former spy was left out in the cold?”

The son of an Iraqi diplomat and senior member of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, Sumaida lived a privileged childhood that saw him taken to school in a chauffeured limousine.

But his father’s abusive behaviour pushed him to resentment, he wrote in his 1991 autobiography Circle of Fear. “I turned my hatred of him into hatred of Iraq’s rulers.”

While studying in England in the early 1980s, he joined the local cell of a Shi’a group, al-Da’wah, that was working against Saddam Hussein’s regime. But he became disenchanted with the movement and ended up leaking information about al-Da’wah’s members to the Iraqi secret security apparatus, the Mukhabarat.

“So by day I went around with the Da’wah putting up stickers that said Saddam was a new Hitler, and by night I went around with Saddam’s agents taking them down,” he wrote.

Troubled that he was “working for the monster Saddam and his killing machine,” Sumaida switched allegiances and joined Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.