Dillon Hillier can’t help but laugh at the reaction as he surrendered his passport at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, the dust of the world’s most watched conflict still fresh on his boots.

“Where did you go? What did you do?” came the Canadian customs query in the usual bored monotone.

“I was in Iraq. Fighting ISIS with the Kurds,” answered the bluntly truthful Hillier, 26, a former Canadian soldier with an unusual taste — quite obviously — for action.

“Uh-huh,” said the customs officer, who then went for the jugular. “Did you bring any cigarettes or alcohol back with you?”

Okaaay then. Welcome home, volunteer soldier. Just like that, Hillier was in — and in the air again, flying to the family home outside Ottawa. Later, two Canadian intelligence officials arrived at the door, less concerned about smokes and booze. A full debriefing followed, with Hillier spilling the beans, telling the full how/what/why of a journey into war with Islamic State radicals.

Six weeks later, Hillier, son of Carleton Place MPP Randy Hillier, is licking his wounds in a west end bar with the Star. The scars are not from his two-month odyssey in Erbil province, but from the wide range of brickbats and bouquets that greeted his return.

A hero to many, misguided to others. An outright idiot, to the most critical few. Mostly, he says, the reaction has been positive. A case in point: he’s a first-time Torontonian, thanks to an offer he couldn’t refuse from a Toronto investment firm whose name he wants to keep private.

“They said, ‘We need risk-takers. You appear to be an interesting risk-taker.’ They’re training me from scratch. I’ll be wearing suits for the first time in my life. It’s a different kind of challenge. But an exciting one,” said Hillier, a retired corporal who served five years with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, including deployment to Afghanistan.

Soldiers of misfortune

They are nothing new, volunteers like Hillier. From the American Civil War to Vietnam to the Arab Spring, thousands of Canadians have snuck away to fight causes beyond the border, for more reasons than there are wars.

Yet things are different now. Just ask Canadian historian David Bercuson, director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, who has a personal story to tell about his own father’s dalliance with deployment as an overseas privateer.

Coming out of the Depression in the 1930s, Bercuson’s dad attended a recruitment meeting in Montreal for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion — an informal group of mostly left-leaning and working class Canadians organizing to join the anti-Nazi side of the Spanish Civil War. There were posters calling attention to the event — and plainclothes Mounties in the room, taking names. Bercuson’s dad chose not to go to Spain, but instead signed up two years later the conventional way, joining Canada’s battle against Hitler in Europe. But his name nevertheless ended up on RCMP watch lists for years to come.

“Things have changed on two levels. Recruitment no longer happens out in the open as they did in my dad’s day, with posters around town and public meetings,” said Bercuson.

“Now it is far easier to get involved online, open a pipeline that nobody else will know about. Just book the flight and you are there.”

War is a click away

On the digital front, Canadians can quietly click-and-go into war wherever they want, if so inclined. And on the cultural front, the comparatively homogenous Canada that gave rise to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion now is home-away-from-home to the whole global family. So many varieties of Canadians with so many varieties of ties. We are all richer for it.

But between the more easily parsed poles — those who would fight ISIS versus those who would join it — are a multiplicity of blurred lines. And they raise the question: when, in 2015, is it okay for Canadians to choose to fight with other flags abroad?

For Bercuson, the answer is almost never. “I don’t like to see Canadians volunteering to fight for foreign forces, whether we agree with the cause or not. It isn’t technically illegal unless you join someone actually fighting against the government of Canada — or with the specificity of joining someone the Canadian government has declared a terrorist organization.

“But at the same time, the grey areas are growing. In the 1990s at one point, there were Canadian citizens fighting on all three sides of the civil war in the Balkans. The truth is, we’ll never know who gets involved in what where. I just feel joining the Canadian army, navy or air force is the right way to go.”

Eric Morse, a former Canadian diplomat and co-chair of the Security Studies Committee of the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto, views Canadian volunteerism as “something unstoppable that shouldn’t be countenanced.”

“The short answer to ‘When is it okay for Canadians to fight with others?’ is when it’s convenient for the government — or at least when it’s not politically inconvenient,” Morse said.

“The advantage we have with ISIS is they have declared war on the entire world. After that, it gets murky real fast. And the murkiness changes. Look at Libya, for example. What seemed clear cut four years ago is now something on the verge of a collapsed state full of competing militias.

“Now we have murmurs of Canadian volunteers in Ukraine, which runs in alignment with Ottawa policy. But can you imagine if Russian-Canadians start turning up on the other side? They’ve got families there, too.”

What the law says

The law on Canada’s books — the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1937 — was specifically designed to dissuade Canadians from the Spanish Civil War. Once enacted, volunteers kept going anyway, many lying their way over the U.S. border to embark across the Atlantic on the pretense they were attending the Coronation of King George VI.

They were branded as subversives and socialists, but as Bercuson notes, history now records them as having “fought the good fight” — the first wildly outgunned encounter with German and Italian Nazi forces.

Canada’s vast Ukrainian diaspora, many note, is surely pleased with Canada’s relatively benign view of off-the-book fundraising for the cause. Canadians of Tamil descent, by contrast, fall under a different degree of scrutiny.

Canadians who can demonstrate Jewish grandparentage are welcome in the Israel Defence Forces. Canadians of Palestinian ancestry, by contrast, cannot join the asymmetrical side of the Mideast conflict without risking running afoul of Canadian law by dint of terrorist designations.

“The fact is, we are fairly permissive with people fighting for our allies. But once someone gets involved with what the government of Canada would define as terrorist activities, that’s where it gets politicized,” said Philippe Lagassé, associate professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

“You can understand the government’s reticence about people joining informal, sub-national groups because it’s difficult to know how these groups will change. And even if the government generally agrees with their motives, they shouldn’t be looking the other way because there can be negative consequences.

“But when it comes to fighting with state-level allies, I think it’s different,” he said. “If we have a policy of dual citizenship, I’m not sure it is realistic or even legitimate to apply a blanket prohibition on volunteering.”

Shifting allegiances

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Hillier, having fought alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq, knew he was on safe ground, legally. Though not technically an independent nation, the largely autonomous Iraqi Kurds are friendlies, in Ottawa’s view.

But the Kurdish equation, as Hillier learned, is far trickier on the Syrian side of the ISIS warfront. He was briefly beguiled by a Facebook page called “The Lions of Rojava,” where the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia recruits English-speaking warriors to join its battle against Islamic State.

But a few clicks later, said Hillier, he discovered the YPG’s close ties with the banned PKK, an organization on Canada’s terror list because of its attacks in Turkey. He kept searching for a group that wouldn’t complicate his goal of coming home.

“Some people don’t do their homework. I researched. My motivation was mainly in response to the attacks in Ottawa and Quebec. My thinking was — I am trained for this. And if there are 90 Canadians fighting with ISIS, then I am in a position to balance that number out one notch by fighting against them,” said Hillier.

“I did it entirely on my dime. I did not take a salary from the Kurds. There was zero religion involved, for me at least. I was fighting alongside Kurdish Muslims. But eventually, you could tell we were being held back. Things changed and they didn’t want foreigners in maximum risk. When that happened, it was time to come home.”

Since Hillier’s return, another former Canadian soldier, Brandon Glossop, 26, left Edmonton on a private mission and is now believed to be fighting alongside Kurds, Britons and Americans with the Lions of Rojava in Syria. Unlike Hillier, Glossop’s allegiance to the YPG places him in a risky place under Canadian law. And the same may hold true for Gill Rosenberg, a Canadian-born Israeli also believed to be fighting ISIS with the YPG in northern Syria.

“Technically, they would be subject to the Canadian law against fighting for an organization on the terror list. But we don’t know — and I’m doubtful — that the law would be applied if and when they come home,” said Amarath Amarasingam, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow who co-directs a study of Canadian foreign fighters at the University of Waterloo.

Amarasingam’s group primarily looks into the motivations of those who join ISIS. But his research has expanded to probe the motivations of Canadians joining the other side of the battle.

“There are only a few Canadians like Dillon Hillier who have actually done it. But there are dozens more who have expressed interest. And it matches up with larger numbers from the United States, Britain and Australia.

“The thing that blows my mind is that many of them are going in with more passion than research. One American was horrified to learn that the Kurdish YPG group he joined up with turned out to be communists. You didn’t Google them first? Because their political stripes are pretty well known.”

Blurry battle zones

For Amarasingam, the one clear line in these blurry battle zones comes down to public safety.

“It’s a given that we live in a transnational world now. People will care about where they came from,” he said.

“And it’s not just a question of who is on the terror list and who is not because these things change. We also need to be wary of double standards, because consistency on Canada’s part is what will play best against ISIS propaganda. So, if you are Canadian and you are fighting for someone other than the Canadian army, that’s a problem. I’d like to see it clearly spelled out.”

But as Amarasingam observes, many who come up on Canada’s security radar as returnees from conflict prove to be no threat whatsoever.

Take Thwaiba Kanafani, 43, of Mississauga, for example — a happy Canadian until the start of the civil war in her native Syria, when she threw herself into the cause against Bashar Assad, hoping to help forge a viable — and moderate — opposition under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

Kanafani piqued the interest of Canadian intelligence officials when she emerged online in 2012, appearing armed and dangerous in fatigues. But she was never an actual fighter.

“It was purely political, of course,” said Kanafani, who is back home in Mississauga and utterly dejected by what she now regards as “a stolen revolution.”

“A female in uniform sends a powerful message that this fight is for moderate values, not radical Muslims. I held a gun for the camera to make precisely this statement. We had so much hope. And now everything feels lost.”

A Canadian intelligence team paid her a visit upon her first return. And again following her subsequent travels in 2013, when she worked with Syrian refugees on the Turkish frontier.

“I’ve had an ongoing dialogue with the Canadian government. They just wanted to make sure I was moving in the right direction and I’m happy about it. We talked a lot and still do. But I fear our revolution is dead.”

Amarasingam said Kanafani’s story matches up with dozens of accounts he’s heard of Canadians helping nationalist struggles around the globe.

“I’m so not worried about, say, Chechens, Somalis, Libyans or whoever else who might go to fight a nationalist cause because from a safety perspective we can basically ignore them. Nationalists have wives and kids here. They aren’t coming home to wreak havoc.

“The real line has to be public safety. If you have basically declared war on Canada, that’s the line.”

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