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Irish "Sam" is Dead in Syria
Part of channel(s): Syria (current event)

The Libyan Irish Leprechaun half-breed is dead. The fate of all those of who dare attack Syria.

IrishTimes
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Two young volunteers from Ireland have died fighting with Syrian
rebels in recent months. There is increasing disquiet, here and in
Syria, about the role of young men from abroad in the conflictThe
story of how Shamseddin Gaidan’s short life took him from a Navan
classroom to an untimely death amid the chaos of Syria’s uprising begins
in early 2011. In February that year the Libyan-born schoolboy watched,
fascinated, as anti-regime demonstrations inspired by the toppling of
dictators in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia erupted in the country that
he and his family had left years before.As the protests tipped
into armed rebellion against Muammar Gadafy, Shamseddin, known as
Shamsi, told his schoolfriends and teachers how much he wanted to be
there to witness the revolution that ended Gadafy’s 42 years in power.The
Gaidan family are from Nofaliya, a small town on Libya’s Mediterranean
coast close to where the front line see-sawed for months during the 2011
war. When on holiday with his family in Nofaliya last summer,
Shamseddin would have been regaled with stories of battles lost and then
won, as well as tales of the sacrifices of the shuhada, or “martyrs”.The
16-year-old would also have heard of the scores of young Libyans who,
having tasted revolution in their own country, later flocked to join
rebel forces battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.Many
of these youths detail their exploits on Facebook. The
social-networking site is also where those who die fighting are
eulogised in flowery prose and melodramatic photo and video montages.Among
the Libyan fighters in Syria was Shamseddin’s 23-year-old cousin, who,
it appears, was killed with him last month. His cousin had left Libya
for Syria some time before Shamseddin’s parents arranged for their son
to fly back to Ireland in mid August to prepare for the new academic
year at St Patrick’s Classical School, in Navan.The teenager
never arrived in Dublin. Instead he took advantage of an overnight stop
in Istanbul to head for the Syrian border. It is likely Shamseddin found
his way to Syria with the help of his cousin, much to his family’s
dismay.“I will never understand why Shamsi went without my permission,” says his father, Ibrahim, his voice cracking with emotion.

The
family subsequently received a phone call from an unknown person in
Syria. “He told us Shamseddin [was there and was] helping the Syrian
people.”The last Gaidan heard from his son was a brief phone call
some time later, during which he pleaded with him to return home. “He
refused, saying how could he leave when the Syrian regime was killing
its own people, including children.”In mid February the Gaidan
family’s worst fears were realised. They received another short phone
call from a stranger in Syria, this time to tell them Shamseddin had
been “martyred” some days before. Given the fog of Syria’s war, the
circumstances of the teenager’s death remain unclear.“We don’t
know where or how he was killed, and we don’t know where his body might
be,” says Gaidan. “It is very difficult to get any information. This
confusion makes our grief much worse.”Shamseddin Gaidan is not
the first person from Ireland to join rebel forces in Syria; nor is he
the first to die there. Some 20 men are estimated to have travelled from
Ireland to Syria to participate in the uprising, not as medical or
humanitarian volunteers, as others from here have done, but as armed
rebels.A man doing humanitarian work in northern Syria last
summer told me he had met teenage fighters of Arab origin speaking with
strong Irish accents. One source here claimed other young men have
joined the Syrian rebellion without informing their parents.Shot dead

By
contrast, the family of 22-year-old Hudhaifa ElSayed, from Donacarney
in Drogheda, who was shot dead by regime forces in northern Syria in
December, knew exactly what he was doing.He was born in Egypt,
then moved to Ireland with his family, as a young boy, after his surgeon
father, Abdel Basset, secured a job here. He attended St Mary’s
Diocesan School, in Drogheda, and Dublin City University, before working
as a motivational coach and trainer.ElSayed, a naturalised Irish
citizen, was well known within the Muslim community for his involvement
in youth projects. A Facebook page titled Hudhaifa’s Legacy, set up in
his memory, contains numerous tributes from relatives, friends,
colleagues and others, including a Catholic chaplain at DCU.ElSayed
and several other men from Ireland joined the Syrian rebels as part of
Liwa al-Umma, a brigade founded by a Libyan-Irish man named Mehdi
al-Harati, who also commanded a rebel unit during the Libyan revolution.ElSayed
did not leave Drogheda with the aim of becoming a rebel fighter in
Syria. After attending a conference in Turkey last April, he volunteered
to work with Syrian refugees in the country. Several weeks later, he
decided he wanted to do more.I met ElSayed in Jarjanaz, a small
dusty town in Syria’s restive Idlib province, last July. His wire-rimmed
glasses seemed incongruous alongside his military-style fatigues and
the Kalashnikov slung across his back.Softly spoken and earnest,
ElSayed had none of the swagger of other rebels. He justified his
presence in Syria in philosophical terms. “I see my life as being about
three things: searching for the truth; defending the weak against
injustice and the oppressors; and helping to build peace in the world,”
he said, as we watched hundreds of anti-regime protesters gather after
Friday prayers. “The battle here in Syria combines all three.”ElSayed
talked about his parents’ initial worries but said their concerns were
eased somewhat when they learned he was joining al-Harati’s brigade.“He
never did anything without our blessing,” recalls his mother, Asmaa.
“When he decided to go over the border into Syria, he called us to ask
for our permission. We told him it is okay if you really want to do
that. We believe in God’s fate and that everyone has a time to leave
this life.”The issue of young men such as ElSayed and Gaidan
joining the ranks of the Syrian rebels prompts mixed feelings among
Ireland’s 40,000 Muslims. Some oppose it outright, others admit to
feeling uneasy, but several compare it to the International Brigade
during the Spanish Civil War.“These youths see what is happening
in Syria. They see that the big countries are not doing anything to stop
it, and they want to do something themselves,” says ElSayed’s father,
Abdel Basset. “People like Hudhaifa are not brainwashed, they are not
manipulated, they are not extreme. It is a human response. They feel
they have to act, even if it endangers their life.”Last year
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent Egyptian religious scholar linked
to the Muslim Brotherhood and with strong connections to the
Dublin-based Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland, used Twitter to call
for people to go to fight in Syria or send weapons there, describing
such assistance as obligatory.In October, however, an influential
Saudi cleric, Salman al-Ouda, who has visited Ireland a number of
times, advised Muslim youths against going to Syria to fight “so as not
to give the regime a pretext” that it is battling “terrorists” who have
infiltrated the country.Last weekend Syrian state media reported
Shamseddin Gaidan’s death as “new evidence of involvement of foreign
parties” in the conflict.“The movement of young people from
Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt to Syria to fight against the
regime will complicate the issue, and the Afghanistan crisis will be
repeated,” al-Ouda wrote on his personal webpage. “Leave Syria to the
people of Syria; they do not lack courage or numbers.”Senior
Irish Muslims have echoed al-Ouda’s message in an attempt to discourage
others from going to fight. Those efforts have been given fresh impetus
in the wake of Shamseddin Gaidan’s death at such a young age, says Adam
Argaig of the Muslim Association of Ireland.Argaig, a Libyan who
knew both Gaidan and ElSayed, is concerned about the number of foreign
fighters, many with no experience, streaming into Syria. They include
dozens of young men, a large number of them teenagers, from his
birthplace of Derna, a town in eastern Libya well known for sending its
sons to Afghanistan and Iraq in the past.“They are young and
idealistic, and they talk about doing jihad but don’t realise that they
could help the Syrian people in other ways, by raising funds or
highlighting their cause,” he says. Like many others, Argaig raises the
spectre of what happened after the war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan in the 1980s ended. The “Arab Afghans”, men who had joined
the so-called mujahideen, returned to their home countries steeped in
more radical ideologies. “We are still dealing with that legacy,” he
says.Distraught father

Mohammed Busidra, a
sheikh in eastern Libya, shares this concern. He has been contacted by
several people about relatives who have gone to Syria. They include one
distraught father whose 15-year-old son left to join the rebels. He says
the issue has become so pressing that he has raised it with Libya’s
interior minister.Some in Libya and Ireland blame Mehdi al-Harati
for encouraging people to go to Syria. Liwa al-Umma’s Facebook page,
which has been shut down, featured a video clip of the late Abdullah
Azzam, a Palestinian religious scholar who provided the theological
underpinning for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, outlining
when jihad becomes fard ayn, meaning an individual duty. A message
bylined by Harati contained an invitation to “join the jihad in the land
of al-Sham”, a reference to Syria.Harati became embroiled in
controversy in late 2011 when an Irish tabloid alleged, citing anonymous
sources, that he had received money from US intelligence, a claim he
firmly denied. He formed Liwa al-Umma early last year after several
Syrians, aware of his experience as a rebel commander in Libya,
approached him about establishing a brigade in Syria. The brigade draws
on a network of private donors in Syria and across the Middle East and
north Africa for finance.Harati and a number of other Libyans
involved in setting up Liwa al-Umma have not been back to Syria since
last autumn when Turkish authorities informed them they were no longer
allowed to enter Turkey.“Liwa al-Umma now has very few foreigners
in it, perhaps around 10 maximum,” Harati says. “It is now under the
command of a Syrian and consists mostly of Syrians.”Harati says
he was sad to hear of Gaidan’s death, because he was so young, but he
describes it as “a great thing” that the teenager was “martyred for a
cause, fighting a criminal like Bashar”.He says Gaidan was not involved with Liwa al-Umma and he knows nothing of how the schoolboy got to Syria.

“Some
people are angry with me, but this is not fair,” Harati says. “The
people going to Syria are not babies; they are 17 or 20 or 22 or older.
They can make their own decisions. I never encouraged people to go to
Syria, but I can’t stop them. My view is that people should go in an
organised way, not independently.”Bitter-sweet

Harati’s
Irish-born brother-in-law, Housam Najjair, was also involved in Liwa
al-Umma. Now back in Ireland, where he has been writing a book about his
experience of fighting during the Libyan revolution, Najjair says the
news of Gaidan’s killing stirs “bitter-sweet” feelings for him.“I
strongly believe that this would not be an issue if the international
community was standing by the people of Syria as they did in Libya. Now
it is not just al-Qaeda and other groups we have to worry about filling
the vacuum, due to porous borders and lack of security, but also rising
numbers of young men and teens. The more people such as Shamseddin learn
about the regime’s massacres, the more they feel compelled to do
something where others have failed.”Hudhaifa ElSayed looks down
from a huge banner that adorns the hallway of his family’s home in
Donacarney. The ElSayeds, like the Gaidans, fear they will never get
their son’s remains back, but their grief is laced with pride.“As
a mother, of course I wish Hudhaifa had stayed with us. He had so much
potential,” says Asmaa. “But I do not regret what he has done, because
he went to Syria for an honourable reason.”Abdel Basset nods in
agreement. “If he died in an accident I would feel more sadness,” he
says. “But we know he died for a great thing.”

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