[LINK] "Mother of Canadian Muslim convert says son recruited into Syrian conflict"

[rfmcdonald]

I found Stewart Bell's National Post article describing, from the perspective of his mother, why a young Canadian man ended up joining jihadis in Syria. It fits the general profile of people who found themselves out of sorts but found an answer for their griefs in a simple but still non-conformist solution.

Academically gifted and athletic but suffering from crippling anxiety, the Nova Scotia-born French Catholic Acadian was bored at school. He went through phases during which he dressed as a gangster, a jock and Frank Sinatra. “He was trying to find an identity,” she said.

“He had a rough go. He has a higher than normal IQ so his intelligence level and emotional intelligence level did not meet when he was going through those teen years, obviously, and he didn’t feel like he fit in anywhere.”

Between the ages of 15 and 17, he barely left the house and his mother described him as agoraphobic. He home schooled on the Internet. He also started chatting online with a Muslim girl. But his anxiety prevented them from ever meeting and she broke it off.

He fell into depression and his mother found a suicide note. She called the police but they didn’t take it seriously until he turned up in hospital. He had been found unconscious in an alley, having swallowed a container of anti-freeze.

Two months later, he was released from hospital and started talking about converting to Islam. At first, his mother was relieved by his conversion. He calmed down and seemed to have found a place where he felt he fit in. He talked about becoming an imam.

But about two years ago, he moved to the west side of Calgary and left behind his former mosque, she said. “And that’s when everything started changing.” He lost touch with lifelong friends and became more “hard core and extreme,” she said.

“He started bringing up stuff about the rest of the world. He started getting a little bit more forceful when he was talking about the religion and how important it was, certain beliefs that all of a sudden he started coming across about having more than one wife, and just some not-so-Western cultural type things where he was kind of going off the wall a bit.”