By Scott Taylor
On Monday 10 February, Omar Khadr gave a keynote speech at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The talk was organized by the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative and not surprisingly, Khadr spoke about having been himself a child soldier in Afghanistan.
This was the first time Khadr has spoken publicly on the subject and to say that he has become a polemic character in Canada would be a massive understatement.
Naturally enough Khadr’s appearance at Dalhousie blew up yet another storm of controversy.
For those firmly in the ‘hate Khadr’ camp, the belief is that Khadr was an al-Qaeda terrorist who committed treason against Canada and then was subsequently rewarded by the Trudeau government with a $10.5 million settlement for having been a traitor. Based on that set of facts one would wonder how anyone could be sympathetic to this individual.
However, lost in the powerful emotion of hate is the fact that Khadr was just 15 years old at the time he was captured by U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002.
It was Khadr’s father who brought young Omar to Afghanistan to fight against the American-led invasion. The father bears the guilt of exploiting his own son and 15 year old Omar was simply an exploited victim. A minor. A child soldier.
To allege that Khadr was a terrorist would imply he was guilty of committing an act of terror. Yet the circumstances surrounding Khadr’s capture were instead that of conventional warfare. The U.S. military was attacking Taliban fighters in the village of Ayub Kheyl. Airstrikes preceded the attack before U.S. Special Forces moved in to mop up the village.
During that phase of the operation a grenade was thrown which killed U.S. Sergeant first class Christopher Speer. Although there was never any conclusive proof that Khadr threw that grenade – eye witness accounts differ – a severely wounded Khadr was the only Taliban survivor of that clash. Thus Khadr was labeled a ‘murderer’ and it was also erroneously claimed that Sgt. Speer was a medic, which therefore made his murder a ‘war crime’.
The fact is that Speer was a U.S. Special Forces operative with a medical specialization. During the firefight he was armed and apparently dressed in local Afghan garb meaning he was not targeted or deliberately murdered because he was a medic. It was a battle, not a terrorist attack. Speer was a professional soldier, not a doctor.
Following his capture, Khadr would spend the next 10 years as an inmate of the U.S. military’s detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In October 2010 Khadr plead guilty to “murder in violation of the laws of war”. However he subsequently renounced that confession stating that it had only been made in order to secure his eventual release from Guantanamo Bay.
In September 2012, Khadr was repatriated to Canada to serve out the remainder of the U.S. military imposed eight year sentence. He was out on bail by 2015 and on 25 March 2019, the Alberta court of Queen’s Bench declared his sentence complete
This brings us back to the matter of the Canadian government authorizing a settlement of $10.5 million to Khadr in 2017. The payment was to settle a lawsuit brought by Khadr against the government for failing to respect his rights as a Canadian citizen under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The lynchpin of the case was a Supreme Court of Canada ruling which stated in 2010 that Khadr’s treatment in Guantanamo Bay ‘offend[ed] the most basic standard [of] the treatment of detained youth suspects.”
He did not get a payout because he was a terrorist. He was paid compensation for the decade that the Canadian government left a victimized child soldier to rot in a U.S. detention centre.
Let’s let Khadr speak about the victimization of child soldiers, for on that subject he certainly knows whereof he speaks.
