There was a touching funeral Nov. 20 in Toronto. Children with flags and banners, police, a fire brigade and an official band were lined up as thousands of somber citizens bid farewell to a compatriot who had lost his life thousands of miles away in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan). One banner carried by children read “You are our hero.” That hero was John Gallagher, a Canadian veteran killed Nov. 4 fighting in the ranks of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) against the Islamic State (IS).

While the hearse bearing Gallagher’s coffin was proceeding to a cemetery accompanied with a police escort and an impressive convoy, the body of Turkish YPG fighter Aziz Guler was lying in a morgue in Kobani, Syria, where it had been for 59 days. Turkey had imposed an embargo to keep out the bodies of its citizens who were killed while fighting with the YPG. Turkey claims YPG is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist organization.

Before joining the battle against IS, Guler had been a senior at Istanbul Yildiz Technical University, studying politics and international relations. He was among the founders of Genc-Sen, a students' labor union, and was a member of the Socialist Democracy Party. He was among the best-known student movement leaders in Turkey, having been a guest on a major TV channel to discuss university autonomy, and he had debated with Justice and Development Party (AKP) partisans.

His family — impoverished Kurds from the southeastern province of Bingol — had migrated to Istanbul before he was born. Because of Turkey’s assimilation policy, he had never learned to speak his mother tongue, Kurdish.