OTTAWA – A Canadian has been killed in Libya while storming Moammar Gadhafi’s stronghold in Tripoli.
Nader Ben Raween, who left behind his information technology job in Ottawa to join the rebels, is believed to be the first Canadian killed during the Libyan uprising.
On Wednesday, Ben Raween’s friends in Ottawa got word the 24-year-old had been shot in the head by a sniper during the rebels’ assault on the sprawling Bab Al-Aziziya compound the day before, where Gadhafi was thought to be hiding.
In March, Ben Raween surprised his friends when he left behind his job at a computer company to join the Libyan revolt.
“He wanted just to help his brothers, sisters, family, to get rid of this cancer,” said Ben Raween’s friend, Haithan Alabadah, in Ottawa. “This is like a cancer, Gadhafi is like a cancer in the country. He’s a disease. He wanted to get rid of the disease and then come back to Canada. He didn’t want to die.”
The first stop for Ben Raween was the rebels’ capital of Benghazi where he received weapons training, and stayed in touch with his friends back home using Facebook and Yahoo messenger.
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After that, he was moved out to the western city of Nalut near the Tunisian border, where his best friend Abdurrahman Ghariba, another Libyan-Canadian, said he shared the training he had received in Benghazi with other fighters.
But Ben Raween’s place near the Western front meant that when the rebels started their advance to Tripoli, he was on the front lines.
Ghariba received telephone updates from his friend as the rebels advanced. He says that Ben Raween took part in the battle for the key city of Zawiyah on Friday, just 40 kilometres east of the capital.
By Aug. 20, Ghariba says Ben Raween was on his way to Tripoli, the city where his mother, father, two brothers and two sisters were still living.
But the sniper’s bullet found Ben Raween before he could find his family.
Ben Raween was born in Edmonton while his father was studying there, and although he attended elementary school and high school in Scotland, and completed his undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Tripoli, he came to Ottawa right after. He planned to return after the fighting had ended.
“He said, `I want to go back to my work, my education, after Gadhafi steps down, ‘ ” said Ghariba.
Education was what brought Ben Raween to Ottawa in the first place, He came to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Ottawa in 2008. He didn’t get into the program, so he got a job instead. But he never lost his passion for learning. Ghariba says the tall, thin, bespectacled young man loved to spend his free time in Chapters, searching out new books to read.
Ghariba said Ben Raween loved his life in Canada, but as soon as the uprising started in Libya, he couldn’t be anywhere else.
“He said `I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t do anything.’ So he said `it’s better for me to go fight with my people’.”
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