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Nader Ben Raween, 24.
Photo Credit: Facebook
Nov
Dozens of Libyan-Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill to celebrate the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the man who maintained an iron rule over their homeland for 42 years, and who they blame for plunging the country into a state of abject poverty and social decay.
Gaddafi's death marked the end of a violent political drama that has absorbed Canadian-Libyans for months, ever since the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East reached Libya and touched off a civil war that led to Gaddafi's ouster two months ago.
Thousands of Libyans lost their lives in the country's civil war. We remember slain Ottawa residents Nader Ben Raween, 24, and Abdel Hamid Darrat, 46.
In March, Nader Ben Raween surprised his friends when he left behind his information technology job in Ottawa to join the Libyan revolt.
Mr. 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 ended.
According to friends, Mr. Ben Raween joined the rebel forces in the port city of Benghazi on March. 29. The rebels gave him weapons training and asked him to join the frontlines as a guide since he had intimate knowledge of Tripoli from his university days and still had family living in the city.
“He wanted just to help his brothers, sisters, family, to get rid of this cancer (Gaddafi),” Ben Raween's friend, Haitham Alabadah, said to the Ottawa Citizen. “He didn't want to die”
According to his best friend Abdurrahman Ghariba, another Libyan-Canadian fighter, Mr. Ben Raween took part in the battle for the key city of Zawiyah on Friday, just 40 kilometres east of the capital.
On Aug. 23, Mr. Ben Raween was felled by sniper fire, shot in the head by a loyalist sharpshooter during a raid on Gaddafi's Bab Al-Aziziya compound.
Abdel Hamid Darrat, believed to be the second Canadian killed in the Libyan uprising, was a successful businessman who travelled frequently between Ottawa and Tripoli.
Mr. Darrat, a father of seven ”“ his eldest child is 21 while his youngest is a toddler ”“ first came to Ottawa in the early 1980s to study and received both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer engineering. He ran a telecommunications company, providing IP addresses for internet users despite Gaddafi's internet service ban.
Witnesses say that while at work in May this year, Mr. Darrat and five co-workers were arrested by government officers and shoved into the back of a van. On Aug. 25, his body was discovered in a warehouse among over 150 other bodies.
Mr. Darrat's 16-year old daughter Khadija told the Ottawa Citizen that her father was passionate about ensuring that Libyans knew how to access and use the internet.
According to news reports his widow and children are still in Libya.
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