Mother of killed ISIS fighter wants to fight propaganda

A story of a mid-aged woman was portrayed at the three-day anti-terrorism summit hosted by White House from Tuesday to Thursday. The woman who grabbed attention of various countries` ministers and terrorism experts was Christianne Boudreau from Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Boudreau turned an activist against Islamic extremists after his son Damian Clairmont who joined ISIS and was killed in Syria in January last year. She was determined to tell the world what IS really is, in order to prevent another victim like his son from being fooled by ISIS propaganda. The mother recently posted a video on YouTube on his son`s death and her message, which posted some 15,000 views.

"We need to start arming ourselves with the knowledge, the awareness, the education, and to be able to deal with these issues and be able to speak with our children at an early age," Boudreau said at an interview with CNN on Friday. "We do the same thing with sex education, with drugs, and this is just one more thing that our kids are faced with, a challenge."

While growing up in Calgary, Boudreau remembered her son as a warm and compassionate little boy. That changed in high school, however, when he experienced problems with peers and became withdrawn. He attempted suicide on his 17th birthday, and after recovery he converted to Islam.

She said that positive changes started to happen later and he became social again. "He wasn`t drinking, he wasn`t using drugs, there were lots of positive changes," Boudreau said. She didn`t suspect anything when Clairmont told her he was leaving for Egypt to study Arabic. But in 2013 Canadian security officials came to her door and told her that Clairmont was suspected of being an ISIS militant and was likely in Syria, not in Egypt. She said her son was brainwashed in Syria and he eventually sided with ISIS, believing they were the stronger group and he was more likely to survive fighting for them. And then the 22-year-old was killed during fighting near Aleppo in January 2014.