THE FAMILY of the only Irish person known to have died while waging jihad has spoken of their wish to see his remains repatriated from Afghanistan.
The Irish Timestoday reveals the story of John Burke, from Clonmel, Co Tipperary, who died at the age of 27 while fighting with the so-called mujahideen in eastern Afghanistan in 1989.
Mr Burke, who changed his name to Muhammad Omar after he converted to Islam while living in London, studied at madrassas in Pakistan before attending mujahideen training camps in Afghanistan in 1988.
In a letter to his father, Mr Burke described the “guerrilla-style” training he received and the time he spent at the front fighting Soviet troops then occupying Afghanistan. “We would bomb . . . with mortars and anti-aircraft guns,” he wrote. “The Russians would reply with mortars and tank fire. I always thought mortars used to whistle as they came down like in the movies, but they don’t.”
According to the central tracing agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mr Burke is believed to have been buried close to where he was killed near the city of Jalalabad. At the time of his death the Soviet Union had already withdrawn its forces from Afghanistan but the mujahideen continued to fight against the Russian-backed government in Kabul.
The ICRC has provided Mr Burke’s father, also named John, with photographs of the grave and a map pinpointing its location.
“It was very hard,” Mr Burke recalls of the day he was informed his son had been killed in Afghanistan. “My only hope was to see if I could get his body home. I wrote to everyone I could think of to see if they could help. The Red Cross eventually found out where he was buried . . . but there are still questions over whether it is his actual burial place. Other people have said he was buried in a cemetery somewhere.”
The exact circumstances of John Burke’s death remain unknown. His family has received several different accounts of what happened.
“We still don’t know how he was killed, whether it was a shooting incident or whether he was killed when he stepped on a mine,” Mr Burke, a former corporal in the Defence Forces, said.
Although several of the deceased’s associates say it was his wish to be buried in Afghanistan, Mr Burke still holds out hope that his remains will be brought back to Ireland.
“It is still devastating to think about it even after all these years,” he said.