Canadian vet has 'no regrets' for joining fight against ISIS in Iraq

Canadian veteran Dillon Hillier, who served in Afghanistan, is shown here in Iraq where he fought against ISIS.

A Canadian veteran is home safe after a stint in northern Iraq fighting alongside Kurdish troops battling ISIS, but despite an experience on the front lines that Dillon Hillier admits was "terrifying," he says he would return in a heartbeat if he could.

Hillier, whose father is Ontario MPP Randy Hillier, spoke to CTV News Friday from his parents' Ottawa home.

He explained that he was sitting in a hotel room last November in Saskatoon, where we was working in the potash industry, when he decided to take a step he had been contemplating for weeks -- he booked a plane ticket to join Kurdish fighters battling ISIS in Iraq.

"I'd been thinking about it for a long time," said Hillier. "I'd also been making preparations, contacts on the ground there for three or four weeks, and the more I talked to the guy on the ground there -- a lieutenant with the Pshmerga -- it kept sounding better and better and I realized it was something I had to do or else I would regret it for the rest of my life."

A few weeks later Hillier was on the front lines in Iraq, taking heavy fire as his unit attempted to retake a hill that ISIS fighters had claimed in the town of Tal Ward.

A retired corporal from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, Hillier had previously served in Afghanistan. But this was his first experience fighting as a volunteer with a foreign military.

"We had to cross a bridge into the town. We crossed the bridge, taking enemy fire, and then we rushed through the village, assaulted the hill and they fell back pretty easily and we just held the hill for maybe… my unit was there for 20 hours," Hillier said.

He added: "I was terrified."

During that battle, Hillier captured video of the firefight, including first-person perspective as he fires his weapon out of a bunker. In another video Hillier bandages up one of his comrades who has been shot. The frantic intensity of the moment is palpable.

"I didn't see him get hit, he was about 10 feet away from me. I just noticed him lying on the ground with two guys standing there, not doing much. There wasn't panic but there was definitely a lot of adrenaline pumping. I did what I knew I had to do to get him out of there and patched him up as best I could," he told CTV.

Hillier knew better than to give his parents too much advance notice of his trip to Iraq last November. In fact he waited until 10 minutes before his flight departed to email his dad and let him know his plans. Randy Hillier said he quickly tried to do anything he could to halt his son's plans.

"I made a lot of inquiries, phone calls to people that I know, to see if there was any way, as well as trying to influence him, to encourage him not to go, but I know Dillon is a pretty strong-willed individual and when he has his mind made up there wasn't much I was going to be able to do about it," MPP Randy Hiller told CTV.

"So then it was a case of giving him as much support and encouragement to be safe and secure."

Among their chief concerns, Randy and his wife Jane were concerned their son had been lured by ISIS agents posing as Kurds, and that he would be considered a valuable target for the enemy.

In the end, it wasn't his parents' worries that cut short Dillon's trip. It was the intervention of U.S. and Canadian military brass who made it clear to their Kurdish Pshmerga counterparts that Western volunteers shouldn't be allowed to join the fight.

Dillon knew that for him, the war was over.

"It was tough to say goodbye but at the same time it was out of my hands. They were all like, 'Don't leave, don't leave, don't worry about what the general said.' But I've been in the military, I know how it is. They were saying don't worry about what he said but he's their boss."

With a report from CTV’s Katie Simpson in Ottawa