A Calgary woman, whose 22-year-old son was killed while fighting with rebels in Syria, said she doesn’t want her son to have died in vain.

Chris Boudreau, the mother of Damian Clairmont, was speaking at a conference on the radicalization of Muslim youth in Calgary.

She said “trying to make sense of it all was extremely difficult.” 

Clairmont was killed last winter in Syria after he joined the terror group, ISIS.  He converted to Islam at 17.

Boudreau says her mission now is to spare other families the same sort of anguish.

She said she had no idea of what her son was up to until it was too late.

Boudreau said she wants to help ensure “other families don’t go through this, so we can reach out to youth before they take that last drastic step of going overseas and getting way deeply involved in the trenches out there, once you’re there it’s difficult to come back.”

Clairmont died this past January.