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Court documents opened last week show that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police intends to prosecute a Canadian ISIS foreign fighter on a series of terrorism charges.
Since being captured by the Kurdish forces backed by the United States in January 2019, Mohammed Khalifa has been detained in a prison in northeastern Syria. This self-identified ISIS fighter is from Toronto.
An affidavit classified as “top secret” but unsealed by the Ontario High Court judge last Tuesday shows that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police intends to sue Khalifa on four separate indictable charges, including participating in a known terror. The organization-the Islamic State-and persuade others to commit terrorist crimes.
Khalifa is also referred to by the RCMP as the code name of the Islamic State Abu Radwan (sometimes spelled Abu Ridwan) al-Kanadi. Al-Kanadi means “Canadian” in Arabic.
Documents show that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is establishing a case against Khalifa and intends to use his own confession as evidence against him.
In September 2019, Khalifa accepted an audio-only interview with global journalist Stewart Bell in a Syrian prison. He reported that Khalifa did not show obvious remorse for his role in ISIS.
I heard Khalifa say in the interview: “If you ask me about the martyrdom, yes, I believe they are correct and acceptable. Does this mean I will do it? Personally, I will avoid it…I have my reasons.”
An affidavit classified as a “top secret document” and signed by Const. Waleed Abousamak, a member of the Canadian Integrated National Security Team (INSET), which includes members of the RCMP and other law enforcement agencies, said Khalifa’s recognition” Will be used” as evidence that he was accused of committing a crime. “
Although Ottawa had previously accused several Canadians abroad in connection with the work of the Islamic State, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that it either did not know where they were or believed that they had been killed in battle.
In contrast, Khalifa was held in prison.
It is not clear whether Ottawa will take steps to repatriate Khalifa and allow him to stand trial in a Canadian court. CBC News asked in an e-mail whether the Canadian Department of Public Safety intended to do so, but the government department did not respond.
Capture the highest-ranking Canadian ISIS member
According to the affidavit, Khalifa quit his job as an information technology expert in Toronto’s IBM contractor Kelly Services in 2013 and left Canada for Syria.
The RCMP obtained Khalifa student records from Seneca College in Toronto, where Khalifa studied information technology. It also stated that Kelly Services and CompuCom received production orders regarding his employment records, and the TD Bank Group and Scotiabank were forced to provide his bank records.
In a TV interview with CBC Fifth Manor In the summer of 2019, Khalifa said: “I live a normal life in Canada. I did a good job for myself. I decided to give up… What I sacrificed in the process. This is a decision I made, and I insist on that decision.”
Once in Syria, he joined Katibat-ul-Muhajireen Wal-Ansar, an organization fighting to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.
Watch | Mohammed Khalifa said in an interview with CBC News in 2019:
Former ISIS fighters on the status of the organization 0:16
Khalifa said that when his organization merged with the Islamic State, he became a resident of Abu Bakr Al-Bagdadi’s self-styled Caliphate.
Khalifa speaks fluent Arabic and English, and he said he was assigned to the ISIS media department as a translator and reporter.
Khalifa admitted that ISIS paid him and his wife US$50 a month and an additional US$35 each for their two children, which was enough to allow them to live comfortably in Raqqa, the capital of the Caliph, from 2014 to 2017.
‘The English Voice of the Islamic State’
Khalifa’s unique North American English accent has earned him an international reputation, calling him the “English Voice of the Islamic State”.
In his interview Fifth Manor, Khalifa admitted that he was the English dub in the brutal ISIS promotional video “The Flames of War” in 2014. The video showed that the Syrian man was forced to dig his own grave and was executed by a bullet in the back of his head.
“They brought me a script, they said we want you to read this, so I read it, I recorded it, they took it, they asked for some changes, and I re-recorded some parts, which is That way,” Khalifa told Fifth Manor.
When asked if he was the masked executioner in the video, Khalifa said he was not.
Khalifa told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that after the fall of Raqqa in 2017, he discarded his media equipment and picked up a gun. He was captured by Kurdish forces in Deir ez-Zor in January 2019 after he was injured in a fierce gun battle.
CBC independently confirmed that he has been in the same prison in northeastern Syria since his arrest.
In defending its intention to use Khalifa’s comments as the basis for allegations rather than relying on their own investigations, RCMP Const. Waleed Abousamak stated that “there is no other way to reasonably obtain information” and that “the public interest in investigating and prosecuting criminal offences exceeds the privacy of journalists in collecting and disseminating information”.
Global News believes that the use of these materials by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police may harm the work of journalists and weaken the trust of the people they talk to, putting them at risk. The news organization argued that the RCMP is capable of conducting its own interviews.
However, in his ruling, Ontario High Court Judge BP O’Marra stated that he was not satisfied that “the local government and security forces can protect” RCMP investigators and pointed out that “the Canadian government has warned that there is a clear Danger.”
How was Khalifa discovered
The documents unsealed last week revealed for the first time how the RCMP tracked Khalifa.
After the U.S. Department of Defense provided the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with ISIS documents found by the coalition forces in Raqqa, the Khalifa investigation was initiated for the first time.
The first document, dated December 6, 2015, stated that “Abu Radwan Al-Kanadi is required to provide a fixed phone to meet his urgent needs.” At that time, the coalition forces backed by the United States were using cell phone signals to attack through drones. Track and destroy ISIS fighters.
The second document dated December 2015 is the “Contract for the use of telephones by Abrad Wankanadi who lives behind the Labyrinth in Raqqa Abu Khaf”.
However, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was unable to determine the true identity of al-Kanadi, and the investigation ended.
After Khalifa was arrested in January 2019, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) released a video of a captured ISIS fighter who claimed to be Mohamed Abdullah Mohamed. The RCMP suspected that he might be Abu Radwan al-Kanadi, so the unit restarted the investigation.
Watch | Fifth Manor’s complete documentary on de-radicalizing ISIS fighters:
Dozens of Canadians have returned home after joining terrorist organizations abroad. Others are waiting in Syrian detention camps. The federal government says it has a plan to ensure the safety of the public when they return. Bob McKeown investigated the Canadian strategy and found that people are very worried about its effectiveness. 45:05
In the affidavit, Abu Samark said that he pieced together the Arabic and English versions of the Self-Defense Force video to piece together that Muhammad Abdullah Muhammad is Khalifa. Khalifa’s parents and sister living in Toronto confirmed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that the person in the Self-Defense Force video is indeed Khalifa.
The RCMP then compared Khalifa’s signature on the 2011 Canadian passport application with the signature on a U.S. Department of Defense document he found in the ruins of Raqqa.
Forensic audio expert Dr. Colleen Kavanagh matched the voice of the captured fighter in the Self-Defense Force video with the voice of the narrator in the “Fire of War” video.
According to the RCMP’s affidavit, Khalifa’s mother told the RCMP that her son emptied his bank account before going to Syria in 2013 and gave her a lifetime savings of $16,000.
Although Khalifa is still in a Syrian prison, his Kenyan wife and their three children born in Syria are being held in a separate facility in northeastern Syria.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was informed that Khalifa and his wife were not allowed to visit or communicate with each other.
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