International [ISIS Repatriation] Yazidis plead with Canada not to repatriate ISIS members

This is incredible. I knew Guardian is liberal trash, but I never would have imagined the level of grand-standing they would put on display for ISIS jihadists:

Did the UK government do a dirty deal with Trump over the Isis suspects?

The decision to help the US was unlawful and unconstitutional. Theresa May should open a public inquiry into what happened.

https://amp.theguardian.com/comment...vernment-dirty-deal-trump-isis-suspects-trial
 
wtf.. guantanomo is still open.. just send those fuckers there
 
In this week's segment of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes"....

‘I’m going to die here’: Wives of ISIS fighters want to return home to Canada
By Stewart Bell | October 11th, 2018







From the road, Roj Camp looks like the other tent cities that have sprung up in Syria — a grid of white tarp and children flying kites made from sticks and plastic bags.

But the armed Kurdish fighters guarding the front gate are a sign it’s not just another refugee camp: It’s a detention centre for the captured wives and children of the so-called Islamic State.

And seven of them are Canadians.

“I’m going to die here,” one of them, a 26-year-old Toronto woman, told Global News in an interview at the camp in northeast Syria.

The wife of a Lebanese ISIS fighter, she was captured by Kurdish forces last December and brought to the site near the Iraqi border.

While she said she had spoken online with a Canadian official about coming home, that was months ago and she had not heard from the government since.

A 23-year-old from Montreal was at the same camp with her two children. The wife of a German ISIS fighter, she too spoke to a Canadian official about returning but without any result to date.

“Seeing nothing from Canada is actually making us lose hope,” she said.

The Canadians are among almost 500 foreign women affiliated with ISIS who have been captured and are being held at camps in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. Another 1,000 are minors.

In addition to the women at Roj Camp, Vancouver’s Rida Jabbar, the wife of high-profile Canadian ISIS member Mohamed Ali, was detained with her two children at a different camp.

That brings the total number of Canadians identified by Global News to three women and seven kids, in addition to three male fighters. A Kurdish official said the numbers could rise as the U.S.-backed Syrian Defence Forces retake the last ISIS strongholds.

The Western families are mostly kept at Roj Camp, which was initially built for Iraqi refugees, a few of whom remain. It is run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the military alliance that controls the region. But the Kurds want to shut down the camp, preferably before the winter cold arrives.

According to Kurdish authorities, the Canadian government showed an initial interest in bringing the Canadians home and had them fill out passport application forms.

But Ottawa suddenly stopped the repatriation process for reasons the Kurds do not understand, said Abdulkarim Omar, co-chair of foreign affairs for the administration that controls the region.

The two Canadian women at Roj Camp were interviewed by Global News and academic researcher Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam. Both women consented to being interviewed on camera on the condition they could cover their faces and would not be named.

Prior to the interviews, Global News signed a paper agreeing to respect international human rights laws. It also said detainees did not have to answer questions. The camp manager was in the room during the interviews but did not interfere.

Both Canadian women insisted they were not active in the conflict and had spent their time under ISIS as homemakers. One of them said her husband, whom she met online, tricked her into coming to Syria.

Amarasingam said their stories were similar to those of other foreign women married to ISIS fighters. He described their roles as “a kind of revolutionary domesticity” in which they supported the ISIS cause by staying at home and having children.

“I think once the war heated up in Mosul and Raqqah they also got to the point where they didn’t want to see their kids killed. They wanted to find a way out and some of them made arrangements to leave,” he said.

The eldest of the women is a Somali-Canadian who said she grew up in Toronto’s Dixon Road neighbourhood and met her husband online.

He was Lebanese but in November 2014 he sent her to Istanbul, where he had arranged for a man named Abu Mohamed to meet her, she said.

She thought Abu Mohamed was going to take her to Lebanon to be with her husband, she said, but instead, he brought her across the border into Syria.

Her daughter was born in Raqqah, the former hub of ISIS activity. She said she stayed at home and was unaware of the atrocities ISIS was committing as it sought to force its rigid version of Islamic law on the population.

When the bombing began, she was terrified, she said. During her third pregnancy, she decided to return to Canada.

“I thought that maybe if I go back I can give birth, start over, you know like, I know Canadians are different than anyone else. They believe in second chances.”

Last December, she set off with her kids intending to cross into Turkey but she was stopped at a Kurdish checkpoint. “Cause I’m obvious, you know, I’m Somalian. So they took us straight to the prison.”

She was taken nine months ago to Roj Camp, which currently holds 370 families, 100 of them foreigners. Most are from North Africa but there are also Europeans and North Americans.

Her sister said the Toronto family was talking to Global Affairs Canada but the process was slow-moving and officials had provided no timeline for her return.

The case was unique because she only ended up in Syria as a result of her husband’s deception, the sister said.

“She had no idea where she was going,” she said. “We just want her to come back.”

The Montreal woman said she became more devout at Montreal’s Collège Ahuntsic, where she was inspired by the Muslim converts she met.

The “sisters” encouraged her to pray and cover herself, she said. But nobody recruited her, she insisted. “To come over here, that was really on my own. It was not anyone trying to push me.”

She said she no longer felt comfortable in Canada.

“I was feeling like I’m different from the others, you know, because the moment you cover your face, everyone (was) just looking at you strangely.”

“And I was just like, OK, there’s a bunch of Muslims there (in Syria), everyone is the same,” she said. “I want to live under the rules of Allah, you know, and as long as there’s a place where it’s being used, I have to go over there.”

She flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria, where she lived with other women at an ISIS house in the city of Jarabulus. She said she was not permitted to leave the house without a male escort, which she soon realized meant she would have to marry.

“They don’t force you but it’s like, if I don’t get married, I don’t leave this house,” she said.

A German ISIS fighter eventually came by and asked if anyone wanted to get married. She went to meet him and accompanied him to Raqqah.

he felt she was “just living like a normal family.” She had a TV, internet, a daughter and a husband. Being at home, she never witnessed the horrific crimes of ISIS, she said.

But with the start of the bombing campaign, it became impossible to ignore that she was in a war zone. She began asking if she should get out. Pregnant with a second child, she left Raqqah for Mosul, Iraq, and then came back to Syria.

“At the end, we were just, like, from city to city because every city was getting destroyed and you just have to run away,” she said.

To get her home, her mother paid a smuggler to bring her and the children — including her unborn child — to Turkey. “My mom planned everything,” she said.

They passed through five of the checkpoints that are everywhere in Syria’s northeast. But at the biggest one, the soldiers asked for ID. The smuggler tried to pass her off as his wife’s sister, but they looked nothing alike and under questioning, she came clean.

She gave the date of her capture as Oct. 23, 2017.

She gave birth in a prison she said had no medical facilities. “There was nothing, absolutely nothing,” she said. “It was horrible.”

After 63 days she was moved to Roj Camp, where she now lives in a tent and spends the days caring for her kids and waiting for the Canadian government to take her out.

No Canadian officials have visited her, she said, but she did speak with one. “They were asking, like, is everything OK, where we are.”

The official asked whether she preferred to go home through Iraq or Turkey, and she opted for the latter. She said that was five or six months ago. Since then, “nothing, nothing. I’m just having information from my mom, that’s it.”

She insists she is not a danger.

“I don’t want to do anything, I just want to live a normal life and be with my children and that’s it,” she said. “Even if it’s, like, that I have to be, like, judged in Canada and get prison, everything, I absolutely don’t care.”

Both women said they had filled out passport applications but had not received any response.

“I think it’s kind of imperative on Canada to bring them back,” Amarasingam said. “Seven of them are under the age of five, living in a tent city in the desert, under the heat and with winter two months away.”

He said the government’s reluctance could be the result of concerns they might not face arrest if returned to Canada due to the challenges the RCMP faces in building cases against those active in overseas terror groups.

Canada also lacks the resources to put returnees under constant surveillance and does not have sufficient rehabilitation programs for them, he said. The Liberal government may also fear the political fallout of repatriating Canadians who were involved in ISIS.

The Toronto woman broke down as she appealed for help. She said the medical care at the camp was not good and the dust aggravated her asthma. She had been losing weight, she said.

“I’m really sick. My son, he has infection in his lungs.” She pointed to her daughter. “This one, she has asthma and the other one too. So, like, we’re getting more sick, you know.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“It’s not fair. We come from one of the best countries in the world and we’re suffering. Why?

“I’m so tired of this.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/4529299/...ther&utm_medium=MostPopular&utm_campaign=2014
 
‘I just want to go back’: Canadian ISIS fighter captured in northern Syria speaks out
By Stewart Bell | October 10th, 2018

abuisis21.jpg


Muhammed Ali sat on the couch in the prison commander’s office, still wearing the T-shirt and sweatpants he had on four months ago when he was captured by Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria.

Four years ago, the Canadian was a defiant voice of the so-called Islamic State, using his social media accounts to spread beheading photos, threats and incitement messages to an English-speaking audience.

But now he looked defeated.

“I’m just tired of everything,” he told Global News, which interviewed him last weekend at a facility run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the U.S.-backed fighters who control the country’s northeast.

Balding and beardless, with dark rings around his eyes and a quiet voice that seemed at odds with his belligerent online persona as Abu Turaab Al-Kanadi, he said he wanted to come back to Canada.

He said he didn’t care if he was arrested on arrival and insisted he wasn’t a threat.

The Mississauga resident, who left Toronto to join ISIS in April 2014, said he was attempting to cross into Turkey and return to Canada when Syrian fighters from Kurdish People’s Defense Units, or YPG, caught him near the border in a town called Ras al-Ayn.

They brought him to a building in a compound guarded by gunmen. The faded sign above the metal gate said it was once the Syrian Department of Immigration and Passports, before civil war turned the country into a graveyard.

Ali’s wife, Rida Jabbar, who is from Vancouver, and their two children, who were both born under ISIS rule and have never seen Canada, were also taken into custody and are being held at a detention camp not far away.

The question is what to do with them.

Kurdish authorities want Ottawa to take back Ali and at least a dozen other Canadian ISIS fighters, women and children they are holding. But Ali said Canadian officials had not visited him, or even spoken with him on the phone.

“You guys are the first Canadians I met,” he said.

aliisis2.jpg


In a two-hour interview conducted by Global News and terrorism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam, Ali spoke openly about his role in ISIS and why he ultimately abandoned the group.

Ali consented to be interviewed on camera. His captors were not present in the room during the meeting. The SDF asked Global News to sign a form requiring “adherence to international human rights laws” and “not to force the detainee to answer.” Questions about the location of the detention facility were also off-limits.

A Toronto-based academic who studies foreign fighters, Amarasingam said Ali seemed disillusioned and appeared to have undergone a change of heart as a new father trying to raise young children under the coalition anti-ISIS campaign.

While Ali’s responses were consistent with those of other disenchanted fighters, Amarasingam said the remorse could also be feigned, and it was unclear whether he had abandoned his commitment to jihadist violence or had merely soured on ISIS as an organization.

“Just based on a two-hour interview, it’s kind of difficult to know whether he’s lying, whether he’s kind of playing the regret card just to get back to Canada,” said Amarasingam, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London.

Ali had no complaints about Canada, which he said became his home at the age of seven or eight when his parents immigrated from Pakistan. He grew up in Mississauga playing basketball and attending a Catholic high school before starting at Ryerson University in 2008.

Maybe because he “wasn’t mature enough,” he felt lost, depressed and “stopped going to classes, stopped showing up for tests,” he said. A Toronto-based Muslim convert named André Poulin whom he befriended had a strong influence on his fate but didn’t recruit him, he said.

poulin.png

Andre Poulin was raised in Ontario before leaving travelling to Syria in 2012 to join the extremist militants of the Islamic State


After Poulin died fighting in Syria in 2013, Ali worked in northern Alberta to raise money for a plane ticket to Turkey. When he confided that he wanted to fight abroad, his father took him to an imam to talk him out of it, but Ali wasn’t swayed. “To me it seemed like the right thing to do at that time,” he said.

“At that time the regime was basically going all out on the civilians, so I decided to come here and help the rebels in their fight against the regime and against Assad,” he said. “At that time it was very simple because a lot of the foreigners were coming in for that reason. A lot of them were English-speaking.

“So I decided, why not?”

He left Toronto’s Pearson airport for Istanbul in April 2014 and, with the help of a Swedish extremist he met online, crossed into Syria northeast of Azaz. ISIS asked him questions and sent him to basic training, which lasted 21 days.

abuisis3.png



When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the head of the Islamic State in June 2014, Ali said he was supportive, believing it would unify the competing anti-Assad armed factions, although it didn’t.

At first, he said, he was sent to work for the ISIS oil and gas ministry, but there was little for him to do, so he spent much of his time online and quickly became a prominent social media propagandist, even as his various accounts were suspended.

His online posts were taunting, at times gruesome. He posted photos of ISIS executions and talked about playing soccer with severed heads. As ISIS was throwing homosexuals off rooftops, he said they should be killed. Following the October 2014 terror attacks in Quebec and Ontario, he gloated and called for more.

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” he said when reminded of those posts. “2014 was a long time ago, different time. Killing of civilians is not really justified Islamically. I haven’t seen any justification yet. It doesn’t really help anyone because … it’s not really a good idea.”


isisabutwitter.png



He met his wife at a house where women waited to be married off to ISIS fighters. She was an Afghan-Canadian who had come to Syria four months after him. Their courtship was pragmatic. “We had a meeting for about 30-40 minutes,” he said. And that was it. “I married her.”

While he said he hung out mostly with Australians, he occasionally encountered other Canadians, like Farah Shirdon of Calgary, whom he said died in an airstrike in Raqqah in 2017. Another Canadian led a battalion of English-speaking fighters, he said, and a third, who went by Abu Rudwan, narrated the ISIS execution video Flames of War.

But he downplayed the numbers of Canadians in ISIS, saying estimates of 80 to 100 were too high.

“I mean there’s like five Canadian guys. Two killed in Raqqah, me,” he said. “I heard there’s another one in a different prison. And maybe one or two still in ISIS. Not a lot of Canadians here.”

From the oil ministry, he joined a sniper and reconnaissance unit at a camp in Al-Tabqah. “And pretty much been doing that for the last four years,” he said. He did “mostly recon, some sniping and some training,” he said.

“Most of the time I was doing recon, even in the sniping units, I was a spotter.” Asked if he had killed, he said ISIS did not try to confirm whether they had hit their targets.

During the siege of the ISIS capital Raqqah that began in 2016, he said he moved to Al Mayadin, where the terror group’s leadership was relocated. But by late that year, he was losing faith in ISIS, he said.

screen-shot-2014-09-04-at-9-55-22-am.png



He felt ISIS had shifted its focus from toppling the Assad regime to fighting other armed factions. And he was upset about the treatment of foreign fighters he said were either used as cannon fodder or tortured and killed on the premise that they were spies.

“They portray themselves in the media as they’re an Islamic state,” he said. “But there are many things here that are not in Islam. Like it is a lot of lies, things like that.”

He also began to struggle with ISIS terrorist attacks, he said. He denied he was involved in the ISIS branch that trained foreigners to enter Western countries and carry out attacks.

“No, no,” he said. “But there were people trained and they were sent back to Europe. And you’ve probably seen what happened in France and things like that. But I never met anyone who was trained in that.”

Ready to give up ISIS, he said, he spoke to his wife’s father in Dubai, who contacted the Canadian government. “They said if you want to come home the best thing is to go to Turkey, because from there they can help us get back.”

kt6qmqqx.jpg


The family left Ash Sha’fah, near the Iraqi border, with Ali hidden in a secret compartment in a transport truck. They changed to a car and then to a different car, but as a Pakistani-Canadian, he would have stood out and the Kurdish forces pulled him aside.

For the first three months, he was in solitary, where the lights were always on, he said. He is now in the general population and shares a cell with four Europeans, five Iraqis and four Syrians.

The Kurds, Americans and British have interrogated him, he said. They asked him “everything — about myself, about ISIS, about other people, things like that.” He said he had not been mistreated or tortured.

The Canadian government may not be in a hurry to repatriate ISIS members like Ali following the uproar in the House of Commons last year over a Toronto-area man who said he had served in ISIS but had not been arrested.

With a federal election next year, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may fear the optics of repatriating ISIS members when it remains uncertain the RCMP would be able to gather enough evidence to arrest them.

Ali sounded resigned to being arrested upon arrival in Canada. “I mean, obviously, they’ve got things that they want to charge me for,” he said. “It is what it is. I have to go back home. I can’t spend any more time here, man. Four years is enough.”

Was it all a mistake?

“Well, if you say it’s a big mistake, then you’re going to spend the rest of your life banging your head on the wall. I mean, I don’t know man, the only thing I care about now is my wife and my kids,” he said. “I don’t even care about anything else. I don’t care about this country or these people here.”

In one of his many social media posts after joining ISIS, Ali said he wasn’t Canadian anymore. He said his passport expired in 2014 and was taken from him. But throughout the interview, he repeated that all he wanted was to go home.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “Four years, I mean, it’s pretty much taken everything out of me. Don’t know, man. I’m not going home to do anything stupid or anything like that. I was never in trouble growing up, never got in trouble and I’m not looking to get in trouble once I go back.”

“I just want to go back and live my life, that’s it.”


https://globalnews.ca/news/4528417/canadian-isis-fighter-captured-in-northern-syria-speaks-out/
 
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“I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “Four years, I mean, it’s pretty much taken everything out of me. Don’t know, man. I’m not going home to do anything stupid or anything like that. I was never in trouble growing up, never got in trouble and I’m not looking to get in trouble once I go back.”

“I just want to go back and live my life, that’s it.”

<puh-lease75>

I can’t believe Canada takes these.....things back
 
“I thought that maybe if I go back I can give birth, start over, you know like, I know Canadians are different than anyone else. They believe in second chances.”

I'm sorry Mrs Somali-Canadian, but it doesn't sound like you're very Canadian at all. First clue was you buggering off to Lebanon, then using "Canadians" and "they" instead of us or we. Not a convincing case made of helping our own out.
 
Let me just throw this out there.

I feel sorry for their family/loved ones probably never seeing these people again while strangers cheer for the death of said loved one.

THAT said, they fucking should have known better what they were getting themselves into when they (the person in question) left.
100%.
 
Then we are no better than them. Did we kill all German soldiers Post WW2?

Huuuuuuuuuge difference . German soldiers were just soldiers doing their job before Hitler and the Nazi party came along .Most of them weren't hateful. They were just professional soldiers doing their job .

People who join a terrorist group join out of a hateful ideology.
 
I’d be absolutely shocked if she were successfully extradited and served that or any other sentence that was agreed upon. Once a Fighter gets back to their own country and has to be tried in that legal system the lack of evidence (happened in a war torn country with minimal records, no available witnesses, confessed under conditions unacceptable in the home country, etc.) pretty much guarantees any case strongly pursued leads to a very early release.



It’s the capitalists fault! They were trying to get in on the ground floor of a plucky upstart. That’s just good exonomics, damnit!



I don’t care if not a single on does. If a citizen of my country had travelled to, say, France, and made it clear they were embracing and joining a gang who both before their arrival and after were active in murder and rape, the idea that once they make it back here we ignore their actions entirely and that they face no repercussions infuriates me. And that’s not even assuming they themselves took an active part in any specific rapes or murders.

The fact we have a country (Canada) that is so seemingly dedicated to Social Justice and women’s justice who sees nothing wrong with welcoming rapists and murderers back to their lives as if nothing occurred because the people they committed these crimes on are, what? Strangers? Not one of us? It’s disgusting. Want to rape, enslave and murder? Just do it somewhere else on the weekends and it’s fine.
Anyone who thinks Canada is doing a horrible thing should read this and consider reality:
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-should-canada-do-about-returning-jihadists/
"Q: Is there any evidence this sort of approach works?

A: We don’t have exact numbers, but the Danish government basically is saying they’ve now dealt with dozens of such individuals and that there’s not a single case yet where they’ve encountered someone going through one of these programs who then went and committed a terrorist act. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

Q: What would you say to people who’ll respond to all this by saying, “Oh, come on, professor—these are hardened, horrible people, who are implicated in all kinds of atrocities. How can you talk about a rehabilitation?”

A: I recognize the resistance to these ideas. But, from the best studies we have available—which admittedly do not deal with people coming from Syria and Iraq and from ISIS, where we have a much more extreme circumstance—but from all of the real studies done of the people who fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and elsewhere in the world, involved in jihadist struggles, the numbers show that about a third die in the fight, about a third never come back because they want to go live in a Muslim-majority country and they disappear into Morocco or wherever, and about a third come home.

Of the ones that come home, the vast majority are either disillusioned or they’re to some extent traumatized and feel they done their bit—”I did my service to fight for the Muslim people against their oppressors, but I’m done.” A tiny fraction of them will be coming back actually still radicalized and interested in engaging in some kind of, you know, further terrorist action. And so this is why you have to have a really careful debriefing process, an assessment process, and of course our security officials know how to do that. That’s their job."
 
Why are ISIS fighter being captured? Line them up against a wall and shoot them.
 
I’m going to die here

But but wasnt that the whole point? To live and eventually die in their wonderland? Or is it because the latter came sooner than they expected?
 
‘I just want to go back’: Canadian ISIS fighter captured in northern Syria speaks out
By Stewart Bell | October 10th, 2018

abuisis21.jpg


aliisis2.jpg



poulin.png

Lol, no wonder why they left Canada. Look at the first guys hair line. Then look at the second guy's patchy beard growth, narrow face and long nose. No way they are banging any of our hot, maple neighbors. Definition of incels.
 
Huuuuuuuuuge difference . German soldiers were just soldiers doing their job before Hitler and the Nazi party came along .Most of them weren't hateful. They were just professional soldiers doing their job .

People who join a terrorist group join out of a hateful ideology.

Adding to that, once the war broke out, it’s not like they had a choice. You were conscripted into the army and the alternative was prison or a concentration camp or straight up firing squad. These people willingly left one of the safest countries on the planet to fight our allies, and now they want to take a mulligan (let’s not forget that the chance they committed murder or at least were accomplices to murder is extremely high).
 
‘I just want to go back’: Canadian ISIS fighter captured in northern Syria speaks out
By Stewart Bell | October 10th, 2018

abuisis21.jpg


Muhammed Ali sat on the couch in the prison commander’s office, still wearing the T-shirt and sweatpants he had on four months ago when he was captured by Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria.

Four years ago, the Canadian was a defiant voice of the so-called Islamic State, using his social media accounts to spread beheading photos, threats and incitement messages to an English-speaking audience.

But now he looked defeated.

“I’m just tired of everything,” he told Global News, which interviewed him last weekend at a facility run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the U.S.-backed fighters who control the country’s northeast.

Balding and beardless, with dark rings around his eyes and a quiet voice that seemed at odds with his belligerent online persona as Abu Turaab Al-Kanadi, he said he wanted to come back to Canada.

He said he didn’t care if he was arrested on arrival and insisted he wasn’t a threat.

The Mississauga resident, who left Toronto to join ISIS in April 2014, said he was attempting to cross into Turkey and return to Canada when Syrian fighters from Kurdish People’s Defense Units, or YPG, caught him near the border in a town called Ras al-Ayn.

They brought him to a building in a compound guarded by gunmen. The faded sign above the metal gate said it was once the Syrian Department of Immigration and Passports, before civil war turned the country into a graveyard.

Ali’s wife, Rida Jabbar, who is from Vancouver, and their two children, who were both born under ISIS rule and have never seen Canada, were also taken into custody and are being held at a detention camp not far away.

The question is what to do with them.

Kurdish authorities want Ottawa to take back Ali and at least a dozen other Canadian ISIS fighters, women and children they are holding. But Ali said Canadian officials had not visited him, or even spoken with him on the phone.

“You guys are the first Canadians I met,” he said.

aliisis2.jpg


In a two-hour interview conducted by Global News and terrorism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam, Ali spoke openly about his role in ISIS and why he ultimately abandoned the group.

Ali consented to be interviewed on camera. His captors were not present in the room during the meeting. The SDF asked Global News to sign a form requiring “adherence to international human rights laws” and “not to force the detainee to answer.” Questions about the location of the detention facility were also off-limits.

A Toronto-based academic who studies foreign fighters, Amarasingam said Ali seemed disillusioned and appeared to have undergone a change of heart as a new father trying to raise young children under the coalition anti-ISIS campaign.

While Ali’s responses were consistent with those of other disenchanted fighters, Amarasingam said the remorse could also be feigned, and it was unclear whether he had abandoned his commitment to jihadist violence or had merely soured on ISIS as an organization.

“Just based on a two-hour interview, it’s kind of difficult to know whether he’s lying, whether he’s kind of playing the regret card just to get back to Canada,” said Amarasingam, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London.

Ali had no complaints about Canada, which he said became his home at the age of seven or eight when his parents immigrated from Pakistan. He grew up in Mississauga playing basketball and attending a Catholic high school before starting at Ryerson University in 2008.

Maybe because he “wasn’t mature enough,” he felt lost, depressed and “stopped going to classes, stopped showing up for tests,” he said. A Toronto-based Muslim convert named André Poulin whom he befriended had a strong influence on his fate but didn’t recruit him, he said.

poulin.png

Andre Poulin was raised in Ontario before leaving travelling to Syria in 2012 to join the extremist militants of the Islamic State


After Poulin died fighting in Syria in 2013, Ali worked in northern Alberta to raise money for a plane ticket to Turkey. When he confided that he wanted to fight abroad, his father took him to an imam to talk him out of it, but Ali wasn’t swayed. “To me it seemed like the right thing to do at that time,” he said.

“At that time the regime was basically going all out on the civilians, so I decided to come here and help the rebels in their fight against the regime and against Assad,” he said. “At that time it was very simple because a lot of the foreigners were coming in for that reason. A lot of them were English-speaking.

“So I decided, why not?”

He left Toronto’s Pearson airport for Istanbul in April 2014 and, with the help of a Swedish extremist he met online, crossed into Syria northeast of Azaz. ISIS asked him questions and sent him to basic training, which lasted 21 days.

abuisis3.png



When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the head of the Islamic State in June 2014, Ali said he was supportive, believing it would unify the competing anti-Assad armed factions, although it didn’t.

At first, he said, he was sent to work for the ISIS oil and gas ministry, but there was little for him to do, so he spent much of his time online and quickly became a prominent social media propagandist, even as his various accounts were suspended.

His online posts were taunting, at times gruesome. He posted photos of ISIS executions and talked about playing soccer with severed heads. As ISIS was throwing homosexuals off rooftops, he said they should be killed. Following the October 2014 terror attacks in Quebec and Ontario, he gloated and called for more.

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” he said when reminded of those posts. “2014 was a long time ago, different time. Killing of civilians is not really justified Islamically. I haven’t seen any justification yet. It doesn’t really help anyone because … it’s not really a good idea.”


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He met his wife at a house where women waited to be married off to ISIS fighters. She was an Afghan-Canadian who had come to Syria four months after him. Their courtship was pragmatic. “We had a meeting for about 30-40 minutes,” he said. And that was it. “I married her.”

While he said he hung out mostly with Australians, he occasionally encountered other Canadians, like Farah Shirdon of Calgary, whom he said died in an airstrike in Raqqah in 2017. Another Canadian led a battalion of English-speaking fighters, he said, and a third, who went by Abu Rudwan, narrated the ISIS execution video Flames of War.

But he downplayed the numbers of Canadians in ISIS, saying estimates of 80 to 100 were too high.

“I mean there’s like five Canadian guys. Two killed in Raqqah, me,” he said. “I heard there’s another one in a different prison. And maybe one or two still in ISIS. Not a lot of Canadians here.”

From the oil ministry, he joined a sniper and reconnaissance unit at a camp in Al-Tabqah. “And pretty much been doing that for the last four years,” he said. He did “mostly recon, some sniping and some training,” he said.

“Most of the time I was doing recon, even in the sniping units, I was a spotter.” Asked if he had killed, he said ISIS did not try to confirm whether they had hit their targets.

During the siege of the ISIS capital Raqqah that began in 2016, he said he moved to Al Mayadin, where the terror group’s leadership was relocated. But by late that year, he was losing faith in ISIS, he said.

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He felt ISIS had shifted its focus from toppling the Assad regime to fighting other armed factions. And he was upset about the treatment of foreign fighters he said were either used as cannon fodder or tortured and killed on the premise that they were spies.

“They portray themselves in the media as they’re an Islamic state,” he said. “But there are many things here that are not in Islam. Like it is a lot of lies, things like that.”

He also began to struggle with ISIS terrorist attacks, he said. He denied he was involved in the ISIS branch that trained foreigners to enter Western countries and carry out attacks.

“No, no,” he said. “But there were people trained and they were sent back to Europe. And you’ve probably seen what happened in France and things like that. But I never met anyone who was trained in that.”

Ready to give up ISIS, he said, he spoke to his wife’s father in Dubai, who contacted the Canadian government. “They said if you want to come home the best thing is to go to Turkey, because from there they can help us get back.”

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The family left Ash Sha’fah, near the Iraqi border, with Ali hidden in a secret compartment in a transport truck. They changed to a car and then to a different car, but as a Pakistani-Canadian, he would have stood out and the Kurdish forces pulled him aside.

For the first three months, he was in solitary, where the lights were always on, he said. He is now in the general population and shares a cell with four Europeans, five Iraqis and four Syrians.

The Kurds, Americans and British have interrogated him, he said. They asked him “everything — about myself, about ISIS, about other people, things like that.” He said he had not been mistreated or tortured.

The Canadian government may not be in a hurry to repatriate ISIS members like Ali following the uproar in the House of Commons last year over a Toronto-area man who said he had served in ISIS but had not been arrested.

With a federal election next year, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may fear the optics of repatriating ISIS members when it remains uncertain the RCMP would be able to gather enough evidence to arrest them.

Ali sounded resigned to being arrested upon arrival in Canada. “I mean, obviously, they’ve got things that they want to charge me for,” he said. “It is what it is. I have to go back home. I can’t spend any more time here, man. Four years is enough.”

Was it all a mistake?

“Well, if you say it’s a big mistake, then you’re going to spend the rest of your life banging your head on the wall. I mean, I don’t know man, the only thing I care about now is my wife and my kids,” he said. “I don’t even care about anything else. I don’t care about this country or these people here.”

In one of his many social media posts after joining ISIS, Ali said he wasn’t Canadian anymore. He said his passport expired in 2014 and was taken from him. But throughout the interview, he repeated that all he wanted was to go home.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “Four years, I mean, it’s pretty much taken everything out of me. Don’t know, man. I’m not going home to do anything stupid or anything like that. I was never in trouble growing up, never got in trouble and I’m not looking to get in trouble once I go back.”

“I just want to go back and live my life, that’s it.”


https://globalnews.ca/news/4528417/canadian-isis-fighter-captured-in-northern-syria-speaks-out/

What an optimistic article.

Why on Earth would Trudeau fear the optics of repatriating terorists? The federal liberals are a suicidal death cult bent on the destruction of Canada from within.

They will be thrilled to bring even more Ialamic terrorists into the country they hate so much.
 
Anyone who thinks Canada is doing a horrible thing should read this and consider reality:
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-should-canada-do-about-returning-jihadists/
"Q: Is there any evidence this sort of approach works?

A: We don’t have exact numbers, but the Danish government basically is saying they’ve now dealt with dozens of such individuals and that there’s not a single case yet where they’ve encountered someone going through one of these programs who then went and committed a terrorist act. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

Q: What would you say to people who’ll respond to all this by saying, “Oh, come on, professor—these are hardened, horrible people, who are implicated in all kinds of atrocities. How can you talk about a rehabilitation?”

A: I recognize the resistance to these ideas. But, from the best studies we have available—which admittedly do not deal with people coming from Syria and Iraq and from ISIS, where we have a much more extreme circumstance—but from all of the real studies done of the people who fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and elsewhere in the world, involved in jihadist struggles, the numbers show that about a third die in the fight, about a third never come back because they want to go live in a Muslim-majority country and they disappear into Morocco or wherever, and about a third come home.

Of the ones that come home, the vast majority are either disillusioned or they’re to some extent traumatized and feel they done their bit—”I did my service to fight for the Muslim people against their oppressors, but I’m done.” A tiny fraction of them will be coming back actually still radicalized and interested in engaging in some kind of, you know, further terrorist action. And so this is why you have to have a really careful debriefing process, an assessment process, and of course our security officials know how to do that. That’s their job."


Yep, and doubtless the vast majority of Nazi war criminals would have lived peaceful and productive lives, never to commit another crime, let alone attempt to repeat the ones they engaged in previously.

And yet, we have no difficulty realizing that despite them posing effectively zero risk of FURTHER harm, they absolutely do not deserve to be let off, and those who either fled or returned to their home countries are hunted to this day.
 
Seriously, why the fuck isn’t this how we deal with killing the baddies. I mean, yes, let’s kill these ISIS guys, but, just in general - line em up and cut em down. Fuck sakes. Clear up those death rows in a day. Cheap way to do it, quick, make em dig their own hole first, just makes sense.
 
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