The immigration officer knew the passport was fake, as fake as the story of torture the wiry young Algerian had told while claiming asylum: Even then, Ahmed Ressam soon walked out of the airport onto the streets of Toronto. Even though his asylum application was rejected, Ressam was allowed to continue living in Canada, supplementing his welfare entitlements with shoplifting and stealing luggage from tourists. And even when Canadian intelligence learned he was providing stolen passports to al-Qaeda, nothing happened.
Finally, in December 1999, a suspicious United States customs officer at the Port Angeles border crossing pulled Ressam aside, thinking he might be trafficking narcotics. Inside the car, she found almost 50 kilograms of fertiliser and ethylene glycol dinitrate, intended to explode at millennium celebrations near Los Angeles International Airport.
Last week, prosecutors in British Columbia began the trial of a 20-year-old Mississauga resident, Anand Nath—or Adnan, the name he chose to go by—with serving as a hitman for a jihadist cell. Together with Suliman Raza and Naqash Abassi, prosecutors allege, Nath shot dead his friend Naim Akl in the summer of 2021 to prevent him from exposing an operation to send funds to the Islamic State.
The case establishes that organised crime-linked Khalistan terrorists aren’t the only ones hiding in the shade of the Maple Leaf. Erratic law enforcement standards and political appeasement of the country’s increasingly poisonous identity politics are providing jihadist groups with a safe haven.
Entwined with gang culture, which already claims more civilian lives each year than all of India’s insurgencies put together, Canadian jihadism could pose a danger not just to the country but also to the world around it.
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Immigrant Islamism
Early in the summer of 1975, the son of a provincial Egyptian civil servant arrived in Montreal, hoping to secure an engineering degree and Canadian citizenship. Ahmed Said Khadr had arrived in the West as an observant Muslim, but largely secular-nationalist in his outlook. At university, journalist Michelle Shephard records, he ended up joining the Muslim Student Association, a group founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963, which had set up branches across North America.
Khadr would, in key senses, lay the foundations for a jihadist movement to emerge in Canada.
From a mosque in Munich, the Egyptian Islamist ideologue Said Ramadan had steered the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, as it fought for the transformation of the country into a theocratic state. The movement was then an ally of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), journalist Ian Johnson has written, serving to fight against Soviet communism and Arab nationalism.
French author Caroline Fourest has noted that Ramadan emerged at the vanguard of Islamist causes worldwide, with Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan even giving him a regular slot on national radio.
Even after he obtained an excellent position at Bell Northern Research, however, Khadr sought closer involvement in the theocratic movements which had swept Iran and Afghanistan in the 1970s. In 1982, he moved his family to Bahrain; three years later, they shifted to Pakistan, where Khadr became part of the jihadist circle around Palestinian-born ideologue Abdullah Azzam and his acolyte, Osama Bin Laden.
Following the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan in 1995, Khadr was arrested and sentenced to death. Faced with intense diplomatic pressure from Canada, where Islamic groups relentlessly lobbied Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s government, he was released and left for Afghanistan.
Khadr was later killed in a 2003 firefight with Pakistani forces; his teenage son Omar would spend a decade in Guantanamo Bay. Even though substantial evidence emerged of Omar’s involvement in terrorism, he later won a $10.5 million compensation payout from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government because of the role of Canadian officials in enabling his torture during interrogation.
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The rising jihad
The networks of jihadist mobilisation established through Khadr were soon making their presence felt. Fateh Kamel, who recruited Ressam to supply passports for al-Qaeda, left Afghanistan for Canada in 1988, hoping to use his new homeland to help the jihad. French courts, which handed Kamel an eight-year sentence for an attack in the town of Roubaix, would describe him as the “principal organiser of international networks determined to prepare attacks and procure weapons and passports for terrorists acting throughout the world.”
Led by Trinidadian convert Glenn Neville Ford, five members of the Pakistani jihadist group Jama’at al-Fuqra—or Army of the Poor—plotted to bomb a Hindu temple and movie theatre in Toronto in 1991, where an estimated 4,500 people were expected to gather for Diwali celebrations.
Ford twice travelled to Lahore to study at cleric Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani’s International Quranic Open University, reporter John Goddard has written, which is described by the FBI as a terror front. There, he studied Gilani’s writings, including an exhortation to “lead Muslims to their final victory over Communists, Zionists, Hindus [and] deviators.” In 1991, Ford followed Gilani’s call to establish a rural collective to insulate the group’s followers from Western culture.
Then, to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Zakaria Amara—a Jordanian Christian by birth, who converted to Islam—led a group of eighteen conspirators who plotted to detonate two truck bombs in Toronto. The group had, scholars Michael King, David Jones and Amarnath Amarsingham have written, even hosted a convention of jihadists from the United Kingdom and United States in 2005.
In 2010, Afghanistan-trained Canadian jihadist Hiva Alizadeh, together with Misbahuddin Ahmed and medical resident Khurram Sher, were held for plotting to set off a bomb in Ottawa. The group had also procured thousands of dollars to help jihadist groups in Afghanistan, investigators found. Three years later, Tunisian national Chiheb Esseghaier, studying for a biotechnology doctorate in Canada, plotted to derail an intercity train.
From soon after 9/11, King and his co-authors record, numbers of Canadians were moving to jihadist battlegrounds around the world, inspired by Islamist cells centred around mosques as well as the Internet. Ferid Imam, Muhannad al-Farekh, and Miawand Yar met while studying at the University of Manitoba and left Canada in 2007 with the intent of joining either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Estimates suggest some 180 Canadian nationals served with the Islamic State, of whom some 80 have returned home. The scholar Kyle Matthews notes the country has been reluctant to prosecute citizens for crimes they are alleged to have committed for the so-called Caliphate.
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The jihad comes home
Little is known so far about what drew Anand Nath to the Islamic State: The son of immigrants living in Toronto, he worked in marketing at the warehousing firm TRYAL, Inc., together with several of his fellow accused. The firm, owned by Abbasi, is believed to have been used to send funds to Canadians in the Islamic State in Syria. It is unclear when Nath, as well as his victim Akl—a Druze by birth—converted to Islam. Prosecutors say the decision to kill Akl, as well as his family, was taken after he threatened to expose the operation to authorities.
Like Nath, several other young Canadian jihadists have had past relationships with small-time crime or drug use. The vast majority of people who fit that profile, though, have not been drawn to jihadism; conversely, many jihadists, even though some were converts, were not. There is no easy, deterministic model that explains who becomes a terrorist.
The political scientist Lorne Dawson has noted of the Toronto jihadists that “the young men appear to have come from secular, nominal, or at best moderately religious backgrounds, yet they were bound together by an intense, coherent religious rhetoric and sense of purpose. They strove to live out the mujahideen ideal, in their own fashion, mixing the catchphrases of Islamic fundamentalism with the lingo of the gangster rap culture of urban youth.”
Like other violent youth clusters—Khalistani or just plain-vannila gangster—young, alienated youth from immigrant backgrounds seem to find in jihadism a sense of brotherhood and agency they lack in their communities and everyday lives. The conditions are ripe for fundamentalists and organised crime groups to grow in.
Years before 9/11, Canadian spymaster Ward Elcock warned his country could become known as a place from where “terrorist acts elsewhere are funded or fomented.” “We cannot ever become known as some Rest and Recreation facility for terrorists. In other words, and I will be as blunt as I can be, we cannot become, through inaction or otherwise, what might be called an unofficial state sponsor of terrorism.”
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)