Front Burner - A Canadian said he killed for ISIS. The RCMP say it’s a hoax

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

The story was chronicled in detail in the mega-hit New York Times podcast Caliphate: a young Canadian man who claimed he had travelled to Syria to join ISIS, committing executions on behalf of the group before becoming disillusioned and fleeing. Now, Shehroze Chaudry, a.k.a. "Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi" has been charged by the RCMP not for being a member of ISIS, but for allegedly lying about it. He's now facing a terrorism hoax charge. Today, terrorism and radicalization expert Amarnath Amarasingam shares his perspective on the story. He's been in contact with Chaudhry for about four years, at first as part of his research into ISIS fighters and returnees, and later as someone who works to help reintegrate former extremists.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. After that, I stabbed him. The blood was just, it was warm. And it sprayed everywhere.

And the guy cried, was crying and screaming. He did not die after the first time. The second time or so, he probably just flinched over. That chilling excerpt is from an episode of the podcast Caliphate. And the voice you hear is a young man named Sharose Chowdhury. He's Canadian and a self-professed ISIS executioner. When the New York Times released Caliphate, it was a huge hit. It helped make reporter Rukmini Kalamaki a finalist for a Pulitzer.

It won her a Peabody. It also ignited a controversy. Why was a young man who claimed to be an ISIS killer walking free in Canada? Mr. Speaker, this individual is speaking freely to the media. The government has got to know where he is. And in fact, last night in the podcast, this individual described how he executed individuals

by shooting them in the back of the head. Well, last week Chowdhury was arrested, not for being a member of ISIS, but for allegedly lying about it. He's now facing a terrorism hoax charge. Today I'm speaking with Amarnath Amarangsingham. He's an assistant professor at Queen's University. And for roughly the last four years,

Amarnath says he's been talking to Chowdhury, at first as part of his research into ISIS fighters and returnees, and later as someone who works to help reintegrate former extremists. I'm Josh Block, this is FrontBurner, and a warning, this episode covers some disturbing allegations. Hi, Amarnath, thank you for joining me. Hi, thanks for having me. Hi, Amarnath. Thank you for joining me. Hi, thanks for having me.

So the RCMP is alleging that Sharose Chowdhury lied about his role in ISIS and taking part in these execution-style killings. I understand that you spoke to Chowdhury after the arrest. What did he have to say to you about these charges? I didn't ask him specifically, of course, whether he lied or not. I mean, now that it's a legal issue, I don't really want to start asking those kinds of questions of him. But I was basically checking in to make sure he was okay and how he was dealing with it. And he basically had to say that he doesn't know why the RCMP is digging up these old issues again. He's, you know, he's been in school, he's trying to move on with his life, and they're making it more difficult, I guess. So that's the most he had to say about it in terms of the charges and how he's dealing with it afterwards. There's a lot to unpack here, and I want to help people understand just how much of a flashpoint of debate Chowdhury's become here in Canada and internationally. To start, how did Chowdhury become so widely known? So a think tank named Memory, the Middle East Research Institute, put out a report in November 2016, November 3rd, 2016, where they basically said that they had found a Canadian who was posting online on Facebook and Instagram about traveling to Syria and things like

that, and then having returned to Canada. And then from that report, I guess, Rukmini picked it up and visited him in Canada, had email exchanges with him in Canada, and went to interview him in around mid-November 2016. Can I ask what your parents do for a living? Yeah, my dad, he runs a restaurant and my mom does not work. She used to be an esthetician. So what I'm trying to do is see if what he tells me matches up with the reporting I have done. The Caliphate podcast was what really kind of put him into the public eye. It was, I think, early 2018 or so. This idea that, you know, there was an ISIS fighter that had returned to Canada, was living without charges, was going to school, was freely

traveling around, started to hit the airwaves around that time. Joining me from New York via Skype is Rukmini Kalamaki. So he was speaking to us in this window of time when he essentially thought that he had slipped through the cracks. He said that he felt remorseful for what he had done and that he was looking for closure. Let's talk a little bit more about that New York Times podcast, Caliphate. As you mentioned, Chowdhury was featured prominently in it. He goes under the alias Abu Huzaifa. And for those who haven't heard it, he talks, he gives a detailed account of going to school in Pakistan and then leaving school and traveling to Syria and joining ISIS. Tell me more about what he tells Rukmini.

and joining ISIS. Tell me more about what he tells Rukmini. Yeah, he tells her in pretty intense detail his time in Pakistan, his decision to travel to Turkey, travel to Syria, join the Islamic State, cross into ISIS territory, work as an ISIS police officer, basically as like a part of the police force of the Islamic State is forced to or is asked to commit several murders on their behalf while in ISIS territory. You feel the pressure from the gun and everything and you've I guess you feel

bits coming back at you when from his head I guess. I kept thinking we killed them. Like they were middle aged men. And I'm just a kid uh he talks about how that's been a very emotional uh response he had a very emotional response to those killings and eventually stole a motorcycle uh and headed headed back to the turkish border crossed into

turkey and then flew back to pakistan and then after some time in pakistan uh flew back to the Turkish border, crossed into Turkey, and then flew back to Pakistan. And then after some time in Pakistan, flew back to Canada. And so that's kind of the general trajectory of his time in Syria. He claims initially to have traveled from early 2014 to about June 2014. And that's significant because the Islamic State declares its so-called caliphate at the end of June 2014. And so he places himself kind of at the pre-caliphate period to some extent, even though he claims to have been there during the declaration of the caliphate. Oh, there was a lot of celebrations that day. They celebrated it. Throughout the night, they just would have sweets handed out, food, free food.

Restaurants would be giving out free food. They'd be hugging each other, you know. From there, what's interesting is Rukmini starts to look at his passport and some of the dates that he's talking about and realizes that a lot of this is probably not true, the stamps in his passport don't match

the timeline that he's talking about, and so entire chapter 6 of the Caliphate podcast is dedicated to unpacking some of the inconsistencies in his story. And I think they place him eventually, that he probably went, but it was late 2014 to early 2015, sometime in that window. Right. And in the podcast, you know, what kind of evidence do they provide? I mean, they're not relying solely on his account. The team goes and attempts to corroborate it with others. Tell me about some of the evidence they provide to support the claim that he actually did go to Syria and did join ISIS.

who visits Josefa's uncle's house. From there, they call his father. His father says Josefa's making it all up, that this is all made up in his head. I managed to talk to him for 20, 25 minutes. He just portrayed his son as a curious kind of young mind who spent a lot of time over the internet. From there, the New York Times calls Adam Goldman and Eric Schmidt, who are two of their kind of well-known national security correspondents, and they start to work their sources and come

back with the fact that somebody under Shiro Shoudri's name and Huzaifa's name is actually on the no-fly list, can't enter American airspace, can't enter the United States, is already under investigation by Canadian authorities for being a suspected member of the Islamic State. And so I think that corroboration from sources inside American law enforcement give them some confidence that they might be onto something. We also reach out to my colleague Maliki Brown. So we shared with Maliki a video that Josefa had given us, which he says shows him shooting a Glock into the Euphrates River. So you can see that he's standing on an island in the middle of the river. By using old satellite imagery, we can tell within a three-month period of when that island appeared. After November 2014,

this island appears. And so kind of all of that put together, mixed with eventually solidifying his timeline a little bit more consistently with his passport and things like that, they draw the conclusion that he's probably lying about details of what happened there, how he got in, how he got out, etc. If you made this up, if this whole thing was an invention, I guess just tell me, you know? Oh, I've been hoping that, I've been hoping I can say that this whole thing was an invention? I guess just tell me. You know? I've been hoping I can say that

this whole thing is bullshit just so I can say that once they come around to a prosecution that you cannot prove anything because they cannot prove anything. The question about the veracity of his story kind of continues past the podcast. You know, back in 2018, he does an interview with CBC where he does admit that he travels to Syria. He joins ISIS, but he denies entirely that he killed anyone. He claims he never harmed anyone, but did witness ISIS brutalizing Muslims regularly,

lashings and worse. There was also beheadings too, but that was for higher crimes. What kind of issue does that raise in terms of his credibility, in terms of the original account of his story? Yeah, I mean, this is the challenging part is I don't think when he first spoke with the New York Times, it was, you know, it was the first interview that he'd done. And so he was probably a bit more open. And then he changed his story quite a bit after that, because he felt like now he was

incriminating himself. There were problems that he was having with people that he knew in Canada who recognized his voice and things like that. And so he felt like he had to backtrack a little bit. Whether he made up the killings or not, I can't be sure. But I think the walk back of that, I think, had a lot to do with the public response that the Caliphate podcast engendered. And he felt like he needed to at least say that he may have gone there, but he didn't do anything reprehensible. And to be clear, I mean, the accounts he gives of the atrocities that he says he committed when he was in Syria

are very graphic and very detailed. I mean, at one point he talks about having to execute an alleged drug dealer by stabbing him multiple times in the heart. And then we put him up on a cross, and I had to leave the dagger in his heart. It just felt disgusting but numb at the same time, like gloomy-ish. Like, what the hell did I just do? You can hear him having an emotional response to this description.

He's tearing up. He's, you know, he's having a clearly a kind of PTSD response to this situation. And for someone who, if they actually made it all up in their heads, it would be quite a quite an amazing feat, I think, to engender a real physical response, a real psychological response to something that you've invented and come to believe. He's told me several of these stories where he's, you know, broken out into tears, his fingers have been shaking, he looks off into the distance, doesn't talk for a little while. So when the RCMP came out with this hoax charge, I was a bit,

you know, a bit stunned because ever uh, ever from all of my interactions with him and talking to him over the last almost four years now, um, I, I never, I never doubted that the, that the whole thing was false, right? I, I always had suspicions about little details about, you know, this flights of fancy, I guess, or, or narrative, uh, exaggerations that he threw in there sometimes. But, um, the idea that he never went at all was a bit stunning. Well, can you explain to me what exactly is the hoax charge that the RCMP is alleging?

So the RCMP is alleging that all of this media attention, all, you know, his interviews with the Caliphate podcast, his CBC interview, his Vice News interview, everything that came after was all a kind of elaborate ploy on his part to create fear and anxiety in the Canadian public,

that to convince the Canadian public that an ISIS fighter had returned to Canada, that he hasn't been charged, that he's walking the streets, that there could be an attack any moment, etc. And so the RCMP is basically saying two things. One, that by doing this, by going on the media and telling this elaborate story, he created panic in the Canadian public, but also made them waste a whole host of resources and energy and time that could have been spent with legitimate investigations and legitimate things that were happening in Canada. And so what they'll have to show is that he knew he was making this all up, that he did it on purpose, that he actively went to these media outlets with the intention of telling a frightening story in order to cause fear and panic, which is, I think, quite a hard

case to make, particularly when you're talking about somebody's intentions for lying, right? And so I'd be very interested to see what the RCMP puts forth as their evidence. And did they have to make the claim that he never went to Syria and joined ISIS at all, or just that he didn't actually commit the atrocities that he claimed that he initially committed? Well, I think they only have to prove that he lied knowingly and that he intended to cause panic and fear in the Canadian public, right? It's more so that he told the story that all of his media interviews were an elaborate plan to kind of create panic and create fear. And I will say, I think, having known him for this long and having talked with people at The New York Times and Rukmini for quite a while. That in itself is quite a hard charge to make, I think, because I know that he tried very hard to have

the Caliphate podcast killed very early in 2017 before it came out. He emailed Rukmini constantly. I continued getting these panicked messages from Hufa saying things like Rukmini, I can't breathe. And so on and so forth. So if the RCMP is alleging that he loves to talk and he wanted to talk and he wanted to get on as much media platforms as possible to create panic and fear, I think that's going to be a very hard case to make because we know that he very much tried to kill most of these media stories and was quite worried that these media stories were coming out. Did you ever wonder why he wasn't arrested earlier? I mean, back when he was making these claims publicly about being an ISIS executioner, why didn't the RCMP arrest him?

I think, I mean, I think that the charge was quite difficult to make in court, right? The standards are quite different for what makes it into a podcast or what you need to make the case in a newspaper article than what you need to make the case in a court of law. I know that the RCMP, you know, hunted the story down quite heavily and they couldn't trace him to Syria, basically. I think part of the problem is with his passports, because the stamps end in Pakistan. There's no evidence that he entered Turkey. There's no evidence that he went from Turkey to Syria, aside, where if CSIS did have some sort of evidence that could be used in court to make this case, they might not be willing to have it publicly disclosed. They might not be willing to burn their sources on the ground. And so they just came to a position where I think charging him with terrorism for joining the Islamic State would either be very difficult to make and they're worried that they would lose the case or that they didn't want to burn their sources to begin with. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income?

That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Unsurprisingly, when the Calipate podcast was released, you know, many Canadians did not like the idea of this alleged ISIS killer living in Ontario, and neither did members of the Conservative Party

who grilled the Liberal government about the matter in Parliament. CSIS, the RCMP, and all the related security and police agencies of this country are doing their job. No, Mr. Speaker, that's not good enough. This guy is apparently in Toronto. Canadians deserve more answers from this government. Why aren't they doing something about this despicable animal walking around the country?

What debate did Shiroz Chowdhury inspire here in Canada? I think having the voice of a young Canadian man on a podcast that's been downloaded 30 million times or more, basically admitting to joining ISIS, admitting to multiple murders, and then gloating in some of these interviews that, you know, the government hasn't been able to charge him, even though he'd been back in Canada for, you know, at that point, two or three years. I think it ignited a broader conversation in Canada about the role of radicalization, de-radicalization programming, disengagement programming, reintegration programming, and then also whether,

because at the same time, you have to remember the war in Syria is coming to an end. You have a whole host of new Canadian prisoners being taken in to Kurdish custody, about 25 children, several women and several men, who their family members are urging that Canada repatriate, bring them back to Canada and charge them. The U.S. is urging countries, including Canada, but Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodell says... The fact of the matter remains that is a dangerous and dysfunctional part of the world in which we have no diplomatic presence, and we are not going to put our diplomatic officers or our consular officials at risk and so the josefa case impacted that whole conversation in

a big way because they basically said that it's very possible that we could bring all these fighters back and they wouldn't be able to get charged you wouldn't have uh the resources needed or the evidence that you that would hold up in court to actually charge them. And so you're basically going into an election saying that I brought back seven ISIS fighters who I can't charge. And so that's not a political argument you can win. That's not a political argument that the Trude around that conversation basically begins with the Josefa case. the political fear around that conversation basically begins with the Josefa case. Well, what happens for Chaudhry now? I understand he's not in custody, but what position do these charges put him in? Does this mean that in order to defend himself against these charges,

he'd have to argue that he actually did commit the crimes he originally confessed to? I don't think so. I mean, I think that's kind of what a lot of the social media discussion has pointed to. But I think it's not that he has to admit that he joined isis as a as a defense because that's not really that's not really a defense um what he has to do is poke holes in the government's charge that he made it all up with the intention of causing panic right because it's not illegal to make something up. It's illegal to make something up with the intention of causing public harm or public panic. To turn around and say, you know, he went to Syria, that's why this discharge is fake is obviously not a great strategy,

because you might then be charged with a terrorism offense, which is much, much worse. Abernath, thank you so much for speaking with me. Thank you. Shiro's Chowdhury is due in court next on November 16th. In a statement to the Washington Post, the New York Times stands by their reporting on Chowdhury is due in court next on November 16th. In a statement to the Washington Post, the New York Times stands by their reporting on Chowdhury, also known as Abu Huzaifa in the Caliphate podcast, saying in part,

part of what the series explored was whether Abu Huzaifa's account was true, and that in Chapter 6, the podcast confirms that Huzaifa was lying to the Times about the date of his travel to Syria and the timeline of his radicalization. The episode tells listeners what our journalists knew for sure and what was still unknown. In the episode, our staff was able to place Hu Seifa on the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria by geolocating his whereabouts in a photo.

That's all for today. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.