Adnan R. Khan on the ground with two Canadians: one who joined the Islamic State, the other the Kurds
When the blindfold is removed, Muhammad Ali has a look in his eyes that is not so much panic or fear; it is one of emptiness—someone who has lost all sense of purpose.
After eight months in a prison in northern Syria, Ali looks otherwise healthy, apparently well-fed with the beginnings of a new beard replacing the one he shaved off before attempting to escape the last vestige of the ISIS caliphate in June last year. He becomes agitated when one of the intelligence officers sets up a video camera for the interview.
As many as 800 ISIS foreign fighters, including Ali and Khalifa, now reside in al-Hasakah’s central prison, most captured by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, during the last stages of the assault on the dwindling caliphate’s territory. Over the past few months, under the cover of U.S.
The 30-year-old Thunder Bay, Ont., native walks in for lunch with a group of six foreign fighters, mostly Americans, who have enlisted with the YPG, considered by most experts to be the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish acronym, PKK, which has fought a bloody insurgency in Turkey’s southeast for decades and is listed as a terrorist organization in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
“If you look to the north you can see the Cudi mountains, which are a part of northern Kurdistan within the borders of the Turkish nation state,” Town says. “If you look to the east you can see some of the mountains that are in Iraq, so southern Kurdistan. It’s kind of a constant reminder that Kurds are living in these four split-up parts—when you include Iran.
When I meet the foreign fighters at the Freedom Battalion camp, they know the war is nearing its conclusion. They are relaxed and talkative. All have been to the front to fight; Town most recently at the beginning of January. What he found there was an enemy in retreat, without the will to fight and lashing out in desperation. “For the most part there was little resistance,” he says. “On Jan. 7, ISIS attacked our position during the evening.
Growing up, Ali attended John Cabot Catholic Secondary School, where he had few friends and spent almost no time socializing. His life was routine: go to school, come home, watch television. There was nothing that really interested him, no set of beliefs that his parents, Pakistani Muslim immigrants who arrived in Canada in 1999 and were busy trying to build a new life, instilled in him.
Poulin’s death in August 2013 was the final push Ali says he needed. For months he had thought about going; his friend’s “sacrifice” was what finally gave him the courage to follow through. For years after being kicked out of university, he had wandered through life aimlessly and eventually ended up in northern Alberta taking on odd jobs in its oil fields.
In 2007, Town left Thunder Bay for university in Ottawa to study political science—but found that what he was being taught was its own kind of propaganda. “I didn’t really agree with what we were being asked to accept,” he says, “that Canada, and the West generally, is more or less the pinnacle of progress in society in terms of democracy.” He dropped out and joined like-minded people in the anarchist community.
It’s impossible to confirm details of his time in Syria . But Ali has been consistent with his story, and the timeline of what he did while he was an ISIS member does align with how the group’s territory expanded and then collapsed. Over three months there, Ali received advanced sniper and reconnaissance training. It was there also that he met his future wife.
“I started seeing that I’d been manipulated, that this group was more so a mafia than anything else,” he says. “They were really not concerned about the Syrian people or foreigners like me. They were mostly concerned about protecting themselves and surviving.” “By the afternoon, I heard that pretty much the entire west side had fallen in that hour or two-hour period that I’d been gone,” he says. “[The regime] pretty much just walked in and stormed the place. When I heard that news, I pretty much left work, just stayed home with my family, saw a few people. I left ISIS; I stopped working for them.”
The more difficult question to answer is whether Ali has abandoned his ideological fervour. He insists he was never fully inured to the ISIS brand of Islam. But when the situation was good, when ISIS controlled large swaths of territory and Ali was contentedly working away in the oil fields or training snipers, he was, by his own admission, happy to play the role of radical Salafi jihadist and believed he was engaging in a holy war against the West.
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