“I thought, this guy sounds like people I grew up with,” Amarasingam said. The FBI also declined to comment.Īmarasingam, the Toronto researcher, was among the first to take an interest in the unnamed narrator’s possible Canadian connection, after noticing the distinct accent of the speaker in an Islamic State video boasting about the 2015 attacks in Paris. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to comment on his detention, as did the Canadian foreign ministry. He said he had not received a visit from Canadian authorities or been offered consular help. Photo by Ivor Prickett/The New York TimesĪ month after his capture, Khalifa’s future was uncertain. Muhammed Ali, a captured fighter for the Islamic State who helped identify the English-speaking narrator of some of the group’s films, at an office near the detention facility where he is being held by American-backed militia in northern Syria, Jan. Khalifa said he had married in the caliphate and had two children, though it was unclear where they were now.Ĭanada is one of many countries that have been reluctant to take back their citizens, worried that battlefield evidence may be deemed inadmissible in court, making it difficult to secure prosecutions.
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Thousands of their wives and children are being held in detention camps, free to move among the tents but unable to leave.
Khalifa is now among hundreds of Islamic State fighters from approximately 50 countries who are locked in prisons in northern Syria. “He is a symbol - the voice coming out of ISIS, speaking to the English-speaking world, for the better part of the last four to five years,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a prominent researcher in Toronto who studies radicalization in Canada, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. The sum of his narration work - believed to include dozens of audio and video clips - serves as a sampling of the Islamic State’s most influential English-language propaganda. Photo by SITEįor Khalifa it was the beginning of a prolific career. Article content The English narrator, now identified as a Canadian, Mohammed Khalifa, speaks as Syrians dig what he describes as their graves in the video Flames of War. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Terrorism experts say it is hard to overstate the role his effortless English narration played in bringing the terrorist group’s propaganda to English speakers and luring some of them to its cause.
He said he had studied computer systems technology and worked for a contracting company before leaving for Syria - drawn to the battlefield by watching YouTube. Photo by Ivor Prickett/The New York TimesĪ thin, diminutive man who occasionally broke into a grin during the hours long conversation with The New York Times, Khalifa said he immigrated as a child from Saudi Arabia to Toronto, where he learned to speak much like a native Canadian. “I don’t regret it,” says Mohammed Khalifa, a Canadian citizen. “I was asked the same thing by my interrogators, and I told them the same thing.” For years, an anonymous narrator extolled the Islamic State’s brutality in videos seen around the world. “No, I don’t regret it,” Khalifa said from a prison in northeastern Syria.
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