Calgarian jihadist back with new threats
Six weeks after he was declared dead, a Calgarian who joined the Islamic State resurfaced on video Thursday, vowing the terrorist group was preparing to bomb New York and fly its flag over the White House.
Interviewed from Iraq by the U.S. website Vice.com, Farah Mohamed Shirdon, a former Calgary movie theatre employee, appeared erratic and became increasingly enraged as he dished out threats and claimed God was on his side.
“God willing, we will make some attacks in New York soon, a lot of brothers are mobilizing there right now in the West, thanks to Allah,” he said. Smiling, he added they were “mobilizing for a brilliant attack, my friend.”
Islamic State was conducting beheadings because “you attack one of us, we will attack one of you,” he said, adding, “We will stop when we behead the kuffar,” he said, using a highly derogatory Arabic term referring to non-Muslims.
He is one of several Somali-Canadians thought to have joined Islamic State, prompting the Canadian Somali Congress’s Western branch to appeal for government help.
“No one recruited me. Actually no one spoke a single word to me. All I did, I opened the newspaper, I read the Qur’an. Very easy,” he said. Five days before he left, Canadian authorities interviewed him, he claimed. “All their intelligence workers are imbeciles,” he said, although he then named the FBI before correcting that it was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
The nephew of the former prime minister of Somalia, Shirdon has made grandiose threats before. After arriving in Iraq, he appeared in a video in which he burned his Canadian passport and threatened Canada and the U.S.
The departure of dozens of Canadian extremists to Syria and Iraq has prompted a crackdown by Ottawa, which has begun cancelling their passports, laying criminal charges and tracking them in case they attempt to return to Canada.
The government added Islamic State to its list of outlawed terrorist organizations on Wednesday. The move makes it simpler to investigate, prosecute and deport those who have joined the group or who are otherwise supporting it.