‘Extremism wasn’t a reality until this happened’
GROUP OF MEN PRAYED AT CALGARY MOSQUE BEFORE HEADING OVERSEAS TO JOIN ISIL
Standing with his ISIL comrades, a man toting an assault rifle lobbed his Canadian passport into a fire. “This is a message to Canada and all the American tawag-heet (false idols). We are coming, and we will destroy you,” Farah Mohamed Shirdon said in a video released last June.
Back home in Calgary, his former imam was furious.
“This was someone I knew, and how the hell did they end up like that?” wonders Navaid Aziz. The 33-year-old imam is usually enthusiastic, but his hands clench when asked what he’d say if he saw Shirdon again.
“I would want to ask why. But I went to a stage where I don’t even care. I was like: ‘We tried so hard to bring you back. We tried so hard to be rational with you; yet you keep spewing out this hate.’
“And I’d be like: ‘Don’t you realize the damage you’re causing yourself, your family, the Muslim community?’ I don’t think he realizes the backlash that the Muslim community faces over here, when he becomes the face of Islam — of Canadian Islam, in Iraq or wherever he is right now.”
Aziz pauses, peering down at the floor of his downtown mosque where at least five Canadian men prayed before leaving to join the Islamic State group, known as ISIL.
Four have since been reported dead. Last week, the RCMP laid six terrorismrelated charges against Shirdon in absentia, including allegedly participating in terrorist activities with ISIL and inciting others to do so.
“At this point I wouldn’t even have it in me to engage him at all. I guess I’m still really upset at the things he’s said and done.”
Shirdon’s departure last year provoked more than a Canadian imam’s fury. It prompted a community of Muslims to stop sweeping uncomfortable conversations under the rug. Many mosques, like Aziz’s, started working with their young people to inoculate them against the lure of radical forces.
STRANGERS IN THE
MOSQUE
The 8th and 8th Musallah mosque is Calgary’s only English-language prayer centre for the majority Sunni denomination of Muslims.
The simple prayer rooms are on the ground floor of a highrise building in which four friends spent their last days in Canada. In late 2012, Salman Ashrafi, Damian Clairmont and brothers Collin and Gregory Gordon left for Iraq and Syria, after living together for months in an apartment above the mosque.
All four men are now reported dead.
When Aziz started working at a parent mosque across the Bow River in April 2012, he made brief visits to the downtown prayer room. He recalls the small, insular group of young men who frustrated others during Ramadan in August 2012.
“They were very rebellious in the mosque, in the sense that they didn’t want to interact with anyone; they wanted to be taken care of and they didn’t want to even clean up their own mess.”
By the end of the year, they had all stopped showing up.
Michael Zekulin, a terrorism researcher at the University of Calgary who has studied each group member’s biography, says living together in the apartment above the mosque likely escalated their radicalization.
“That feeds off of itself; that becomes its own animal. That’s when that group process takes over,” he says.
“The ideas become more extreme: ‘We don’t like these people; we should do something about these people; we should hurt these people; we should kill these people.’ ”
‘HE COMPLETELY
FLIPPED’
Long before Shirdon went to Syria, his family fled political instability and religious violence in Africa.
His father Mohamed had once directed Somalia’s agriculture ministry but sought asylum in Canada in 1993 when the government fell.
His uncle Abdi Farah Shirdon had served as prime minister of Somalia, surviving numerous assassination attempts by Islamist militants.
The younger Shirdon was born on April 18, 1994. Classmates in Calgary describe him as a bully with a short fuse, who nevertheless got good grades. They say he had a good sense of humour but always yearned to fit in.
“He was a good guy at heart; he was led down the wrong path,” recalls Nathan Little, who played video games with Shirdon in middle school.
By high school, Shirdon was hanging out with people who sold drugs, while working part-time at a movie theatre and a fast-food restaurant.
“The loneliness in his heart overwhelmed him to the point that he fell in with bad people,” says Little.
After high school, Shirdon enrolled at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, but never finished. That’s when Aziz first met the 19-year-old, during the imam’s weekly chaplaincy in 2013.
The imam says he saw Shirdon struggling with issues at home, but thought his life was less tumultuous as he embraced Islam. Shir- don went to the downtown mosque regularly, where Aziz was now working full-time. He often went to Aziz’s Friday night courses.
“I was trying to help him re-find his faith, reconcile with all the spiritual issues he was having. Everything was going really fine.”
At the end of 2013, Aziz went abroad for a conference. When he came back, Shirdon started picking theological fights and his views grew more extreme.
“He completely flipped. He started watching some crazy stuff online, started asking me some really weird questions.”
“It eventually came down to him accusing me of being watered-down, and pacifying the religion, so that it’s more accommodating to western values.”
In February, Shirdon told Aziz that Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents had come to speak with him. On March 14, 2014, Shirdon left Canada.
In June, CSIS asked mosque officials about Shirdon, whose video surfaced online days later.
“A couple of months go by, we don’t hear too much, then all of a sudden that crazy video is released of him burning his passport,” Aziz says.
SHIRDON SPEAKS
Shirdon is among hundreds of westerners fighting with terror groups like ISIL who post their exploits on social media. On Twitter, he’s shared photos with more than 10,000 followers, posing with children or standing in front of stolen vehicles.
On one of his Twitter accounts, Shirdon brags about the group’s success.
“I’ve been in Iraq for a few days and have already experienced American drone strikes. May Allah destroy them!” he wrote last summer.
“Beheading Shias is a beautiful thing,” he said in another post, referring to adherents of the second-largest branch of Islam.
In messages to Postmedia, he’s evasive about what led him to Syria, but echoes ISIL messaging of Muslims being oppressed.
He also doesn’t understand why people would find his story interesting.
“Why are they astonished there are hundreds of Canadians here?” he wrote to Postmedia. “Things are great, come here and see for yourself.”
‘EXPORTING JIHADIS’
After Shirdon’s video was released last year, police revealed up to 30 Calgarians had been recruited by foreign terror groups. National media called Calgary a “hot spot for exporting jihadis.” Donations and attendance dropped at the mosque.
Aziz describes the next three months as a “traumatic experience” for the downtown mosque, where every few weeks brought a new name, a reported death, or a video release.
“We really learned that, as nice and as kind and as hospitable that the Muslim community is, we do have our dirty laundry at the end of the day,” he says.
“Extremism wasn’t a reality until this happened.”
BUILDING COMMUNITY
This past June, 25 young people from the mosque gathered at Calgary’s Drop-In Centre.
The girls wore hijabs while others donned turquoise shirts bearing the mosque’s logo. Some were immigrants, some converts. One of them was Shirdon’s brother, who declined an interview request.
In the space of an hour, the group assembled and served meals for 1,300 people staying at the homeless shelter.
“I can be useful to the community, and there are people who need my help,” says Kinza Arshad, 21, whose family came from a small Ontario town last spring.
Events like this have helped Arshad adjust to life in Calgary.
“Sometimes people really let you down by using whatever ignorance is being pushed out there, to kind of label you with the same kind of identity as someone who’s radical.”
Arshad, who wears a hijab, says it takes confidence to navigate social stigma. Some of her friends have left Islam, and she thinks their decision had more to do with social pressures than religious belief.
“You already feel a bit like an outsider,” she says. “It’s easy to get confused and feel like you’re kind of alone in this journey.”
The monthly food service at the homeless centre is part of a series of activities Aziz and his colleagues rolled out last November, to try to show youth some ways to have purpose and meaning in life.
He thinks it’s likely Shirdon and the other men who joined ISIL, with their rumoured family problems and drug issues, didn’t feel that.
“I think the concept of isolation, not only from the greater society but from the Muslim community, did exist,” he says. “They all found each other because they all isolated themselves from the Muslim community.”
Ultimately, he hopes these new programs — all attempts to build up resilience in young men and women — will stop that from happening.
“For every moment of darkness you will have wonderful moments of light.”