Man in ISIL audio may have Canadian accent
Praises massacre of ‘sodomites’ in Orlando
• An ISIL propagandist with a Canadian-sounding voice has resurfaced in the terrorist group’s official audio statement praising the attack in Orlando, according to experts.
The day after a gunman claiming allegiance to ISIL murdered 49 people at the Florida gay nightclub, the group’s propaganda arm released an English audio recording glorifying the killer.
Several experts said they recognized the narrator as the same extremist the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls “Unknown Individual” and who speaks in a distinctly North American — some say Canadian — accent.
The same voice can be heard in an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant audio claiming responsibility for last November’s Paris attacks, as well as a gory execution video and a 2014 tribute to an Ontario terrorist killed in Syria.
“Yes, I think the voice is t he same, and I still think it ’s very Canadian sounding,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, who is conducting a major study on the foreign fighter phenomenon.
“If true, it would mean that there is a Canadian, in Syria or Iraq — or elsewhere for that matter — who is very much part of the ISIL media team,” said the professor, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
The reappearance of the propagandist almost two years after his debut in a recruiting video that lionized André Poulin, a Muslim con- vert from Timmins, Ont., who became a foreign fighter in Syria, comes amid an international investigation attempting to identity him.
“Our brother Omar Mateen, one of the soldiers of the Khalifah in America, carried out an attack on a nightclub for sodomites,” he said in the broadcast. “He succeeded i n massacring the filthy Crusaders … May Allah accept the brother among the shuhada ( martyrs).”
He has a ppeared on screen only once, his face concealed behind a black mask in an ISIL production called Flames of War, which showed him forcing captured Syrian soldiers to dig their own graves before executing them. “By Allah, the fighting has just begun,” he said.
The FBI later released a Seeking Information alert asking for the public’s help identifying the extremist, whom the agency said alternated “seamlessly” between English and Arabic. “The man has what is believed to be a North American accent,” it said.
The RCMP is also investigating, but authorities are still apparently uncertain about his identity, or even whether his accent is Canadian or American, partly because the pervasive influence of today’s media has blurred the distinctions.
Matching his voiceprint to the roughly 100 Canadians involved in the Syria and Iraq conflicts has also proven difficult because the current generation of extremists tends to communicate in writing on social media rather than by phone.
Speaking at a conference in Toronto in April, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service official confirmed several Canadians were part of the ISIL propaganda wing, where their English- language skills are considered valuable for recruiting in the West.
“I would argue that would be equally as dangerous, maybe more, than someone who is joining the military wing,” said Andy Ellis, who was the CSIS assistant director of operations.
“A l ot of these young western adherents to ( ISIL) are put on the front lines and die very quickly. Someone who is working in the propaganda wing can hurt us over and over and over again.”
HE SUCCEEDED IN MASSACRING THE FILTHY CRUSADERS.