Canadians may belong to secretive group
Report keys in on group’s membership
The day after the United States and its Arab allies launched airstrikes in Syria last September, President Barack Obama advised American lawmakers the targets had included “elements of al-Qaida known as the Khorasan group.”
Khorasan was described as a terrorist faction operating in Syria that had been set up by the senior al-Qaida leadership to recruit Westerners, train them and send them back to North America and Europe to conduct bombings.
Its highly secretive membership is said to include Kuwaiti, Saudi and French nationals — and according to a declassified intelligence report obtained by the National Post, federal officials are concerned that some of them are also Canadians.
“The Khorasan group may include individuals from Canada,” reads an intelligence brief that was distributed to front-line Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers after the air campaign began. A copy was released under the Access to Information Act.
“Members of the Khorasan group represent a direct threat to Canada and Canadian interests worldwide as they could conduct attacks against civilian passenger flights or travel to Canada with the intent to carry out attacks in this country,” it said.
While the current debate over Canada’s counterterrorism measures has focused largely on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), experts and officials say its rival, al-Qaida, has exploited the lawlessness in Syria to establish a beachhead on Europe’s doorstep from which to launch attacks.
The Canadian government identified this as a “major concern” last August in its 2014 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada, which warned that al-Qaida members were converging in Syria to “train other extremists for possible operations in Western countries.”
But the existence of the faction was not widely acknowledged until a month later, when the U.S.-led coalition began airstrikes in Syria that struck not only ISIL but also Khorasan group compounds, bomb factories and training camps.
“The strikes were launched to disrupt ‘imminent threat’ of attack upon U.S. interests by members of the Khorasan group,” the CBSA Intelligence Operations and Analysis Division wrote in its “situational awareness” report. “It is also unknown how badly damaged the overall structure of the Khorasan group is after the U.S. attack.”
The coalition has targeted almost 20 Khorasan facilities over the past eight months, a review of statements by the U.S. Central Command shows. The most recent was April 7, when a “tactical unit” in Aleppo was struck. Last week, the U.S. military acknowledged that two children had died in a strike on a Khorasan compound.
The Canadian government has said virtually nothing publicly about Khorasan, but in an April 30 speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney mentioned the group, describing the threat posed by “the socalled Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and Khorasan.”
In an interview following the address, the minister told the National Post that Khorasan was “linked to al-Qaida” but “the hard core, almost they are a special unit, if I can put it that way.” He said Canada could not allow terrorists to operate freely in lawless regions, where they could plan attacks “on our own soil.”
Canada was increasing its intelligence sharing with France (one of the Khorasan bomb experts is a French citizen named David Drugeon) and had recently extended its military mission into Syria, “to where the enemy is, regardless of what I would call boundaries that no longer exist,” Blaney said.
The Khorasan group was established by the core al-Qaida leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which sent veteran fighters to Syria, where they “linked up with” the local al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat-al-Nusra, according to the CBSA report.
While some Khorasan members have participated in the fight against the Assad regime in Syria, their primary purpose is to set up training camps in areas under Jabhat-al-Nusra control and “recruit, train and task Western foreign fighters” to conduct attacks against the West, it said.
Overseeing this assignment is 34-year-al-Qaida leader Muhsin Al-Fadhli, according to experts. A Kuwaiti who stands just 5-foot5, Al-Fadhli fought with al-Qaida in Afghanistan, learned to use explosives in Chechnya, helped fund the insurgency in Iraq and was behind deadly attacks on a French ship, a U.S. Marines base and Saudi Arabia.
Early in the fight against Assad, he was based in Iran, where he helped move fighters through Turkey to join al-Qaida forces in Syria, and worked his network of “Kuwaiti jihadist donors” to fund the campaign, according to the U.S. State Department.
Al-Fadhli’s group does not call itself Khorasan. “Khorasan is a name we gave them,” said Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the Washington Institute who testified this month at Senate committee hearings on the government’s new anti-terrorism law, Bill C-51.
The name comes from the Khorasan Shura, the senior al-Qaida leadership council. Levitt and other experts dismissed claims the Khorasan group doesn’t really exist and that it was invented by the U.S. to justify its air war in Syria. “That’s silly,” he said. “This is the real thing.”
Part of the reason for the skepticism may be that Khorasan is not as open as ISIL, which broadcasts its atrocities and threats on social media, he said. “This is old-school terrorism where there is active operational security and they are not looking for recruits among disenfranchised youth in the Paris suburbs, they just want to carry out attacks with a small cadre,” Levitt said.
Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the conservative thinktank Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior editor of The Long War Journal, said that aside from Al-Fadhli, the group’s senior leadership included Sanafi al-Nasr and the recently killed Adel al-Harbi.
Both Saudis and al-Qaida veterans formerly based in Iran, they played dual roles in Syria, helping the al-Qaida-affiliated anti-Assad forces while preparing for attacks in the West.
“The Khorasan group members actually service multiple functions inside Syria,” he said. “They’re both involved in the insurgency against Assad and plotting against the West. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive in the way they’re designed.”
Khorasan’s strategy is to talent-spot Western foreign fighters arriving in Syria and identify those suitable to be trained and deployed back to the West, he said. The most famous Westerner in the group is Drugeon, a Muslim convert and former truck driver who became radicalized as a teen.
Drugeon reportedly learned bombmaking in Pakistan and left in 2012 for Syria, where he narrowly escaped a November missile strike on his car. “It wouldn’t be a surprise to me if there were multiple Westerners inside the Khorasan group or involved with their activities,” Joscelyn said.
Minister Blaney would not confirm that Canadians were active in the group, saying he did not comment on operational matters. But the CBSA intelligence report noted that Canadians “have travelled to conflict zones such as Somalia and more recently, Syria to take part in conflicts as foreign fighters.”
It said Khorasan recruits were to strike “commercial aviation and possibly in the foreign fighter’s home country.” About 80 veterans of jihadist conflicts around the world have returned to Canada. Although none have been charged over involvement in Khorasan, some were active in al-Qaida and its affiliates.
As the first line of defence, CBSA staff were advised to watch for not only Canadian Khorasan members but also “citizens of visa-exempt countries in Europe.”