THE TORONTO 18, 10 YEARS AFTER
Little has been done to study their motives to prevent a new generation being recruited by Daesh,
The Toronto 18 terror sweep offered Canada a ‘psychological petri dish’ to learn what drives middle-class, educated youth towards extremism. And yet, 10 years on, little has been done to study the motives of those such as Fahim Ahmad — who remains in prison, awaiting release — or to prevent a new generation from being recruited to join Daesh
Fahim Ahmad enters the room wearing his prison whites, glasses perched midway down his nose. He just left the kitchen, where he was making grilled cheese sandwiches for the lunch service.
Ahmad no longer looks like the 21-year-old who made headlines a decade ago as one of the leaders of the Toronto18 terror plot. He’s bulkier, lost all his hair. He shows me his photo ID, taken during his first years spent at Quebec’s Special Handling Unit, which has the reputation as Canada’s toughest prison. “See, I had hair there. After the SHU, no hair.”
During his 2010 trial, the Crown described Ahmad as a “time bomb waiting to go off,” ranting about storming Parliament, taking politicians hostage and attacking nuclear stations. But he was also called a “fantasist,” whose big mouth was his only weapon of mass destruction.
Ahmad surprised with a guilty plea in May 2010 — nearly four years after his arrest and midway through his trial. Convicted of three terrorism charges, he was given a 16-year sentence and two-for-one credit for time spent in custody. At his sentencing hearing, the judge said he believed Ahmad had a good chance at rehabilitation.
But Ahmad has never participated in programs for inmates convicted of terrorism offences — because there are none.
He has been rejected for parole and is now being held past his statutory release date, unusual since almost all Canadian inmates are freed with conditions. “They use the catch-22,” says Ahmad of his parole denial. “They say there haven’t been any programs to assess where you are, so we can’t let you out.”
Ten years ago this week, SWAT teams fanned out across Toronto and the suburbs, rounding up 17 men and teenagers. It remains Canada’s largest terrorism case since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The accused were charged with plotting to strike downtown Toronto during the morning rush hour with two U-Haul trucks, each containing a one-tonne fertilizer bomb, while a third bomb would simultaneously hit a military base north of the city. An 18th suspect was later arrested.
By 2010, 11 had been convicted of terrorism-related offences. The seven others had their charges stayed or withdrawn, or were acquitted. Then, after the trials, the Toronto 18 disappeared. There was no effort by the federal government to develop CVE (countering violent extremism) programs that now, a decade later, we are scrambling to put in place. Toronto’s Muslim communities, feeling ostracized after 9/11, were stigmatized in the trials’ immediate aftermath and the government did little or nothing to bridge that divide.
The potential of a CVE strategy “never got the attention it deserved. It was a missed opportunity,” says Luc Portelance, who was the assistant director of operations at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 2006, and later head of the Canada Border Services Agency. “The previous (Conservative) government didn’t seem to have much of an appetite for it.”
It may seem a frail connection between the Toronto 18 and Daesh, the group also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has managed to lure about 30,000 foreign fighters — including about 100 Canadians. A lot has changed in 10 years. Social media connects the world protected by unprecedented encryption. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq served as a rallying cry for jihad in 2006, whereas Syria does today.
But what motivated the Toronto 18 is not much different from what drives Daesh recruits.
Most of the accused were second-generation, educated Canadians in their early 20s who grew up in middle-class, secular households. Some turned to Islam to abandon their criminal pasts, while others were angered by post-9/11 Islamophobia. They opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, rallying not against the West’s rights and freedoms but because they believed those rights weren’t applied equally to Muslims. It was not religious fanaticism, but ego and online propaganda that drove them. They wanted to exchange their humdrum lives for notoriety.
“There are absolutely similarities,” says Larry Brooks about the Toronto 18 and Daesh recruits. Brooks was the CSIS chief of counterterrorism operations for the Toronto region during the investigation. “We had an opportunity, almost a psychological petri dish, because we were looking at and listening to their communications with one another over an extended period, so we saw the whole process of radicalization and recruitment and the interplay between the individuals.”
CSIS, and later the RCMP, could study in real time how sophomoric plans made by a group of friends evolved into a violent plot, a process that forensic psychiatrist and exCIA operations officer Marc Sageman called the “BOG (bunch of guys) theory.”
Fahim Ahmad started serving his terrorism sentence at Quebec’s Special Handling Unit — a place reserved for the country’s most violent offenders.
In the next cell was Ali Dirie, one of the Toronto 18, whom Ahmad had met at a Scarborough mosque. In 2005, Dirie was arrested at the U.S.-Canadian border, smuggling two handguns strapped to his thighs, driving a car rented by Ahmad. Dirie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years.
While behind bars, he talked with Ahmad and attempted to recruit other prisoners to their terrorist plot. In 2006, while still in custody, Dirie was charged with his role in the Toronto 18 plot. Again, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years, with credit for time served. He was sent to the SHU, where Ahmad and two others from the Toronto18 were imprisoned: Shareef Abdelhaleem and Zakaria Amara.
The SHU (pronounced “shoe”) is Canada’s version of a U.S. “supermax” prison. Inmates are held largely in segregation in two-metre-by-three-metre cells. No CVE programs were offered. Dirie reportedly grew angrier at “the system.”
Dirie came to Canada from Somalia in the late1980s with his mother, six brothers and two sisters after his father died. Life in Scarborough was hard but nothing extraordinary that would push him toward crime. His siblings were successful — an older brother even served with the Canadian Forces when Dirie and the Toronto 18 were plotting an attack on Camp Borden.
A relative said Dirie turned to crime at an early age to make money and, once in, it was hard to break free.
Ten years ago, there were few, if any, studies of why someone with a criminal past involving drugs and guns would gravitate toward terrorism. Now there seem to be numerous examples, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the organizer of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, who had a long rap sheet before going to Syria. “Jihadigangsters” or “GTA generation” (referring to the Grand Theft Auto video game) is part of the profile.
A lawyer for Belgian national Salah Abdeslam, accused of driving the three suicide attackers to the soccer stadium in Paris, describes him as a “perfect example of the GTA generation who thinks he lives in a video game. I asked him if he had read the Qur’an, and he replied that he had read its interpretation on the Internet.”
Dirie was not a model prisoner and did not seem repentant. In 2010, a psychological risk assessment by Correctional Service Canada concluded that Dirie had an “antisocial personality disorder” and exhibited “no remorse or empathy for the potential victims that the actions of the terrorist organization may have caused.”
Dirie was denied parole and held until his sentence expired in October 2011. He was then 28 and had spent most of his 20s in prison.
He re-entered a world vibrating with news of the Arab Spring. “He didn’t have a lot going on here and wasn’t happy,” said a relative, who asked not to be named. “But we just thought he would go to school and then return to Somalia.”
Within a year of his release, he stole his cousin’s passport, flew to Turkey and then crossed into Syria. He travelled with another Toronto man, a young father, who was not connected with the Toronto 18 but had met Dirie, Ahmad and others after their arrest and visited them in prison. His whereabouts now are unknown.
Dirie would call his family from Syria declaring he was on a “spiritual high” and felt he was part of something larger than himself. They wouldn’t talk about the politics of the region, so his family is unsure of what rebel group he was fighting with. At the time, the western-backed Free Syrian Army and Al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra were the dominant groups.
In June 2013, Dirie’s family received a call from Syria: Dirie had been left for dead after a battle outside Aleppo. Ahmad says he was shocked when he heard that Dirie had left. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’ But at the same time, after so many years inside, it’s not like anyone tried to sit down and tell us what was going on.”
As Ahmad says, Dirie was pretty much told: “Hope your eyes adjust to the light and here’s your freedom.”
Ahmad spent more than two years at the SHU and then was transferred to Millhaven Institution, where two others from the Toronto 18 — Saad Gaya and Saad Khalid — were held.
Imam Yasin Dwyer, Ontario’s only full- time Muslim chaplain at federal penitentiaries at the time, remembers he was asked to “take care of these guys.”
“I got a call from the warden saying, ‘OK, we got some guys from the Toronto 18 coming, Imam Yasin. What are we supposed to do?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m the Muslim chaplain. I pastor to all the Muslims regardless of their offence . . . what are you trying to say about these folks?’
“I think what they were trying to say is they need a program — because every offender enters the institution with a program. We have a program for anger management, all kinds of programs. When it comes to corrections and rehabilitation, everything has to be measurable, so you can judge later and present something to the parole board and say this is the progress that was made. But there was no template offered to us,” says Dwyer.
He improvised, and the correctional service agreed to hire a part-time Muslim chaplain to work at Millhaven. By all accounts, Imam Ramzy Ajem was a success.
But a year later, Dwyer says, “then public safety minister Vic Toews rolled out of bed one morning and decided that he wanted to cut all of the non-Christian chaplains.”
Forty-nine part-time chaplains lost their jobs and Dwyer resigned soon after.
Ahmad is now classified as a mediumsecurity prisoner at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston. We spoke at the jail and on the phone before his detention review on Wednesday — an annual hearing to review his status. He predicted that he would be turned down again. He was.
No one would describe Ahmad as a sycophant or succinct — there were glimpses of the swagger he was famous for 10 years ago, and some of his answers were meandering. But the questions posed during a 21⁄ 2- hour hearing with parole board members Catherine Dawson and Louise Harris were also at times confusing. An inmate’s progress is usually measured by the programs he has completed and his ability to mitigate the risk on the outside. There are boxes that need to be checked.
Instead, a series of hypothetical scenarios was debated at Ahmad’s hearing. At one point Dawson asked what he would do if confronted by someone at a mosque who held violent extremist views. Ahmad said he would challenge them — tell his own story of being misguided.
Dawson asked why he would not “just walk away.”
Yet when Ahmad later admitted he was embarrassed about his past, and it was painful to discuss publicly, Harris suggested he had a duty to work against radicalism. She reminded him that at his 2014 parole hearing — over which she also presided — he said he wanted to work with at-risk youth drawn toward groups like Daesh. “Now it sounds like a reluctant obligation,” she said.
His detention will be reviewed again in a year, unless the board agrees — based on new information — to another hearing in the next 12 months. If Ahmad is held until the end of his sentence, he will be freed, without conditions, to resume life on the outside in 2018.
There’s a lot about the world he will not recognize — most significantly, the digital world. Ahmad was arrested 10 weeks after Twitter launched. He doesn’t have a Facebook account. In prison, he’s allowed “the old-old PlayStation 1 and the original Nintendo,” he says.
When I tell him that Daesh uses Telegram, Ahmad says, “Oh I know that one,” and rolls his eyes. But it quickly becomes clear he is not talking about the group’s current preferred encrypted messaging app, but telegrams — the paper kind delivered by hand.
He may no longer know the means, but he believes the message is the same.
“These guys are so full of crap,” he says of Daesh’s propaganda. “I understand they have this beautiful messaging thing and it’s glitz and glamour and everybody is living there and kids are eating ice cream . . . It’s very intriguing. But at the same time, remove the veil and you’ll see the bulls--t. Enslaving women and raping them and this and that and calling it religion — are you serious?”
Online propaganda played a large part in Ahmad’s descent. He came to the attention of security forces in 2003 after posting more than 700 angry messages about the persecution of Muslims to the online chat room Clear Guidance. He had been influenced by online lectures from the U.S.-born Yemeni preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. There were also the videos from the start of the Iraq War in 2003 that Ahmad and other members of the Toronto 18 watched endlessly.
“Everything else is just so boring and nonconsequential,” Ahmad says of the propaganda’s appeal.
“If you’re coming from a 9-to-5 job and on the way a car runs you over and you’re dead, nobody asks about you. But if you’re over there (in Iraq), look, he’s a hero, he’s a hero, and everybody knows their names and that kind of thing. It’s the whole myth that comes with it. It’s a major selling point to youth.”
Ahmad says he knows there will be a long period of adjustment whenever he is released. Jobs and friends won’t be easy to find.
But he insists prison has given him time to think, read and learn.
Those brief visits from the imams in Millhaven helped, he says, and his focus now is on his parents and his children, aged 11 and 10. He praises the parole officer he has worked with since coming to Collins Bay in January.
“She’s wonderful,” he says. “It’s nice having people have confidence in you. I haven’t had that in the past 10 years. Like, you want to live up to someone’s expectations. It’s been pretty low so far.”