Wannabe ISIS fighter caught threatening to bomb girlfriend’s car

As a wannabe ISIS fighter, Ismael Habib had all the wrong moves.

The Montreal native was stuck in Canada while his wife, in Syria with their children, kept bugging him to get on a plane and join the fight.

The Mounties were aware of his efforts to join the terrorist organization. And when he tried to get a passport under his brother’s name, using his brother’s driver’s licence as identification, the federal passport office told him to get lost.

By late 2015, Habib, 29, had met a new woman from Gatineau, and moved to Gatineau to be with her. But that started going badly, too.

He wanted her to quit her job because it put her in contact with men, and to wear a veil. No way, she said.

So he sat around watching ISIS videos that showed prisoners being killed. He made her listen to them. And finally, when he got mad and told her he was going to blow up her car while she was in it, she went to the Gatineau police, who arrested Habib and found several pieces of fake ID and his ISIS videos.

On Tuesday, lawyers argued about whether Habib was just a small-time maker of threats, or a more sinister and frightening figure. He has been convicted of threatening the girlfriend (who cannot be named under a court order) and having the fake ID. He will be sentenced Friday.

“He’s not the worst of the worst. Far from it,” Habib’s lawyer, Jacques Belley, told the court on Tuesday. For threats on this level, he said, “we frequently see fines accompanied by probation.”

There was no act of violence, he said. No weapons, no explosives. “Did madame (the girlfriend) see any weapons in the home? No.”

And although Habib wanted the girlfriend to quit her job and start wearing a veil, he never actually forced her to do so, Belley said.

Instead, there was “only one threat” on one occasion.

But Crown prosecutor Marie-Josée Genest was looking for the maximum jail term of 18 months. She said his harassment of the girlfriend is coloured by the separate case in Montreal, the one that deals with his stalled efforts to go to Syria and fight for ISIS. (He has been convicted on terror-related charges in that case but has not yet been sentenced.)

While there is a line between the threatening and the efforts to join ISIS, “the line is thin,” said Genest.

In some cases, someone might dismiss a single remark about putting a bomb in a car, “but (the girlfriend) had reason to believe him,” she said. This was, after all, someone who claimed to have terrorist connections.

She said the young woman lived in a “climate of fear” for the three months they were together in late 2015 and early 2016.

Genest said that forcing the woman to listen to violent ISIS videos over and over, with their repeated real-life violence, was a serious form of harassment in itself.

“We must send a message, a strong message” that society won’t tolerate behaviour like Habib’s, she said.

Habib spoke briefly on Tuesday by video link from jail, to illustrate what he said were extenuating factors in his case.

He spoke of the “loving relationship” between him and his girlfriend (without mentioning his wife), and said he took good care of her.

There was no violence, he said, and when the police searched his possessions they found no explosives and no bomb-making equipment.

The bomb threat, like the rest of his terrorist career, was just empty talk.

Source: Canoe