Captured Mississauga ISIS terrorist: Executioner in ISIS video is Canadian

On Sept. 19, 2014, the so-called Islamic State released a gruesome video in which Syrian prisoners dug their own graves, and were then lined up and executed.

But what struck some observers was the narrator.

He sounded Canadian.

“Yup, it’s another Canadian,” Muhammed Ali, an ISIS member from Mississauga, Ont., told Global News in a recent interview inside the Syrian prison where he is being held by Kurdish fighters.

Ali said the Canadian went by the alias Abu Rudwan, was in his 20s and “might be” from Toronto. He was a full-time member of the ISIS media division and had not yet been killed, he said.

“Abu Rudwan is alive,” Ali said. “Maybe he’s dead now, I don’t know. Last I saw him he was alive.”

The statement supports speculation that a Canadian has been narrating ISIS English-language recruitment videos and claims of responsibility for some of its deadliest terrorist attacks.

Both the RCMP and FBI have been investigating since he appeared in the ISIS video Flames of War four years ago with a masked face and a voice that sounded distinctly North American.

In the video, he aimed a handgun at a kneeling prisoner and appeared to shoot him in the back of the head.

The FBI posted a segment of the video on its website in October 2014 in the hope someone might recognize him. It called the video “a highly stylized recruitment tool designed to lure Westerners to ISIL’s cause.”

He resurfaced in November 2015, narrating the ISIS claim of responsibility for the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130, most of them at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theatre.

Then in June 2016, he narrated the English-language ISIS audio statement on the terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that left 50 dead.

He is also believed to have narrated an ISIS video tribute to André Poulin, a Muslim convert from Ontario who died in Syria in 2013.

But he has only appeared on camera once.

“People actually don’t realize he’s Canadian,” Ali told Global News. “A Canadian would know he’s Canadian. Anyone else would be like, where is he from? He’s Australian.”

Earlier this year, another Canadian told the New York Times podcast Caliphate he had executed captives while serving in ISIS. He has since returned to university studies in the Toronto area and has not been charged.

Source: Global News