TORONTO // ISIL is proving more successful at attracting vulnerable Canadian youth to its cause than Al Qaeda ever was in part to the group’s military success and its brash use of social media, analysts said.
Canadians from cities as diverse as Calgary to the northern mining town of Timmins have travelled to countries like Syria to join the fighting, according to security officials. Police are currently monitoring about 90 other people who intend to go abroad to join militant groups or have come back.
The country’s decision this month to begin airstrikes against the extremist group may have fuelled recruiting while, paradoxically, measures to stop them from leaving the country may be encouraging action at home.
“It does seem in Canada that the ISIL situation resonates much more strongly than just the general Al Qaeda jihadi narrative,” said Lorne Dawson, a professor on radicalisation at the University of Waterloo.
“They appear to be establishing an actual state, their military success speaks to, in their mindset, that God is on their side.”
Canada had its first experience with Islamist militancy on its own soil this week after a gunman shot a soldier in Ottawa on Wednesday, two days after a "radicalised" man killed another soldier in Quebec.
In radicals’ eyes, joining the fight has “been more of a just cause”, Ray Boisvert, president of I-SEC Integrated Strategies and a former assistant director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. “This is about coming not only to the defence of the faithful, but this has been a case of saving young children and women.”
ISIL’s sophisticated use of social media including Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr has had success widening the pool of potential fighters well beyond the Middle East, experts say.
“They seem to be able to catch or use new kinds of social media to foster radicalisation at home, which is something that Al Qaeda was never really able to accomplish,” said Jean-Francois Ratelle, a Canadian visiting scholar at George Washington University who studies how young people become radicalised.
The presence of Western fighters in Iraq and Syria also give ISIL the language skills and networks needed to reach people in Canada, Mr Ratelle said.
“The foreign fighters have been playing a major role in radicalising people.”
Those Canadian fighters have, in turn, been particularly good at spreading the extremist message, Waterloo’s Mr Dawson said.
“Everyone in the field had the sense that something was boiling,” he said. “We were entering into a new threatening era because of the appeal of ISIL, and the evidence of that was the rather large number of young Canadian men coming from places like Calgary, Timmins, Ontario – small communities – going overseas and being very vocal in their Twitter feeds, their Tumblr feeds, speaking out, making really shocking comments back against Canada.”
One such Canadian was Andre Poulin, who arrived in Syria in 2012 and is presumed to have been killed in August last year, according to a report this year by Public Safety Canada, a Canadian security ministry.
“I originally come from Canada,” Poulin, who identified himself as Abu Muslim, said in a recruitment video released by ISIL this year. “I watched hockey, I went to the cottage in the summertime, I loved to fish, I wanted to go hunting.
“Before I come here to Syria I had money, I had a family, I had good friends,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was some anarchist or somebody that just wants to destroy the world and kill everybody. I was a regular person.
“We need engineers, we need doctors, we need professionals. Every person can contribute something.”
Canadians are also being recruited at some mosques, community centres and universities, said Calgary-based Imam Syed Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism.
“I do not believe that all of these people were recruited through the social internet sites,” he said.
They often target recent converts to Islam, those with a troubled past who turn to Islam for direction, and teach them their own extreme version of the religion.
Other Muslim youth, who are at risk because of their belief that the West is the root cause of the geopolitical and economic situations in the Middle East, are also targeted, Mr Soharwardy said.
“De-radicalisation should be our focus,” he said. “Rehabilitation should be our focus, rather than just monitoring.”
* Bloomberg