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ISIS and its violent Central Asian chapter are threatening Canada and the West with jihad. Hussain Ehsani for Inside Policy

Published

2 months ago

14 minute read

From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Hussain Ehsani

Recent terrorism-related arrests in Canada and the wider West are evidence of the resurgence of ISIS, and especially its ultra-violent Afghanistan wing… recently revealed internal memos by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) highlighted ISIS’s growing role in inspiring domestic terrorism

Ten years ago, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria waged a holy war that threatened to engulf the wider Middle East. At its peak, ISIS conquered nearly 200,000-square-kilometres of Iraq and Syria, inspiring thousands of jihadis to join its crusade against the West.

It took a global coalition of 87 nations and groups, led by the United States and including Canada, to defeat Daesh for good. By December 2017, the damage was decisive: ISIS had lost more than 95 per cent of its territory. The coalition members celebrated the defeat of ISIS and thought it could no longer pose a threat, in the Middle East or anywhere else.

The moment lasted only a short time.

Recent terrorism-related arrests in Canada and the wider West are evidence of the resurgence of ISIS, and especially its ultra-violent Afghanistan wing. At the same time, recently revealed internal memos by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) highlighted ISIS’s growing role in inspiring domestic terrorism, and in particular, potential “lone Wolf” attacks against Canada’s Jewish community.

The memos – issued on June 24 and July 10, 2024, and later obtained by media – were prescient: On July 31, Canadian police detained two alleged ISIS-affiliated men in Richmond Hill, Toronto, apparently based on a tip from French intelligence. In September, the RCMP in Quebec – working with the FBI – arrested a Pakistani national on a student visa for allegedly plotting an attack on a Jewish centre in Brooklyn, New York. These events were especially shocking since it was widely believed that ISIS was confined to Iraq and Syria. But ISIS is clearly influencing a new generation of terrorists around the world. Indeed, it’s suspected that ISIS inspired, and possibly directed, a plot to attack the Jewish community in Ottawa last February. Police arrested two Ottawa youths in relation to the alleged plot and charged them with attempted murder.

American authorities have also thwarted ISIS schemes, resulting in the arrest of ISIS-Tajiki operatives in the US earlier this year. The arrests continue: On October 7, the FBI apprehended an Afghan national and a juvenile co-conspirator for allegedly planning an attack under the Islamic State banner on November 5 – the day of the US presidential elections.

These US arrests point to a new trend: the rise and global reach of the Afghan branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP). Some background is necessary. ISIS officially emerged in 2014, following rapid territorial gains in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. Rooted in the ideology of Salafi Jihadism, ISIS sought to establish a “Caliphate” governed by a strict interpretation of Sharia law. The group declared its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as Caliph in June 2014 after capturing Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. This marked the height of ISIS’s power, controlling large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

As ISIS entrenched itself, it began expanding its influence beyond Iraq and Syria. Various affiliates, known as “provinces” or “wilayat,” emerged worldwide. Pledging allegiance to the central ISIS leadership, these groups dedicated themselves to establishing a global Islamic State.

That is one reason for the group’s resilience and recent resurgence. The ISKP was one of the most deadly branches to emerge. Founded in southeastern Afghanistan in 2015 on the border with Pakistan, ISKP immediately sought closer ties with the core ISIS group in Syria and Iraq to gain legitimacy and embolden its fighters and middle-rank commanders to conquer more territory. Those efforts came up short, and ISKP failed in its first years to win ISIS’s support.

Since then, ISKP has redoubled its efforts to impress its ISIS masters – and in many ways, it has succeeded. The group is now among the strongest of ISIS’s adherents.

Turning Point

The collapse of the former Afghan Government on August 15, 2021, was the turning point, when a host of transnational extremist fighters were released from prisons of Afghanistan. Aside from rejoicing about the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, they prepared to take up their “holy duty” to expand ISIS’s regime. ISKP initially in 2015 drew its fighters from disaffected and wayward elements of the Taliban, Haqqani network, and Pakistani Taliban. The release of an additional cohort of Salafists (Sunni fundamentalists) aided its recruitment.

ISKP moved quickly to expand its influence and operations. The first attack in this new era was devastating: it stormed the Abbey Gate of the Kabul Airport on August 26, 2021, killing 170 Afghan civilians and 13 US soldiers. The US Department of Defense later released a report that Abdul Rahman al-Logari, one of the prisoners released on the day of Kabul collapse, was behind the Abbey Gate attack.

The message was clear – ISKP was on the march.

ISKP on the International Stage

To gain “formal” admission to the ranks of ISIS’s provinces, ISKP would have to show initiative and capability, not just in Afghanistan but in the wider territory of Khorasan: Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the eastern part of Turkmenistan.

To do so, it had to find new targets. Traditionally, the Hazara community, the most persecuted ethnicity in Afghanistan, was the main target for Islamist groups, along with former Afghan security forces. They remain primary victims. However, ISKP’s range of targets and ability to strike them has grown. It added new targets in Afghanistan, attacking the Russian embassy in Kabul in September 2022, and a Chinese facility in December of the same year. Then it started reaching  beyond the borders of Afghanistan: ISKP has carried out terrorist attacks in Central Asia and plotted a number of them in Pakistan.

Targets even farther away have now been hit. In January 2024, ISKP executed a complex attack in Kerman, Iran, at an event commemorating Qasem Sulaimani, the former commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, killed by US forces in 2020. On March 22, 2024, it hit a concert hall in Moscow – an operation that took the international community by complete surprise.

These operational successes mattered, but ISIS’s core leaders in Syria and Iraq demanded signs of ideological subservience as well. Under the leadership of Sanaullah Ghafari (also known as Dr. Shahab al-Muhajir), ISKP worked hard to prove that its propaganda machine is an engine of ISIS Salafist ideology.

ISKP uses fluency in a variety of languages, including Urdu, Russian, Tajiki, Uzbeki, Turkish, English, and Pashto, to spread its message. It seeks to extend its ideology to other fighters in the region in order to recruit transnational Salafi Jihadists. It has already recruited a vast number of terrorists from the ranks of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the north of Afghanistan. ISKP also exploited propaganda and demand from the diaspora of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to plot attacks against Western countries.

The attacks and ideological efforts seem to have worked. ISKP now appears to have become the operational wing of the core ISIS group. After the ISKP attack on Moscow, an ISIS spokesman released a 41-minute audio message praising the attack by “Mujahidin” and called on other “dormant” provinces of the “Caliphate” to rise up and follow ISKP’s example.

The terror spreads

ISIS leader Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi has more work in mind for his prized ISKP group. His priorities include freeing jihadists detained in Syria and attacking targets in Europe and North America.

In Syria, Al-Quraishi has encouraged ISIS terrorists to redouble efforts to attack the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed Kurdish militia in the country’s northeast, and try to break detained comrades out of SDF-run prisons. These facilities host thousands of ISIS fighters, including women and children. Given the success of ISKP’s operations and recruitment, ISIS is likely trying to implement the same tactic of jailbreaks in Kurdish territory in Syria and Iraq, to replenish its ranks.

ISIS spokesmen have also called for all Muslims to attack Christians and Jews in the broader West.

In September 2024, Türkiye’s domestic security agency (MIT) arrested Abuzar Al Shishani, who allegedly was plotting an attack on Santa Maria Italian Church in Istanbul in early January 2025. According to MIT, ISKP recruited him in 2021. The arrests in Canada, the US, and Türkiye are proof that ISKP’s reach is growing.

How can Canada fight back?

Canada and its allies in the West must act now to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISKP and ISIS. Fortunately, the RCMP and other Canadian police forces halted the recent spate of planned domestic terror attacks. However, stringent immigration screening is also crucial to keeping Canada and its allies safe. The Canada Border Services Agency needs to be ready to deal with the ISIS/ISKP threat.

To that end, Public Safety Canada should examine ways to enhance inter-agency targeting and intelligence sharing. A task force consisting of Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada, Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Revenue Agency, and FINTRAC – given their respective roles in immigration processing, countering disinformation and anti-terrorist financing – could help to ensure maximum coordination against the group.

Canada must also guard against the threat ISKP/ISIS poses to religious and minority communities in the country. ISIS’s call to target Jewish and Christian communities presents a special challenge. The Jewish community is particularly vulnerable due to the rampant antisemitism seen at pro-Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran rallies across Canada. But Christian sites, like churches, are also vulnerable. ISKP/ISIS are also likely to target Muslim groups that speak against its violent ideology.

Canada should collaborate with international partners to support communities and groups opposed to ISKP/ISIS. These include the Hazara, Kurdish, and Yazidi communities in Afghanistan and Kurdistan, as well as allies in the Kurdistan Regional government, and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Canada should also support initiatives led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries to strengthen the voice of moderate Islam in the Middle East and Central Asia. Such initiatives require careful diplomacy with allies and a range of partners. That is what Canada will require to counter the evolving threat of ISIS and ISKP.

Hussain Ehsani is a Middle East affairs analyst with expertise on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently exploring the foreign policy relationship between Saudi Arabia and Canada. In addition to MLI, he also contributes to the Jerusalem Post, BBC Persian, and The Hill.

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The Hidden and Tragic Costs of Housing and Immigration Policies

Published on December 8, 2024

By

The Audit

 

 David Clinton

We’ve discussed the housing crisis before. That would include the destabilizing combination of housing availability – in particular a weak supply of new construction – and the immigration-driven population growth.

Parsing all the data can be fun, but we shouldn’t forget the human costs of the crisis. There’s the significant financial strain caused by rising ownership and rental costs, the stress so many experience when desperately searching for somewhere decent to live, and the pressure on businesses struggling to pay workers enough to survive in madly expensive cities.

If Canada doesn’t have the resources to house Canadians, should there be fewer of us?

Well we’ve also discussed the real problems caused by low fertility rates. As they’ve already discovered in low-immigration countries like Japan and South Korea, there’s the issue of who will care for the growing numbers of childless elderly. And who – as working-age populations sharply decline – will sign up for the jobs that are necessary to keep things running.

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The odds are that we’re only a decade or so behind Japan. Remember how a population’s replacement-level fertility rate is around 2.1 percent? Here’s how Canadian “fertility rates per female” have dropped since 1991:

Output image

Put differently, Canada’s crude birth rate per 1,000 population dropped from 14.4 in 1991, to 8.8 in 2023.

As a nation, we face very difficult constraints.

But there’s another cost to our problems that’s both powerful and personal, and it exists at a place that overlaps both crises. A recent analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) frames it in terms of suppressed household formation.

Household formation happens when two more more people choose to share a home. As I’ve written previously, there are enormous economic benefits to such arrangements, and the more permanent and stable the better. There’s also plenty of evidence that children raised within stable families have statistically improved economic, educational, and social outcomes.

But if households can’t form, there won’t be a lot of children.

In fact, the PBO projects that population and housing availability numbers point to the suppression of nearly a half a million households in 2030. And that’s incorporating the government’s optimistic assumptions about their new Immigration Levels Plan (ILP) to reduce targets for both permanent and  temporary residents. It also assumes that all 2.8 million non-permanent residents will leave the country when their visas expire. Things will be much worse if either of those assumptions doesn’t work out according to plan.

Think about a half a million suppressed households. That number represents the dreams and life’s goals of at least a million people. Hundreds of thousands of 30-somethings still living in their parents basements. Hundreds of thousands of stable, successful, and socially integrated families that will never exist.

And all that will be largely (although not exclusively) the result of dumb-as-dirt political decisions.

Who says policy doesn’t matter?

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Crime

What did Canada Ever Do to Draw Trump Tariff on Immigration, You Ask? Plenty

Published on December 1, 2024

By

By Todd Bensman as published by The Daily Wire

Much US national security and public safety damage from: an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program and making Mexican travel visa-free.

President-elect Donald Trump bloodied Mexico and Canada with diplomatic buckshot this week by writing that, on his first day in office, he’ll levy devastating 25-percent trade tariffs on those two U.S. neighbors if they fail to crack down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Much public puzzlement has filled international media coverage over why Trump would single out Canada for punishment equal to that of the far guiltier Mexico.

“To compare us to Mexico is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard from our friends and closest allies, the United States of America,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said. “I found his comments unfair. I found them insulting. It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart.”

“We shouldn’t confuse the Mexican border with the Canadian border,” Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.

But this narrative seems intended to deflect public acknowledgement of what the liberal progressive government of Justin Trudeau did do to draw Trump’s tariff ire. In terms of immigration policy, the Canadian offenses are indeed much different from Mexico’s opened super-highway mass migration wave-throughs during the Biden-Harris years. But what Canada has done, arguably, damaged U.S. national security and public safety interests in harmful ways that media outlets on both sides rarely report.

Canada’s massive legal immigration program as a U.S. national security threat

Much of the damage arises from an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program of unprecedented scope. Since the program’s 2021 implementation,  the Great White North has imported some 1.5 million foreign national workers (400,000+ per year for the nation of 38 million) from dozens of developing nations and hundreds of thousands more foreign students in just 2023 – the third record-breaking year of those.

Why are those programs a U.S. problem? Because a spiking number of foreign nationals are apparently abusing the Canadian programs as a Lilly pad from which to illegally enter the United States between northern border land ports of entry, among them proven threats to U.S. national security and public safety.

Why this traffic leaking into the United States is a problem – even though the total numbers illegally entering from Canada are small relative to those crossing from Mexico – arises from the fact that many hail from Muslim-majority nations and have, Canadian media reports, fueled a spate of terrorism and anti-Semitic attacks throughout Canada. As well, far too many of the Mexicans Canada has allowed in turned out to be cartel drug traffickers and killers.

Those kinds of criminals are crossing the U.S. northern border in increasing numbers due to Canadian policies that Canada could address if it wanted to.

Consider that U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions in the brush between U.S.-Canada land ports of entry jumped from 2,238 in FY2022 to 23,721 in FY2024, neatly coinciding with Trudeau’s mass legal immigration programs.

Among those crossing in illegally from Canada, for instance, were 15,827 Indian nationals in FY 2023 and 2024, 8,367 Mexicans, and 3,833 from unspecified countries listed only as “Other” on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s public statistics website.

A border-crossing terror plot foiled

Concern on both sides of the U.S.-Canada line has simmered for some years as Canadians saw the newcomers carry out  terror plots, actual attacks, and probably some of the record-breaking nearly 6,000 antisemitic incidents Canada logged since the Israel-Hamas war broke out.

What’s been happening in Canada was obvious to many.

“Canada has become a hotbed of radicalization, fanaticism, and jihadism,” wrote Casey Babb, Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Newsweek shortly after the arrest. “As un-Canadian as it sounds, Canada has a terrorism crisis on its hands and that should worry the United States for a whole host of reasons.”

Concern would reach an apogee in October 2024, when a joint U.S.-Canadian counterterrorism operation thwarted a plot by a Pakistani student on a Canadian visa to illegally cross the northern border to conduct an October 2024 massacre of Jews in New York.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen legally issued a Canadian student visa in June 2023, now stands accused in U.S. federal court of plotting an illegal-smuggler-assisted northern border crossing to carry out a mass shooting of Jews in New York City to celebrate with blood the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Khan hoped it would go down in history as “the largest U.S. attack since 9/11”.

“We are going to nyc (sic) to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint. “Even if we don’t attack an event we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”

His was among the record-breaking 400,000 foreign student visas Canada issued in 2023.

That alarming new terrorism prosecution in New York State should have been enough to renew Trump’s interest in turning diplomatic pressure onto Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s mass legal immigration policies and border security on its side.

But terrorists cannot be the only concern.

Mexican cartel killers and traffickers in Canada crossing too

The incoming Trump administration 2.0 will need to force resolution of another issue of U.S. public safety concern dating to an especially damaging 2016 Trudeau move that went unaddressed until only recently. Trudeau rescinded 2009 visa requirements on Mexican citizens and against the advice of his own government that Mexican criminals would abuse the policy to fly in at will and bedevil Canadian cities and northern American ones too.

That’s just what was happening again by early 2017. A sustained surge was underway of Mexican nationals who, unable to easily cross the southern border under Trump 1.0, were flying over the United States into Canada. They would claim Canadian asylum, then cross southward over the less tended northern U.S. border.

Among them were the predictable – and predicted – Mexican cartel operatives.

Leaked Canada Border Services Agency intelligence reports said Mexican “drug smugglers, human smugglers, recruiters, money launders and foot soldiers” were turning up in greater numbers than ever before. The cartels went to work building human smuggling networks to move other Mexicans south over the American border, just as they did all along the southern border.

In July 2017, Global News quoted published the intelligence reports saying the ultra-violent Sinaloa cartel had turned up in Canada to “facilitate travel to Canada by Mexicans with criminal records.” Others identified included La Familia Michoacana, Jalisco New Generation, and Los Zetas.

For instance, whereas the reports said 37 Mexicans linked to organized criminal groups had entered between 2012 and 2015, 65 involved in “serious crimes” were identified midway through just 2017, compared to 28 in 2015. By May 2019, at least  400 Mexican criminals connected to drug trafficking, including sicario hitmen, were plying their trades in Canada, at least half of them in Quebec, according to a May 24, 2019, report in the Toronto Sun and other Canadian media outlets.

All had entered through the Trudeau visa loophole for Mexicans.

By the end of 2019, Canada saw a 1,400 percent spike in the number of bogus Mexican refugee claims, the vast majority naturally rejected, and of associated detentions.

Canada finally about to face the music

Only in February 2024 did the Americans pressure the Canadians finally begin to roll back some – but not all — of its visa-free Mexicans policy, because the influx had clogged Canada’s asylum system with too many bogus claims and also sent too many Mexicans illegally over the U.S. border, which presented a politically terrible look as the 2024 presidential election campaign got underway. Now, only Mexicans who already hold a US visa or old Canadian one can travel visa-free, while most other Mexicans with neither will have to apply for a Canadian one.

But the damage that must be managed today is by now well baked into the cake.

From January to mid-October 2022, for instance, 7,698 Mexican asylum seekers took direct flights from Mexico City to Montreal, according to a November 2022 Canadian Press story. The paper quoted officials at nonprofit refugee assistance groups attesting that most fly to Canada because they found out Trudeau’s visa-free policy also got them government financial assistance while awaiting their mostly denied asylum applications.

In their October 2021 book, The Wolfpack: The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld, journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Najera established that the Sinaloa Cartel now has a foothold across eastern Canada, with “solid control of cocaine shipments in and out of Canada.” The Arellano Felix group has its foothold in Vancouver and in the state of Alberta.

The Zetas are in Canada “involved with temporary migrant workers”.

Asked in 2023 if Canada’s importance to Mexican organized crime had increased “in recent years,” co-author Luis Najera answered: “I would say it has increased since criminal cells moved up north to settle and expand operations here. It is also strategic to have groups operating north of the U.S. border, close to key places such as Chicago and New York, and without the scrutiny of the DEA and rival groups.”

Canada is not Mexico but its policies pose consequences for the United States. Any normal U.S. administration would put Canada on the hook for adjusting its policies and more robustly guarding its supposedly treasured neighboring ally, the United States, from harm. If punishing trade tariffs finally focus Canada’s attention on those policy-driven harms, let them last until Canada fixes what it recklessly broke.

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