US has identified mysterious voice behind ISIS propaganda videos

A Canadian who, according to U.S. prosecutors, is behind influential propaganda videos in English for the Islamic State has been brought to Virginia for prosecution.

Mohammed Khalifa, 38, was captured by Kurdish forces in Syria in 2019. At the time, prosecutors said, he had been in the Islamic State for six years. He started out as a fighter, according to court documents, before getting involved in the translation and dissemination of propaganda into English.

Ultimately, he ran the English-language media arm of ISIS, according to prosecutors, whose production included videos, audio statements and an online magazine. Prosecutors say Khalifa recounted more than a dozen ISIS recruiting videos, including two of the group’s most influential efforts to attract Westerners: “Flames of War: Fighting Has Just Begun” in 2014, and “Flames of War II: Until the Final Hour” in 2017.

In the videos, according to court records, Khalifa encouraged his supporters to try to join the Islamic State abroad or, if they could not, to launch attacks in their home country. One of the videos included a voice recording of the man who declared his allegiance to ISIS before committing a massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016.

Others showed brutal executions, including that of Syrian prisoners forced to dig their own graves and that of a Jordanian pilot burned alive.

“As alleged, Mohammed Khalifa not only fought for ISIS on the battlefield in Syria, but was also the voice behind the violence,” Raj Parekh, acting federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is also one of the prosecutors in the case, said in a statement. “Khalifa promoted the terrorist group, fueled its recruitment efforts around the world, and expanded the reach of videos glorifying the gruesome killings and indiscriminate cruelty of ISIS.”

Khalifa, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was also responsible for translating the material from Arabic to English, prosecutors said. He is accused of conspiracy to support a foreign terrorist organization which resulted in death. If found guilty, he faces a life sentence.

This is the second case related to the propaganda arm of the Islamic State that has recently been brought to federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, where many high-profile international terrorism cases are being tried. Parekh and Deputy Prosecutor Dennis Fitzpatrick are also filing charges against two men accused of helping kill American and British hostages on behalf of the Islamic State, executions which have been featured in gruesome propaganda videos. One of the two pleaded guilty last month; the other will be tried next year.

When the “Flames of War” videos were released, US officials had no idea who the narrator was; the FBI asked the public for help in identifying him in 2015. After his capture, Khalifa identified himself to multiple media outlets as the mysterious propagandist.

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. after his capture, Khalifa said: “I had a normal life in Canada, I was doing really well and decided to give it up knowing… what I was sacrificing in the process. It was a decision I made and I stuck to it. “

According to the CBC, Khalifa was an IT specialist in Toronto when he joined the Islamic State. He said he radicalized himself through propaganda videos, narrated by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who joined al-Qaeda and was killed in an American drone attack in Yemen in 2011.

“I came here to fight in the jihad not only to defend the Syrians, but because it is an obligation to fight against the tyrants, to remove them from power and to establish Sharia law, all with the aim of re-establishing the Islamic Caliphate, ”he wrote in a statement. email to a close relative immediately after leaving Canada, according to court records.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a Canadian extremism researcher at Queen’s University, was the first to identify Khalifa as the voice of ISIS’s violent videos.

People said he was crazy, Amarasingam recalls, when he said the man named Abu Ridwan al-Kanadi looked “clearly like the people I grew up with in Toronto.”

Now Amarasingam says he hopes to find out if Khalifa has held any leadership positions in IS beyond being a producer of propaganda in English.

“He is an important person, in the sense that whenever Westerners interacted with ISIS media, ISIS says, ISIS radio, he was the voice we heard,” Amarasingam said. “He also went with ISIS to the last bastions.”

When the Islamic State collapsed in 2018, Khalifa told FBI agents he was ordered to flee, but chose to stay and fight. In a shootout with the Syrian Democratic Forces in January 2019, his AK-47 got stuck and he surrendered, prosecutors said.

Court records did not indicate whether Khalifa had a lawyer.

(c) 2021, The Washington Post – Rachel Weiner

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