An ISIS fighter captured in Syria recently revealed at least one plot to infiltrate the United States through the porous southern border with Mexico to launch terrorist attacks from within the country.
Anne Speckhard and Ardian Shajkovci, researchers with the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, have interviewed hundreds of captured terrorists in recent years, including a Canadian with dual Trinidad citizenship named Abu Henricki al Canadi, who turned himself in to Syrian Democratic Forces aligned with the U.S. this spring.
This week, Speckhard and Shajkovci published the interview with Canadi in which he details his time with ISIS in Syria, where he alleges ISIS leaders proposed a plan to smuggle him into the U.S. through Mexico and tortured and imprisoned him when he and others refused, Homeland Security Today reports.
Canadi spent an hour and a half with the ICSVE researchers on May 12 to explain what attracted him to the violent Islamic State Caliphate and why he was ultimately imprisoned by the group with his Canadian wife in Manbij in 2016. Canadi was tortured, though his wife wasn’t, and the two were eventually released. A life threatening illness and living homeless in an unrelenting war zone later convinced them and others to commandeer a van and drive to a SDF checkpoint to turn themselves in, he said. – READ MORE