ANALYSIS: Alleged ISIS Immigrant: A Rare Occurrence or the Tip of the Iceberg?

Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi, 62, (L) is seen in a courtroom sketch with his son, Mostafa Eldidi, as they appear via video for a hearing in Newmarket, Ont., on Aug. 1, 2024. The Canadian Press/Alexandra Newbould

Many questions are left unanswered around the foiled alleged terrorist plot in Toronto covered by a publication ban, especially on how one of the suspects obtained citizenship and whether any other similarly inclined individuals could be lying in wait.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Aug. 12 that departments are conducting a review of the matter and findings would be shared at the “appropriate moment.”

Meanwhile, opposition MPs called for an emergency committee meeting to promptly begin a study of the issue. All parties agreed this week to start work before Parliament resumes and to call ministers and officials to testify.

Ahmed Eldidi, 62, and his son Mostafa Eldidi, 26, were arrested by the RCMP in late July in Richmond Hill, Ont., and stand accused of several terrorism offences for the benefit of or at the direction of the ISIS terrorist group. Police said they were at the “advanced stages of planning a serious, violent attack in Toronto.”

The father faces an additional aggravated assault charge, with media reports linking it to his participation in an ISIS propaganda video outside Canada in 2015 in which he dismembered a prisoner with a sword. Police have not confirmed the matter and the allegations have not been tested in court.

Authorities have said Ahmed Eldidi has Canadian citizenship while the status of Mostafa has yet to be clarified. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has declined to provide the information based on privacy grounds.

Regarding Ahmed Eldidi’s case, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said he would be evaluating whether the father’s citizenship should be revoked.

“I’m as disgusted as any Canadian, but I have a responsibility to get to the bottom of it, and I will,” Miller said. The minister has the authority to strip someone of citizenship if it was obtained through fraud or by hiding important information.

Review

While a review of this particular case is ongoing, questions have arisen regarding other immigrants with potential ties to terrorism who have come to Canada in recent years.

The Epoch Times asked Immigration Canada whether other files are being reviewed for due diligence, or if new measures are being implemented to prevent future occurrences.

Spokesperson Remi Lariviere said Miller has directed the department to conduct a “thorough review” of Ahmed Eldidi’s case. “Once all the facts are known, IRCC will not hesitate to take appropriate actions,” he said.

The Conservatives have asked that the immigration program used by Eldidi to enter Canada be disclosed, as well as the dates he became a permanent resident and a Canadian citizen.

“Canadians also have a right to know whether there are any other ISIS members living in their communities,” they wrote in a statement.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, who’s been critical of the number of asylum-seekers in Quebec, said it’s normal there are increased risks as more people enter a jurisdiction.

“It’s true in Canada and elsewhere that one might miss something along the way. It has to be analyzed very precisely and cautiously,” Blanchet told reporters on Aug. 15.

Screening

Canada has accepted an unprecedented number of permanent residents in recent years and seeks to reach 500,000 annually by 2025. The number of non-permanent residents, including asylum-seekers and visa holders, has also more than doubled in the past three years, rising from 1.3 million in the third quarter of 2021 to nearly 2.8 million in the third quarter of 2024, according to Statistics Canada data.

All of these individuals are being processed by departments and agencies responsible for borders, immigration, and internal security.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is involved in the process, with ability to consult its holdings composed of information collected through human sources and intercepts, or received from domestic and international partners.

CSIS said in its 2023 annual report that it received 493,200 security screening referrals that year from IRCC and the Canada Border Services Agency. Most of the requests were for citizenship applications (296,300), followed by refugees (128,900), temporary residents (46,400), and permanent residents (21,600).

The agency noted the volume of asylum claimants has rapidly increased in the last five years and continues to grow, “creating pressures at ports of entry and leading to delays in process and other strains on the asylum system.”

CSIS doesn’t decide who is granted access to Canada and can obtain status. Its role is to provide advice to other departments and agencies that have the authority to make those decisions.

The Epoch Times asked CSIS whether the increased workload is causing resource issues. A spokesperson said the agency can’t discuss internal resource allocations given “its mandate and specific operational requirements.”

Former CSIS intelligence analyst Phil Gurski said the agency has a finite amount of resources to deal with a sizeable and increasing amount of requests.

“I don’t think they have the resources to do a full background check on everybody that the government was seeking to bring in to Canada,” he told The Epoch Times.

With regard to going back in time to look at who else could have slipped through the cracks, Gurski said it could be accomplished “in theory,” but the volume is too high practically speaking. A strategy could be used to focus more specifically on Iraq and Syria, but this could be a trap, he said.

Gurski, a specialist on terrorism who currently heads Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting, notes how ISIS now has offshoots in many parts of the world such as Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East, following the toppling of the so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria in 2019.

“The problem has become much, much greater,” he said. “It’s not just the people that fled the caliphate, it’s everybody else right now, and I just don’t think [CSIS] has the resources to do that.”

‘Extremist Travellers’

Along with the potential threat coming from outside, there was a trend of Canadians going abroad to join ISIS for a period of time starting in the mid-2010s. While some known to authorities have been killed overseas and others have returned, there’s also a possibility some left and came back unbeknownst to the government, said Gurski.

Last year Ottawa agreed to repatriate six Canadian women suspected of ISIS links who were detained by Kurdish authorities in Syria. They were arrested and charged by the RCMP upon their return and placed into peace bonds.

The women fall under the category of what CSIS calls “extremist travellers,” individuals with a nexus to Canada who are suspected of having travelled abroad to participate in terrorism-related activities, which could range from producing propaganda to fighting on the front lines.

The Epoch Times asked CSIS and the RCMP for updated data on the issue. CSIS spokesperson John Townsend said the agency and other governmental departments are “well organized to manage the threat posed by” Canadian extremist travellers (CETs) and possible returnees.

“Whenever possible, law enforcement conducts criminal investigations to support criminal charges, and the prosecution of CETs,” Townsend said.

The RCMP didn’t provide a response by publication time.

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) mentioned the topic of extremist travellers in its 2020 annual report, citing information from CSIS and its affiliated Intelligence Terrorism Assessment Centre.

As of 2020, of the approximately 200 extremists who travelled abroad from Canada, 61 had returned, said NSICOP, while 122 were in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. A number of these extremists are suspected to be dead, but the number was redacted in the report.

Among the returnees, Hussein Borhot of Calgary was sentenced to 12 years in jail in 2022 for joining ISIS in Syria. His cousin Jamal Borhot is currently in trial and faces similar charges, to which he has pled not guilty.

Gurski said despite the so-called ISIS caliphate being dismantled, the group remains the number one global terrorist threat. He pointed to the recent successful or foiled plots in Moscow or Austria, with the latter seeking to target a Taylor Swift concert.

“This is a wake-up call for everybody who thought ISIS was dead,” he said, noting how those plots were linked to the group’s Afghanistan branch, known as ISIS-Khorasan.

The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center calls it one of ISIS’s “most lethal branches,” seeking to establish a caliphate over Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, Central Asia, and Iran.

Lorne Dawson, professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo and terrorism expert, shares Gurski’s perspective, saying it’s been a mistake in recent years to “under-estimate the ongoing threat posed by jihadism worldwide.” He told The Epoch Times the socio-political conditions that contribute to jihadist extremism in different countries haven’t changed and in some cases have worsened, like in Iraq.

Dawson said what happened in Russia, with ISIS-Khorasan terrorists killing over 130 concertgoers in Moscow, could easily take place in Europe or North America.

“Far-right extremism is on the rise and important, but it has not displaced jihadism,” Dawson said.

Matthew Horwood and The Canadian Press contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: This report was updated on Aug. 21 after CSIS responded to a previous request for comment.