Chapter Three: The Arrival

title: Chapter Three: The Arrival
author: Caliphate
contenttype: podcast
publication: Caliphate
published: 2018-05-03T15:45:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pfx.vpixl.com/6qj4J/nyt.simplecastaudio.com/4bcf9c0c-53cf-4055-9873-1c15d39d0d33/episodes/48b7d49e-aeae-44ed-b9cc-a2ee54422954/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=4bcf9c0c-53cf-4055-9873-1c15d39d0d33&awEpisodeId=48b7d49e-aeae-44ed-b9cc-a2ee54422954&feed=uUplVtAS

word_count: 3813

The early chapters of this series focus on a man we refer to as Abu Husaifa al-Khanadi, who claimed to be a member of ISIS and said he had committed multiple murders while in the Islamic State. In several episodes of this series we documented his story, as well as our efforts to verify aspects of it. In September of 2020, two and a half years after this podcast was released, the Canadian police arrested Husaifa, whose real name is Shairo's Choundry, and charged him with perpetrating a hoax. That charge led the times to conduct its own investigation, which found a history of misrepresentations by Choundry, and no corroboration that he committed the atrocities he described in the Caliphate podcast. As a result, the times has concluded that the episodes of Caliphate that presented Choundry's claims did not meet our standards for accuracy. In this feed, we've published a conversation with the executive editor of the Times, Dean Bakeh, where he discusses the original reporting in Caliphate, and what the times has found in its re-examination of the story. So I got everything together. Chilled with my friends for a bit, but I hadn't bought this on. They didn't know either. No one knew. I kept it low. I knew I was going to be called a terrorist. It's looked down upon going out on jihad, killing in this and that. So one of them dropped me off to the airport, and that's from there I went. Chapter 3, the arrival. All right, so you've now gotten, so you land in Eastern Bull. It's when in 2014? This was in February. So walk me through. I mean, you're getting to passport control. Yeah, I've got two pass of control, and they asked me why I'm here. I told them here for a humanitarian mission, and I have to go meet up with my agency outside, and they didn't really care, really. From there I met up with my link, Abu Muhammad. Did he say meet me at this diner, or be in a red hat? No, no, no. He found me actually. Don't be described what you're wearing, and everything where you're standing beside what are you standing and everything. But you're using your smartphone to communicate with him, and saying, I'm wearing this, I'm wearing that. I'm standing here. I was talking to him. He was a big fat guy. He looked like a more like a bouncer type guy, to me, I guess, that he came up to me, and I'm like, yeah, he's like, okay, come with me. So he picked up me, and these four or five other guys, we drove just outside of the city. He said that I have to get you guys into Syria quick. I have more people to pick up, back in Turkey. He told us to travel 75, 80 meters along the fence. There's guys over there, you pay them, and they point you to a hole in the fence. What kind of fence are we talking about here? Like chain link fence, with barbed wire on top, and then electric circuitry running up and down it. We pay them each, 75 liras. And then he pointed us to a hole, he just go through there, crawl through, and run into Syria. You said, just keep running, and you'll know when to stop. Just run. Run. Run as far as you can. Run. What are you thinking at this point in time? Are you, are you, is your hard pounding? This is so stupid. Why are we running into like a war torn country? Like, can't we just go in like normal people who wouldn't, you know, cross the border and take us in like a truck or something, you're recruiting this. That was what was all my mind. I'm like, okay, I guess training starts here. We have to, they're trying to test us or something. Be for loyal or not. That's where I instantly thought, and then I just did what everyone else did. And we didn't run for very long, and there was like a truck. It was a pickup truck pay thing. Are you guys, did you guys come from Turkey just now? But like, yeah, they will get come, get in, and then we left. And you straight, throw this into Jarav Bluse. When you got the Jarav Bluse, did you see the, the ISIS flag? Yes, that's the first thing I saw. It looked glorious. It's like, wow, you know, it was waving in the wind. It was just like a glorious black flag. And like, finally, I can live under the banner of Tahir. The banner of Tahir means the banner of a single God. Yes. That was a flag of ISIS. To you, this is the promised land. Yeah. Like, with meaning. Yeah. This promised land idea. What, what is that? What is that? What is he referring to there? Right. So you have to understand that for generations, jihadists have been dreaming of this thing that they call the caliphate. The caliphate is essentially a Muslim empire. It's a land that is four Muslims governed by Muslims as a theocracy, where no other religion is allowed to thrive. And it becomes a safe space for them. Osama bin Laden talked about this frequently. Other jihadists dreamed of it. But ISIS broke with all of the other groups and says the time is now. Why ISIS and not the Nusra front? So even in Syria, you had a chance to choose between groups, right? ISIS had a bigger goal of establishing establishment and control. In this time, in this generation, in this period on Earth, in a rock and Syria, in the chaos of those wars, they were going to fulfill this promise. So there was something inspiring about the fact that ISIS, unlike al-Qaeda, was saying we're going to do the caliphate now, rather than something in the distant future. And that was a big idea back then. And they were planning on establishing it. It was like in the works. And at this point in whose effort is to story, where is ISIS at in this dream they have of building a state? So this could be a major turning point in the brutal rule for control of Syria. They have started to take more and more territory, rebels gathered to celebrate their progress at a main plusroads. They've taken over towns, villages, including Wacom. And in the places that they've taken over, they are starting to put together the trappings of government. It's becoming clearer and clearer to anyone who's paying attention that they are the winning group. In the chaos of the Syrian Civil War, they're the ones who are getting the most traction, the most land, the most fighters. President Obama speaking out about America's deadly assentamies, his choice of war is getting a lot of attention. This is also around the same time in 2014, when President Obama... In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, he compares groups linked to al-Qaeda to an amateur basketball team. Go so far as to call ISIS the JV team. Quote, the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant. But I was seeing this. And you were seeing the Kallafas coming. Yeah. Meeting the Kallafate is coming. Congratulations. The Kallafat has come. I was seeing young men like Huzifa, who were leaving the West, going across the ocean to build this new state. I was talking to my al-Qaeda sources in Mali and in Africa, who were telling me, Rukmini, I'm getting ready to quit al-Qaeda, to go join this group because they are building this new nation. Wow. I want to be part of the first generation that establishes the new Kallafate. At first did it live up to itself? It did. It was pretty organized. It looks pretty clean. Doesn't look so war-torn. So I'm like, you shouldn't be so bad. It looks like they have everything out of control. You'd see everyone just walking around normally, the city life going on. The guys were quite friendly at first, too. They were nice. They were explaining to us how everything would work, how we'd finally become a part of the Dole of Islam. They asked you to fill out the form, references, background checks, and what we needed to provide to them. Wait. They made you do background checks? Yes. And they had to fill out forms. Yes. The things that Huzifa describes, I've seen these forms. I've held them in my own hands. The form was like any regular form of your name, age, level of education. You have where did you study? What countries have you ever traveled through and lived in? How you came to find out about them? Why are you here? Have you ever fought before? Who referred you? Keep in mind, this is a group that at this point is paranoid of being infiltrated by spies. So an important relationship that you have to cite when you're coming into the Islamic state is your reference. So who is your reference at this point? At the moment, that means that he was the same that I saw some other mean, right? So. This is a person that is already inside of ISIS that has been vetted by the group, and that is willing to basically just stand up and say, hey, I know this guy. I vouch for him. And then interview you. They asked me what experiences do I have? What knowledge do I have of which I had been fighting? What did you say? I told them that I was familiar with El Qaeda. I told them I was familiar with the Syrian battlefields and the Afghan battlefields. And then? And then they asked me what role I wanted to play. We know that they did an application process. They asked you if you want to become a suicide bomber, do you want an administration job? Do you want to become a jihad? Do you want to become a local police officer? To basically determine where you will best fit inside the Islamic state. So what they call the local police was a hispa, and I enrolled into that. I thought you went there to be a fighter. Why be a police officer? Well, you know, when you're right there in front of the battle you're like, OK, what if I die? Because I had heard of a British guy. This is Iftika Juman. I think his name was Iftika or something. Whose parents run an Indian take away. Last summer, he left his job in a call center. And like hundreds of other British Muslims signed up with the deadliest fighter group in Syria. And as soon as he got into battle, he was shot. He was killed almost instantaneously. And I wanted to avoid that. So I'm like, you know, I'll just work with this first. Did something scare you? I mean, in those, so you're there on your second or third day. Up to now you're telling us that you wanted to fight, you know, against the crimes of President Bashar al-Assad. But did something happen in that night or that day, where you said, oh my goodness, I'm my god. I'm I'm I'm into deep. Yeah. It was the fact that I don't think I can kill someone with my own hand at that point. I couldn't I didn't think I could right away. So maybe why not just run this police position? Because I thought that was the next lower thing to frontline battlefield. I'm like, maybe I can pick up some skills over there. So he decides to sign up for the hispah, the religious police. They took picture of you and they accept him put you in a safe house and pretty soon he's taken to a training camp. After that training started. You enrol in the hispah, the hispah means the religious police. Right. So what happens next? Weapons training. We got the very first thing we learned was parts of a rifle. The training was a couple of weeks long. And again, this is something that I've seen both in the documents that I have and in the interviews I've done with others. And it was I would say half weapons training. And these rifles were at AKs. Learning how to use an AK-47. How to reload them. How to clean out the gun. How to care for it. How to handle the gun if it gets jammed. How to shoot it. We'd have to learn how to sleep with it between our legs pointed upwards. This is the technique so that you can grab it as quickly as possible. It's possible in fire. And so you learn how to use an AK. Yeah. And a lock. A lock. Did you feel comfortable using the lock by the end of your training? Yeah. Yeah. I actually really liked it because it was a lot like pain-balling. It's the support that I used to play here. And it was pretty fun. And then the other half was religious sharia training. For a police officer, they said they need to have knowledge. You need to know why you're giving up punishment. So you need to know why you're saying what you're saying. You're learning the religious underpinnings of what you are doing in this hard line Islam that they are preaching. They taught you how to deal with locals there. What to do with them. What's the logo when you're apprehending someone. Don't go to their female relatives or anything. Go straight to the man himself and talk to him himself. If someone was caught what procedure to go through. In general, the trainers are people who have a history in the jihadist group, not necessarily in a rocker's area. But we heard of Moroccans, of Libyans, Saudis. We've also heard of people who were in the armies of their home countries, Russians who were in the Russian army, Chechens, who come with their military training and share that with people on the ground. At this point, I was pretty excited. I invested myself fully into the training and to the Sharia course. I did pretty good. I impressed my classmates. I did impress some like managers. I was always in their good books. What did you do to impress them? What did they like about your behavior? Obedience. They liked the fact that I wouldn't question them too much. And that's they quiet at times when I had to stay quiet. They liked how it was straight up when I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. They liked that. Evening time, they'd do training, military training. It'd be obstacle courses, sleeping out, living without food. They'd ask you to carry out small time missions for them, which would mostly deliver missions like, you know, how we'd work as a team. They'd pair you up with different fighters and kind of put unity between the guys there. So he eventually gets posted to a town called Membage in northern Syria. I've heard of Membage. I've heard of it many times because it became a hub for foreign fighters, for the Europeans, the North Americans, who were joining this group. In fact, some of the most famous members of ISIS who went on to carry out devastating attacks in Europe, Abdelhamid Abawud, the leader of the Paris attacks, and others passed through Membage. Wow. The town itself is pretty small. I think the last census had 100,000 people. It's not far from the Turkish border. And he's living there in a communal house in a dormitory with other foreign fighters, who he shares every meal and every prayer with. And his job is to police the society around him according to the medieval codes of the Islamic State. What is the situation? If someone was caught, like if they had cigarettes, they were selling gambling or their pant legs weren't long enough, because for men, they have to be above the ankle. They weren't long enough, so we'd have to make sure there. If the girls are wearing their clothing properly, but the girls were in our main concern, there was a female brigade for that. He was looking for things that to our Western eyes seem incredibly petty. His beard wasn't the right length. Had to be at least fist length. What they're trying to do is they're trying to recreate the world that existed in the seven century. This is the period of time when the Prophet Muhammad walked the earth, right? And so in their minds, they have fixed this epoch in time as being good. So everything that happened at this period in time is the way they are going to make people live now. People are going to have long beards. Women are going to be fully covered up. Men need to wear trousers that look sort of like capricants. Everything is being drawn from their interpretation of how life was lived in the seven century. Yeah, like the Sun, the Sharia code. It's just like, I guess they put it into codes. Stuff like 148 was for cigarettes. 192 was tax evasion. 166 was drug dealing. They were incredibly organized and incredibly bureaucratic in how they went about creating their terrorist state. Did go to a police chief with the ticket and everything with everything they've done with the evidence. We take them in. Then he would give out the actual what punishment they can have. And they enforce their rules through an intimidating and gruesome level of violence. What kind of punishments are you getting? Give me a make like a handful of like not severe up to the most severe. Not severe would be I guess the dress code violations and flirting. That was when we put the guy in a cage in the middle of the street. Just leave him there. What's this cage look like? A regular steel bar cage. I guess it'd be like a four by four. And he had to wear sometimes a sign around his cage or a sign on his neck. It's the humiliation kind of thing. Severe would be for thieves and for those who are not claiming what their capital is. They're not paying their taxes. Those are pretty severe punishments. Those that go up to amputations and stuff like that. Does not he for what kind of crimes? Oh, he would be like hiding weapons in your house and not having them declared drugs and alcohol and out of married sex adultery. Yeah. But lashes were the most like basic punishment. So like when you say lashing, do you think like a I don't know. Oh, so lashing they would be a certain amount of lashes and that lashing would be done with a belt, a leather belt. And it would be like at least this thick with studs coming out this much. And that was like two inches maybe, two and a half inches. And how many tickets is right in the time that you were there? Oh, I go over 10, 10, 15. Oh, yeah, not that much. I was pretty easy. I didn't really like getting people into trouble. Like they were so innocent over there. Like their faces, the families, everything. And like, you know, when you go talk to them to confront them about something, the way they would react to you, was you could sense the fear in their eyes. Like, oh, my goodness. I have kids, my kids with me. What's the most lashes that you meet it out against a particular individual? Oh, 115, 120 around. He, his wife wasn't wearing a good neckab, it was his fault. Yeah, because not enforcing it on his wife is his fault. How old is he? He was in his 40s. Does he do this kneel in front of you? Does he stand in front of you? Is he naked? He has his hands tied in front of him. And he'd be wearing a thin t-shirt and whatever clothes he had on. You'd have to lift the t-shirt up over his head, so he'd be sort of blindfolded. And then the guys in front, there we one guy in front who'd hold his hands even tighter together and they'd sort of spend them forward and use weapons and use go at him. How hard were you heading him? I'd always give him my all. I'd feel bad, but I'd always give it my all. Again, I had my superiors over me watching me. Does he scream? Does he scream? They say, like, please have mercy on me and stop. Please stop for the sake of God's stop. Took me an hour. I gave him the lashes and sections. So I'd do like 50 or so at a time and then I'd stop in the 15 more and then I took a little break. Again, you did feel bad. You're like, okay, so I'm actually inflicting pain on someone. Imagine this was happening to you. You're afraid of already afraid of going to the front lines and dying. Did you see blood before? I mean, real blood before this experience? Not like in person. Online I'd see that stuff be heading and stuff, but like not in person. How much of a caronio? A lot. Get on your arms and like drops of it on your clothes. Sometimes there's a lot. You can get on your clothes and it wouldn't get out. So is he telling us all this? Like what's going on in your head? It very much drives with the other accounts I have heard of what these punishments are like, down to the technical details of how they're carried out, the physical force that it takes to do it. The fact that the person executing the sentence is getting bloodied in addition to the prisoner. But in general, you hear the accounts of the sabbatry from the perspective of the victim. So you're usually putting this together on the other side, having talked to the person who received the whipping. Had you ever had an experience of a former ISIS member opening up like this to you in this kind of confessional detail? No. There was also times where, aside from like the local policing, the local population, you'd have prisoners coming in from Iraq all the time. The prisoners of war, dissidents coming in, and we'd have to kill them. Can you do that? Yeah. Yeah.