Homegrown extremism abroad has a
new face, and CBC News has learned it belongs to yet
another Calgary man, a development that points to the
West as a hotbed for exporting jihadis.
His name
is Salman Ashrafi, and when the Al-Qaeda splinter group
ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) released images
of him last month following a double suicide bombing in
Iraq in November that killed 46 people, he was
celebrated in a martryrdom notice.
Only then, he
was known as Abu Abdullah Al Khorasani.
CBC News
has confirmed that Al Khorasani was Ashrafi's nom de
guerre and that he was a Canadian citizen who grew up in
the Stampede City, where he went to school and
worked.
The Calgarian's story is one of as many
as two dozen others, most of whom left to battle
alongside rebel militants in Syria.
At one time,
Ashrafi led a lifestyle many would have envied, with
jobs at Talisman and Exxon and huge downtown Calgary
firms.
Much has changed since then. The
revelation that he killed himself and others as part of
an attack for ISIS — a group known for such grotesque
violence it has even drawn condemnation from Al-Qaeda —
has stunned people who spoke with CBC News and knew
him.
Among them was Syed Soharwardy, a prominent
Calgary imam.
"Oh, I know him! Oh my God," the
cleric said, upon seeing a photo of Ashrafi and being
told the militant was killed in the 2013 Tarmiya, Iraq,
suicide attack.
Soharwardy was a longtime
acquaintance of the family and had watched Ashrafi and
his siblings "grow up in front of me."
Shocking
though it may have been, Ashrafi's journey from being a
University of Lethbridge student who organized
anti-racism rallies to a violent end as a suicide bomber
is not an anomaly.
Calgary is earning a
reputation as a breeding ground for jihadi
fighters.
The Muslim convert Damian Clairmont,
who later took the name Mustafa al-Gharib, was killed
while fighting with Jabhat al-Nusra, an
al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel group in Syria whose
membership is made up largely of European, Australian
and North American extremists.
Clairmont was also
raised in Calgary, as were as many as two dozen other
young men who, according to sources, have travelled to
Syria to join rebel extremist groups to wage jihad in
the last two years.
Understanding the
relationships between five men in particular — Ashrafi,
two Canadian brothers, Clairmont and his roommate —
could be key to unravelling how they became radicalized.
CBC News is withholding the identities of the other
three men until more information surfaces.
But
they were all friends who dined at the same restaurants,
prayed at the same mosque and lived in the same
apartment building in downtown Calgary.
According
to one source who knew all the men, they had meetings,
sometimes in Ashrafi's apartment, where he reportedly
instructed them that the only way to live with
non-Muslims was to either convert them or subjugate
them, and failing that migrate to a land of
Islam.
They all left Canada at roughly the same
time late
2012.
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