Hot Jihad, Cold Feet

"I cannot help you. That's what I'm trying to explain to you. But you can get somebody else. For me, personally, it's no good."
"You guys are stupid. You don't listen, sorry. I'm very upset with you."
"If you wanna do this, fine, we can do it, but we're gonna do it our way, not their way [Iranian based "brothers"]. We're in Canada, we're not in Kandahar"
"The richest Jews [on] the whole planet, they live in Toronto. They live on one street ... they all live within the vicinity of each other."
"Stop being so dramatic. Dramatic doesn't do anything for Islam."
Raed Jaser, indicted co-conspirator, terrorist plot

"We will go search for another believer."
"We don't want people who are scared."
"You are scared that you go to the jail. We don't want people who is scared ... we want people that scare only from Allah."
Chiheb Esseghaier, Tunisian-born jihadist

CBC

Currently on trial, charged with terrorist offences, Palestinian-born Raed Jaser -- a Canadian citizen against whom a prior criminal record was lifted to permit him to obtain citizenship -- twinned in jihad with Tunisian Islamist Chiheb Esseghaier -- in Montreal on a student visa -- to mount a terrorist attack on Canadian soil, the first of many they hoped to plan and execute. Incensed at what they felt was government-branded Islamophobia, and troops fighting in Muslim countries they were intent on exacting vengeance.

Canadian authorities would learn, through a series of catastrophic terrorist attacks that Muslims would not stand silently by as their brethren were slaughtered. Of course, their minds bypassed as irrelevant that most of the slaughtering was being committed by Muslims, and most inconveniently, against Muslims in a wildly partisan sectarian war. The vicious animosity between the two major Islamic sects, Sunni and Shi'ite, superseded only by deadly antipathy to Jews.

The plan hatched essentially by Mr. Esseghaier and which he was intent on persuading Mr. Jaser would be successful in launching them into the esteemed annals of Muslim celebrity-jihadists had a number of flaws. All of them dutifully recorded by the FBI-Arabic-speaking agent who had convinced Mr. Esseghaier that as a wealthy American Muslim dedicated to jihad, he was a reliable partner in the conspiracy. It is those tapes covertly recorded that now present as the major evidence in the trial of the two men.

They had walked into a discomfiting situation when the three men, attempting to scout out a railway bridge in Scarborough in 2012 as a potential site for their first attack, aroused the suspicion of onlookers who reported their activities to police. And soon enough a number of police enforcement vehicles made the scene "At first we thought they were just passing by. They circled around and parked behind us", testified the FBI agent, at the terrorist trial.

That incident completely unnerved the already-nervous Raed Jaser, after the three conspirators were successful in convincing the police they were merely innocent sightseers who had lost their way. He informed the oher two men that he considered the plan to derail and send a train plunging through a railroad bridge, to be impractical. The bridge, to begin with, was too soundly constructed; drilling through the steel supports would be difficult and time-consuming.

The plan, said to be the inspiration of a jihadist that Mr. Esseghaier had met in Iran, whom he referred to as The Responsible One who had met with the glorious Emir bin Laden, was spurned by Mr. Jaser.

But though Mr. Jaser dismissed the plans formulated by Mr. Esseghaier, a doctoral student studying bioengineering at a Montreal university, he made it quite clear to his friends that he was only giving up on their specific plans, not on jihad. He planned to assemble his own little terrorist cell, an efficient one that would mount attacks that would be carefully planned and executed to ensure maximum success.

"We're gonna have our own operations. We don't have to wait for you or wait for brother Chiheb or wait for orders from overseas", he boasted, as the FBI agent recorded diligently.