Commitment to Jihad in Canada: Rising

"[RCMP are aware of 90 people who] intend to go or people who have returned [from combat zones] -- so the pace and tempo of operations is quite brisk. It's steadily increasing [since the last report]."
"I take briefings every week from my commanding officers across the country. In Alberta, we're seeing a steady increase; in Ontario, increasing; in Montreal, increasing, so it's a steady rise."
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson

Facebook  Martin Couture-Rouleau

"The so-called lone wolves that we have witnessed in Ottawa, Paris, Copenhagen are all united by this ideology of destruction."
"This is linked -- a very strong link. And we need to tackle the root of the problem."
Nicolas Chapuis, French ambassador in Canada

Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store attack

Islamic State, that apocalyptic, messianic cult whose crucible dates to an exclusionist expression of pure Islamist medievalism has enormous appeal to young westerners, awakening in them Islamist tendencies as they appeal to their recruitment on behalf of the caliphate. The gory depictions of Islamic State inflicting death by immolation, crucifixion, beheading might represent a horror to most normal people, but their fascination to those receptive to the Islamist message is undeniably profound.

More Canadian Muslims than ever have in their futures plans to travel to battlefields overseas as jihadists. Alternately, they have gone there, done their fighting on those battlefields, and are prepared to return to Canada, doing so as trained extremists hardened by their combat experience and prepared to repeat them within Canada, as they have been exhorted to do by their terrorist masters.

According to Comm. Paulson, some 90 individuals who in the fall had planned to leave Canada for warzones have since increased in numbers, leading the RCMP to focus even more keenly and to assign greater numbers of agents to the task of surveillance to match that steady increase in recruits. The "foreign-fighter" phenomenon now vexing Western democracies is the concern that young Muslims and new converts to Islam and to jihad travel to Iraq and Syria to support ISIS.

Attempts to curtail their plans and interrupt their intentions to fight with ISIS abroad, may lead to their accepting the obligation to jihadist attacks instead in Canada. Alternative action that has seen the light of day in Canada and Australia as well as in France. Preventing determined jihadis from their dedicated aspiring to combat abroad simply leaves them free to exercise their options in Canada.

Martin Couture-Rouleau who killed Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent with a car in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu in October of 2014 was one such jihadist, a recruit to Islam who responded to the call to jihad, in the sights of the RCMP as being among the 90 individuals being surveilled, refused travel abroad with his passport confiscated, but striking instead in Canada.

Police had attempted to restrict his movements through a court-ordered peace bond. A Quebec prosecutor thought otherwise, believing insufficient evidence existed to take the case before a judge. The problem will only grow, according to authorities, fearing the long-term cumulative effect of the foreign-fighter syndrome on domestic public safety and national security within Canada.