Beloved of Allah

"It is one of the extremist groups. His father took him to Libya. In fact his father pushed him. Believe me, they should really open their eyes [ rather than succumb to blandishments by extremist Islamist clerics to engage in jihad]."
Libyan Ambassador to Canada Fathi Baja

"Abdu Albasset Egwilla] urged an audience of Libyan Islamist fighters to take part in jihad."
"Jihad today is simple and easily accessible, and does not require moving as in the past, as it was for Afghanistan and Iraq [urged the cleric, from his Ottawa pulpit]."
Report, Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre

"Apparently a bomb fell on that building [where former Ottawa resident Owais Egwilla was harbouring] and the building collapsed on them. He wasn't fighting."
"He was absolutely normal. He was in sports and mingling with his friends. He was part of the community here. He was a nice guy."
"He practically grew up here in Ottawa and he went back. About two years ago he came back here by himself and stayed for some time to study English, I believe, to try to go to school here."
"I don't really know if his father was the reason for encouraging his own son to go fight."
Khaled Misellati, Canadian Libyan Community Association trustee

Facebook   The death of Owais Egwilla, left, was announced on social media accounts affiliated with Libyan fighters, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. The youth’s father was Abdu Albasset Egwilla, right, a Libyan-Canadian religious cleric.

 

"Allah loved  you with martyrdom, which you had sought while you were still young" wrote his uncle, Abdul Rahman Egwilla as a tribute on Facebook to the 20-year-old Owais Egwilla, a former student at University of Ottawa whose death on the weekend "raised the head of our entire family". This, obviously was the young man's destiny, a young man who in a video in 2014 viewed his father urging "an audience of Libyan Islamist fighters to take part in jihad", according to a Canadian intelligence report, since declassified.

His uncle's proud tribute to the family's shahid, an honoured martyr in the classical tradition of Islamist responsibilities of the faithful to Islam delineated repeatedly in the Koran, was linked to the Shura council of Benghazi Revolutionaries which posted notice that Egwilla and another colleague in jihad had died "after a battle they waged against a group from the disbelieving forces", the SITE Intelligence Group reported. The 'disbelieving forces', actually was a Libyan government military group.

The young man, whom a spokesman for the Canadian-Libyan group insists hadn't been involved in fighting, had himself posted propaganda exalting jihad on Facebook. According to reports, he was a member of an armed Islamist group, Ansar al-Sharia. This is the Salafist Islamist militia involved in the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed several American diplomats, including the U.S. Ambassador, in a bloody firefight that torched the consulate.


In an appearance Monday before the Senate National Security and Defence Committee, Michel Coulombe, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service spoke of "another report yesterday or today in Libya", and to queries responded that 180 people "with a nexus to Canada" were actively engaged in terrorism overseas; 100 in Syria and Iraq, another 60 having returned to Canada, with an additional 90 to 100 known to be planning to travel to the jihadi conflict zones.

But of course, another Islamist with links to Canada, who has committed to Islamist jihad, spurred on by energetic recruitment -- in this instance by the young man's own father inspiring his son -- is described as ordinary, normal, not violent, not involved in jihad, but sadly simply misunderstood, a bystander. Canada has realized that a plentiful number of "bystanders" have surfaced in the Middle East and Africa, innocently wandering into jihadi training camps, then released to wreak their wretched obligation to Islam.