What's That? Dungeon Them, Throw Away The Key?!!

"No, I don't regret it [enlisting as a conscript with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]. I was asked the same thing by my interrogators, and I told them the same thing."
"He  [Iraqi Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, ISIL media chief] would give me a text, like a script, and I would review it for mistakes, and then we would record. He would then review it and see if there was anything that he would like me to place emphasis on."
"The intention was to not make anyone into a celebrity. I was just the voice."
"I was exhausted. My ammo was gone. They [his eventual captors, the Kurdish militia] kept calling on me to surrender, and so I threw down my weapon."
Mohammed Khalifa, aka Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed

The Flames of War propaganda video was allegedly narrated by Mohammed Khalifa

"He is a symbol -- the voice coming out of ISIL, speaking to the English-speaking world, for the better part of the last four to five years."
"I thought [when first hearing an Islamic State video] this guy sounds like people I grew up with [in Toronto]."
Amarnath Amarasingam, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, University of Waterloo

Captured in Syria a month ago by a U.S.-backed Kurdish-led militia with the Syrian Democratic Forces, the man known as Mohammed Khalifa described his role as a rank-and-file member of the Ministry of Media representing the Islamic State's propaganda arm, responsible for publishing video footage to horrify a Western audience such as the beheading of James Foley and other journalists along with a British aid worker, and placing a Jordanian pilot in a cage, then setting him aflame.

Grinning throughout his interview with a journalist after his surrender following a violent clash between ISIL fighters and members of the SDF, he spoke of his background, as a child immigrating from Saudi Arabia to Toronto, later studying computer systems technology and working for a contracting firm, and finally the decision to leave for Syria after intently watching YouTube battlefield scenes that drew him to the Islamist groups associated with al-Qaeda.

"His voice is the most recognizable English-speaking voice to have ever appeared in Islamic State propaganda", Charlie Winter, senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College London, stated categorically as though to emphasize just how influential he was in extolling the Islamist virtues of ISIL, cajoling susceptible Muslims in the West to join the fight against the kuffars.

Three audio-forensic experts were invited to compare the anonymous voice on the Flames of War video, the 55-minute long, professionally produced video in which this man's voice narrated a broad presentation of Islamic State's capture of a great swath of Iraq and Syria and in the process dispatched its enemies with a cruel zeal unmatched in modern times, with a more recent televised statement by Khalifa aired in Syria, post-capture. The voice experts were unanimous in their confirmation: It is "134 times more likely that the unknown speaker is Khalifa than someone else" two reported.

Forensic audio specialists, voice recognition expert, all concluded that "the speech tone, pitch, cadence and pronunciation is the same in these examples". Further official confirmation was delivered by a U.S. official identifying Khalifa as the ISIL video narrator. Equipped with a GoPro camera the 55-minute video was shot showed a trench being dug before a killing operation; it became an irresistible draw for recruiting from Australia, Britain and North America, stressed Mr. Winter.

Khalifa was involved in the production of dozens of audio and video clips in the production of the Islamic State's influential English-language propaganda and recruitment tools appealing to those eager to become part of the action. Although merely one among hundreds of Islamic State fighters from some 50 countries now securely locked away in prisons in northern Syria, this man played a pivotal role in recruitment and actively fighting for Islamic State. 

While the men are locked in jails, their wives in the thousands along with their children are held in detention camps, where they may move about freely but not leave. Among them would be Khalifa's caliphate wife and two children whose exact whereabouts are unknown. Canada, like most European nations has been undecided about retrieving their citizens, concerned that evidence of battlefield involvement may be difficult to obtain, making prosecution difficult. How like a democracy, unwilling to let actions, available evidence and reality speak for themselves.

Accordingly, not a whisper of a venture of commitment to reclaim this disgusting representative of humanity has been undertaken, no contact nor visit from Canadian authorities through consular aid and nor has the national police body, the RCMP commented on his detention. Toronto researcher Amarasingam recalled tuning his ears to the speaker's accent in an Islamic State video where the 2015 attacks in Paris were being acclaimed as a brilliant strike for the caliphate.

Muhammed Ali, a captured fighter for the Islamic State who helped identify the English-speaking narrator of some of the group’s films, at an office near the detention facility where he is being held by American-backed militia in northern Syria, Jan. 31, 2019. Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

During a research trip to Syria with Global News journalist Stewart Bell, Amarasingam, given access to a Canadian ISIL fighter captured and imprisoned, Muhammed Ali, further collaboration describing Khalifa under the nom de guerre Abu Ridwan was presented, describing him as a Canadian of African descent by way of Saudi Arabia. Born in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia to parents from Ethiopia his work life as an information technology specialist evidently left something to be desired for excitement and commitment.

He took to listening to online lectures by al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki which convinced him of the need to engage in jihad, but it wasn't until seeing a YouTube video where a group of British fighters speaking English on the Syrian front line gave him the impression that he would not be out of place in Syria, fighting alongside them. He left for Syria in 2013 at the birth of the caliphate,  joining the Muhajireen Ansar Brigade headed by a Georgian militant who later become the Islamic State minister of war.

The brigade he was with pledged allegiance to Islamic State soon afterward at a time when Khalifa claims to have begun working for the media ministry, a critical organ of the Islamic State as an influential recruitment tool. Under the media chief, Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, a close adviser to ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, execution videos were to feature a diversity of killers to avoid any one participant becoming too prominent and rising to challenge the leadership.

Khalifa transferred from media voice to fighter when he claimed a Kalashnikov rifle in defence of the embattled Islamic State. The final gunfight he took part in, left him wounded and, he claimed, exhausted. And after six years of commitment and loyalty to the cause of the caliphate he surrendered. Leaving Canada, like its other democratic counterparts whose Muslim citizens had leaked across borders into Syria, to ponder what to do with this legion of human scum.

The English narrator, now identified as a Canadian, Mohammed Khalifa, speaks as Syrians dig what he describes as their graves in the video Flames of War. SITE