The English voice of the Islamic State comes out of the shadows | World News, The Indian Express

The English voice of the Islamic State comes out of the shadows | World News, The Indian Express

By New York Times |Hasaka |Updated: February 18, 2019 12:37:58 pm

The English voice of the Islamic State comes out of the shadows

Speaking fluent English with a North American accent, the man would go on to narrate countless other videos and radio broadcasts by the Islamic State, serving as the terrorist group’s faceless evangelist to Americans and other English speakers seeking to learn about its toxic ideology.

Mohammed Khalifa, a Canadian citizen who says he is the narrator of multiple English-language Islamic State videos, at an office near the detention facility where he is being held by American-backed militia in northern Syria, Feb. 5, 2019. For years, an anonymous narrator extolled the Islamic State’s brutality in videos seen around the world. “I don’t regret it,” Khalifa says. (Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)

(Written by Rukmini Callimachi)

More than four years ago, the FBI appealed to the public to help identify the narrator in one of the Islamic State group’s best-known videos, showing captured Syrian soldiers digging their own graves and then being shot in the head.

Speaking fluent English with a North American accent, the man would go on to narrate countless other videos and radio broadcasts by the Islamic State, serving as the terrorist group’s faceless evangelist to Americans and other English speakers seeking to learn about its toxic ideology.

Now a 35-year-old Canadian citizen, who studied at a college in Toronto and once worked in information technology at a company contracted by IBM, says he is the anonymous narrator.

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Khalifa is now among hundreds of Islamic State fighters from approximately 50 countries who are locked in prisons in northern Syria. (Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)

That man, Mohammed Khalifa, captured in Syria last month by a US-backed militia, spoke in his first interview about being the voice of the 2014 video, known as “Flames of War.” He described himself as a rank-and-file employee of the Islamic State’s Ministry of Media, the unit responsible for publicizing such brutal footage as the beheading of American journalist James Foley and the burning of a Jordanian pilot.

“No, I don’t regret it,” Khalifa said from a prison in northeastern Syria. “I was asked the same thing by my interrogators, and I told them the same thing.”