June of last year was a wake up call for Canada. 17 homegrown terrorists were arrested after purchasing 3 tons ammonium nitrate for the purpose of constructing a truck bomb. The CSIS was able to infiltrate the cell because Mubin Shaikh worked as an operative.Shaikh says he was pulled aside and given the jihadi pitch, the list of
reasons for acts of violence: events happening in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the raping of Muslim women, the killing of Muslim children, and other
emotionally charged issues. He reported the incident back to the CSIS
and told them that he thought Fahim was "a time bomb waiting to go off."
Shaikh had infiltrated the cell so deeply, that he was training the muhajideen for terrorism using his Canadian military background, all the while under the watchful eye of the CSIS. But Shaikh isn't what many would call a moderate Muslim, He favors sharia law, his wife is shown in the video wearing the traditional burqua with only the eyes showing. He explains why he informed the authorities;"I was in the Army Cadets. I still remember things like February 15,
the day the official Canadian flag was proclaimed. This is home for me.
I can't have things blowing up in my backyard. There are values that I
live by -- it's not that they're Islamic or they're Western; it's that
they're human. That's what it comes down to."
Here's a synopsis of the video, if you miss it on TV the Frontline website has an online video. 
"Canadians call it `Toronto the good,'"
says FRONTLINE/World and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter
Linden MacIntyre, as he begins his report from North America's
fifth-largest city. Toronto is known for its many multicultural
communities. But the famously safe city was rocked last summer by news
of a homegrown terrorist plot.
The courts have only now begun to hear their cases. Whatever the
verdicts reveal, McIntyre reports, Canadian authorities believe they
have disrupted the kind of homegrown terror cell that has already
caused havoc in Europe.
We first see Mubin Shaikh walking along the Toronto streets. This is
the man who infiltrated the suspected terror cell. He will be a key
witness at the trials of some of the accused. Shaikh is a devout Muslim
who shares much of the passion and piety of the young men now awaiting
trial. But he was appalled by what he thought they planned to do.
"Storming Parliament, kidnapping, holding hostage the MPs, beheading
them one by one unless Canadian troops are pulled out of Afghanistan
and Muslim prisoners are released from prisons in Canada," Shaikh tells
McIntyre incredulously.
Shaikh, who is the father of four, volunteered to work with the
authorities to help thwart a plot he saw as dangerous to his family,
his Muslim community and his country.
"At the end of the day," he shrugs, "I can't have things blowing up in my backyard."
McIntyre travels to the city of Mississauga, just west of Toronto.
One of the conspirators was arrested here last June. Three of the
accused attended Mississauga high school. Fellow students remember that
the group practiced an austere version of Islam called Salafism. Their
intensity set them apart even from most of their fellow Muslims.
Pictures in a school yearbook show a studious young man called Fahim
Ahmad and the fun-loving Zakaria Amara -- both believed to have been
the leaders of the suspect cell.
Canadian intelligence had been monitoring Fahim Ahmad for four
years, after he began chatting on the Internet with people already
marked as potential security risks. Fahim Ahmad was attracting a
growing circle of "followers," and by 2005 the CSIS asked Shaikh to get
close to the group.
Shaikh was a former cadet with martial arts training. He had also
burned out on hard living in his youth and had become "born again" to
the faith he grew up with. "I took it upon myself again in an observant
manner," he tells McIntyre.
In 2005, he was radical enough to openly campaign for Sharia law.
But he was leading a strange double life, simultaneously working as an
undercover agent.
There were others in the community who smelled trouble in Fahim
Ahmad's group. A Toronto restaurant owner and Muslim convert tells the
reporter how he berated one young man after Friday prayers for handing
out jihadi videos glorifying the 9/11 hijackers.
Many young men, McIntyre suggests, are becoming indoctrinated
through the Internet, which is taking the place of religious
scholarship. Shaikh agrees. He tells the reporter that it's common to
invite friends over to eat barbequed chicken and watch jihadi videos.
Traveling to Washington, D.C., to get a broader sense of the threat
posed by this homegrown jihad, the reporter talks to Michael Scheuer,
former head of the CIA bin Laden desk. Scheuer tells him that bin Laden
has long been passing down instructions to the next generation on the
fight and what the struggle is all about -- Western support for the
oppressors, Western invaders defiling Muslim lands. These grievances,
Scheuer says, are spread through the last will and testaments of
22-year-old suicide bombers, whose videos are watched over and over on
the Internet.
"I'm afraid the American people, at least, don't have a good idea of
just how dangerous the threat is that we face," Scheuer says.
This buildup of grievances exploded like a powder keg in Madrid in
March 2004. It was people carrying local passports, McIntyre says, who
ignited the attacks in Spain. Next followed the Netherlands and the
murder of controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was slain in broad
daylight along a bike path in Amsterdam. He had confronted Islamists
over their attitudes toward the West and, in particular, toward women.
His murderer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch citizen and part of the
Hoffstad Network. This group, like the one in Toronto, had talked of
blowing up secret service offices and assassinating politicians.
McIntyre meets with Ruud Peters, a leading Dutch Islamic scholar,
who was an expert witness at Bouyeri's trial. From his offices
overlooking Amsterdam's tranquil canals, he explains the larger issues
influencing the minds of these young men. "One is the rejection of
Dutch society, as they feel it, so they want to go back to Islam and
they want to have their own Islam, a kind of universal, pure Islam."
The other factor, Peters says, is a need to distance themselves from
their parents, for whom they have affection but whom they also view as
society's losers.
The trajectory, then, suggests McIntyre, is that these homegrown
jihadis start with general alienation, seek out a radical voice, and
then go to the Internet to find each other. "That's right," says
Peters.
McIntyre next meets the parents of Jason Walters, a young Dutch
American who was also attracted to the Hoffstad group. Walters' parents
watched TV in horror as their son tried to throw a hand grenade at
police during his arrest. Both struggle to describe what happened to
their quiet young boy, who, they later discovered, had attended
training camps in Pakistan. Jason Walters is now serving a 15-year
prison sentence.
The list of impressionable young men drawn to extremism goes on.
McIntyre arrives in Atlanta, Georgia, at the home of a respected
college professor whose son is also now in jail. Haris Ahmed is
awaiting trial for conspiring to aid the Toronto terror cell.
His father, Syed Ahmed, rues the day he did not pay closer attention
to his son's activities. "I thought he was just sending emails, or he
was just reading some newspapers. So I think that was my mistake."
In March 2005, Haris Ahmed traveled to Toronto with a friend,
unaware that they were under surveillance by the FBI and Canadian
intelligence. Haris met with Fahim Ahmad, the suspected leader of the
Toronto group. According to U.S. court documents, they discussed
possible attacks on civilian and military targets. However, the
indictment notes that there was no "imminent danger" to the American
public.
Shaikh confirms that the Toronto group was planning to set up a safe
house for those involved in the plot. There was also talk of
Chechnya-style resistance in northern Ontario, where the group could
fortify themselves in case anyone came looking for them. He also tells
McIntyre that he met with Zacaria Amara, who showed up at one meeting
with a detonator.
"He said he could build a bomb right now, but he was still
experimenting to make sure it didn't blow up in his face," Shaikh
recalls.
Shaikh takes the reporter three hours outside of Toronto, to where
he trained the young men in combat activities. The landscape looks
benign enough now, blanketed with snow and pine trees. But 12 or so
aspiring warriors spent a Christmas break there firing off live
ammunition and praying five times a day to Allah.
It was from another informant that Canadian police learned of the
group's attempt to purchase 3 tons of ammonium nitrate, a potential
explosive material.
That's when the police moved in. Shaikh, who admits he was also
angry at the world and wanting to lash out, realizes that one of those
young men now in custody could so easily have been him. "I was lucky,"
he says, "that I was exposed to people who I could talk to who could
correct my understanding."
Canada was lucky as well. Shaikh is a hero to his homeland, and his nation will no doubt need more of them in the future.
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