Abu Henricki al Canadi[v], a Canadian with dual Trinidadian citizenship who was detained by the SDF in Rojava, Syria, spoke with ICSVE researchers for about 1.5 hours on May 12, giving his firsthand account of being attracted to, traveling, joining and serving in the Islamic State Caliphate, first as a fighter and later designated as unable to fight due to chronic illness. As we were about to bring the interview to a close, Abu Henricki suddenly decided he trusted us enough to unburden himself of something that he claimed had been troubling him for some time.

“There’s something that’s kind of like was playing in the mind in the past a little while now,” he told us. “I have been contacted by two organizations from the U.S. and Canada to help stop foreign attacks. The one guy in Canada wants to take me under his wing,” he explained, his eyes widening. “Another one [the American intel] wants me to go around to people I met, Americans from Texas.” That foreign intelligence also interviews the imprisoned ISIS cadres we talk with and tries to learn from them, and perhaps also recruit them as informants, is no surprise to us, as we frequently hear about it from those we have interviewed in SDF and Iraqi prisons. “You met Americans in ISIS?” we ask, surprised, as most often our interviewees have no, or only very sparse, information about American ISIS members.

Nodding, he answers, “There was a Bengali American. Abu Adam.” Trying to recall the others’ names, he adds, “Two cousins. They were from New York. One was American, but Turkish – Abu Ilias. He was from Texas. He was killed in Baghouz in a drone strike.” We ask how he knows for certain this American ISIS cadre was killed, as ISIS had a habit of declaring cadres they hoped to send back home to attack as dead – creating an “ISIS undead” attack force of sorts. “I didn’t see his body, but others did,” Abu Henricki confirms.

Abu Henricki then opens up about a plot in which he said he and other Trinidadians were invited to attempt to penetrate the U.S. borders to mount financial attacks on the U.S. When asked how this occurred, he explains, 

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