... Abu Henricki al Canadi[5], a Canadian with dual citizenship with Trinidad, who was detained by the SDF in Rojava, Syria spoke with ICSVE researchers for about 1.5 hours on May 12, 2019 giving his first-hand 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.
(...)
Abu Henricki then opens up about a plot in which 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, “The emni [ISIS intelligence arm] was inviting us,” which matches other cases we and others have uncovered, in which the ISIS external emni identifies ISIS cadres willing to go home or attack in countries outside the Caliphate.[6] When asked if he can identify the emni member who invited him, as they routinely wore masks covering their faces, Abu Henricki answers, “He speaks English. He was Tunisian, maybe. I don’t know. He approached the guys, and they approached me. He didn’t come directly to me.”
This was in the end of 2016. “They, what they will have, what they wanted to do basically is they wanted to do financial attacks. Financial attacks to cripple the [U.S.] economy,” Abu Henricki explains. “Apparently, they have the contacts or whatever papers they can get to a false ID, false passports [to send me out for this kind of attack,] he adds. “They have their system of doing it. So that’s maybe the way that I could have gone out with other individuals. It wasn’t me alone. They were sending you to Puerto Rico and from Puerto Rico [to Mexico].”
“One reason while I was also put in [ISIS] prison in 2016, I was asked to leave [ISIS] to go to America because I’m from that area. Cause they wanted [and] planned to do something and I refused.” Abu Henricki explains. “I refused to do it. That is why also I’m put into [ISIS] prison and been tortured,” he states.
(...)
When asked about the ISIS plot, he explains, “They were going to move me to the Mexican side [of the U.S. southern border] via Puerto Rico. This was mastermind[ed] by a guy in America.
Where he is, I do not know. That information, the plan came from someone from the New Jersey state from America. I was going to take a boat [from Puerto Rico] into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in,” Abu Henricki explains. “I don’t know where I’d end up. Please be advised, I was not willing to do it,” Abu Henricki adds, wanting to be sure we don’t think he was willing to attack innocent civilians inside the U.S. “But this is one of their wicked, one of the plans that they had,” he explains, “and which I would like to think I foiled the plan by not being part of it.”
While Abu Henricki was told that the aim of the plot was to attack the financial system, as is often the case, the full details of the plot were not disclosed to him. “All I could think of was a bombing mission,” Abu Henricki explains to us, his face becoming deathly serious. Given that the mastermind was from New Jersey, it may have been aimed at New York financial targets ...
op:
