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1. There’s also a much broader point of significance to the Abu Huzayfah case, which I’ll try to unpack a bit here: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032
2. As @StewGlobal and myself found out during our trip to Syria in late 2018, there was a plan afoot to bring Canadian prisoners being held in Kurdish custody back home to Canada around April 2018. https://globalnews.ca/news/4526514/canadian-isis-caught-in-turkey/
3. This plan was mysteriously shelved in May 2018. When I asked some of my friends in the Canadian government about this later, they pointed to @rcallimachi's Caliphate podcast and the storm of controversy it had caused in Canada.
4. The podcast came out in mid-March 2018 and has been downloaded over 30 million times.
5. Hearing the voice of a young Canadian man admit to joining ISIS and then admit to several murders was horrifying, and the controversy only grew when Canadians learned that he was walking around without being charged.
6. Candice Bergen went after the Liberals in the House of Commons on precisely this point. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/isis-canadian-fighter-execution-1.4658607
7. Teleport back to Syria: prisoners in Kurdish custody told us that they had been on the phone with Canadian officials, that Canadian officials promised to start preparing identity papers for eventual repatriation. Then the calls stopped.
8. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the Huzayfah story – not just the podcast, but the idea that an individual could travel to Syria, join ISIS, be involved in horrendous crimes, and then return to Canada and face no charges – changed the debate on repatriation.
9. Literally, any time you talk about repatriation of Canadian prisoners in Syria, the immediate response is: you’re going to bring these guys back and they aren’t going to charged.
Me and @leahwest_nsl talk about this here: https://www.intrepidpodcast.com/blog/2019/10/18/the-five-myths-of-the-isis-repatriation-debate
Me and @leahwest_nsl talk about this here: https://www.intrepidpodcast.com/blog/2019/10/18/the-five-myths-of-the-isis-repatriation-debate
10/10. So, now fast forwarding to today: if all this is proven in court to be false…
....then what?
....then what?
