The Inside Story of a Canadian ISIS Suicide Bomber, As Told by Tumblr

While Tumblr is known for its food blogs and classy porn posts, one Canadian jihadist going by the name Abu Muhajir has made a habit of posting eulogies of some of his dead comrades. And he's not alone: several Western jihadists  use it to show off their exploits fighting holy war in the Middle East.

In May, Abu Muhajir provided a fresh perspective on the conversion and life of the late Canadian fighter Damian Clairmont, including details on how they first met at a Tim Hortons. In his newest post he sheds light on the life of suicide bomber Salman Ashrafi, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah Al Khorasani, and calls out Canada for its meddling in the Middle East.

Canadian jihadists (who describe themselves as “muhajirs," which is Arabic for immigrant) like Abu Muhajir aren't going unnoticed by intelligence agencies. In fact, through their own surveillance operations, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ballparks the number of Canadians in Syria at around 30. Earlier this year the agency released a report on the dangers of homegrown jihadists in Syria. Ashrafi is allegedly one of a group of youths who studied Islamic texts at the 8th and 8th Musallah in downtown Calgary, who’ve all travelled abroad through jihadist networks to fight in Syria for various armed groups.

“There is significant concern that extremism in Syria will result in a new generation of battle-hardened extremists who may seek to return to their home countries or export terrorism abroad,” says the report.

Abu Muhajir might even agree with CSIS. In the latest post he says the number of homegrown jihadists “is rising in Canada at an unbelievable rate.” To his mind, the continuing interventionism of Western governments into the affairs of the Muslim world puts the people of Canada at risk—specifically mentioning those in Calgary and Toronto.

After taunting the operational abilities of CSIS to surveill targets and accusing the agency of entrapment, he warns Canadians not to rely on “their current government or its lousy, incompetent CSIS agents” to protect them. He cites the great potential for “lone-wolf attacks” on Westerners, referring to the Boston bombings and the anti-Semitic rampage by a gunman in Brussels, who was later connected to militants in Syria. But in most of the post, he focuses on lionizing Ashrafi's interesting life and his suicide bombing of an Iraqi army base, which killed 19 soldiers in November 2013. ISIS representatives posted Ashrafi's photo online in March, claiming responsibility for the attack, and Abu Muhajir celebrated Ashrafi's martyrdom on Twitter not long after.

Abu Abudullah alKhorasani, A Canadian brother who did a fida'i operation in iraq! May Allah swt Accept! pic.twitter.com/jKFIONhG4G

— Abu Muhajir (@abu_muhajir1) May 4, 2014

I reached out to the federal government to see what they thought of Abu Muhajir's blog and they were unimpressed. "Our government is aware of reports of a dual national committing terrorist acts abroad," said Alexis Pavlich, the Press Secretary for the Office of Canada’s Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander.

The story of how a fresh-faced Ashrafi went from a newly-married University of Lethbridge graduate, to a business analyst for oil companies, to finally a suicide bomber for ISIS, has puzzled many who knew him. Ashrafi came from a prominent Pakistani-Canadian family with a university professor father—by all accounts he wasn’t the stereotypical alienated Muslim youth some Western intelligence agencies have painted as a threat.

Canadian Brother martyred in Iraq last november pictured in Halab with Abu Abdurrahman @I_Jaman_ pic.twitter.com/3JULQJPagu

— Abu Dujana AlMuhajir (@AbuDujanaMuhajr) June 13, 2014

And according to Abu Muhajir, the squeaky clean image is what bothered Ashrafi. “Salman was not satisfied with this 'sweet-boy” image of himself,' says Abu Muhajir in the post.  “And how could he have been satisfied with being loved by the enemies of Allah[?]”

Even after his marriage to a local Muslim woman, Ashrafi apparently lived with the same yearning to change his identity. Abu Muhajir writes that Ashrafi then realized “that the purpose of life must be greater than simply eating, sleeping, having sexual relations and living a routine life of enslavement to the corrupt system.”

Those feelings lead to him meeting up with Abu Muhajir at the 8th and 8th Musallah in Calgary. Introduced through the now dead Clairmont, the two immediately became good friends discussing “Hijrah, Jihad, Khilafah.” Interestingly, Abu Muhajir says Ashrafi showed some initial trepidation to some of the teachings he admired.

• For more on western jihadists see: Want to Chat with a Western Jihadist? Try Ask.fm

“Although Salman showed some minor resistance initially to some of our views and concepts” wrote Abu Muhajir without referring to specific works, “his thoughts started to evolve very quickly as we tried our best to expose him to the lectures and writings.” Eventually at the end of 2012, Ashrafi quietly quit his job with Talisman Energy and went to visit his parents in Oman, with an eye on the Syrian front.

In the face of divorce from an disapproving wife, Ashrafi still made the move into Syria through the Turkish corridor, where he met up with what sounds like an international brigade of Mujahideen fighters and his friends from Calgary. After receiving military training and celebrating Eid and Ramahdan with his “brothers,” Ashrafi heeded a call to arms by ISIS and made the trip across the Syrian border into Iraq with another fighter.

It wasn't long after that on November 13th, 2013, Ashrafi detonated a truck full of explosives, killing himself and what Abu Muhajir claims was 46 Iraqi soldiers (something he celebrates with an “Allahu Akhbar!”). He goes one step further and salutes the suicide operation as a cornerstone “upon which the resurgence of the Islamic State in Iraq has been built.”

Abu Muhajir leaves the best for last. In perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire post, he plots the sophisticated way friends in the West can contact him with the biographical details of other martyred fighters so he and his group can, “make a collection of inspirational stories of Canadian Mujahideen brothers.”

Among the suggestions for avoiding signals intelligence agencies is the tip to type stories into Notepad (avoiding Microsoft Word), put the document on a USB stick, download the Tor network off of public wifi at a Tim Hortons, then upload the data into freetexthost.com or justpaste.it before sending it to their jihadist site. After that, he recommends that potential sources destroy the USB stick.

Pavlich pointed out that the controversial Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act sends a clear message to individuals who seek to abuse their Canadian diplomatic status by circumventing "our laws or attack us in cold blood."

"In cases where dual nationals commit gross acts of disloyalty such as treason or terrorism or take up arms against our Canadian Forces, they will lose the privilege of Canadian citizenship," he said to me in an email.

Regardless of his popularity with the government, Abu Muhajir's active Twitter accounts and Tumblr is a portal beyond the everyday image of jihadists that beheading videos and propaganda music can offer. You start to realise that like any Canadian millennial on the blogosphere, his mistrust of a "corrupt system" and hatred of Stephen Harper aren't novel ideas. But the average Canadian youth doesn't follow that up by advocating armed conflict in Syria to establish a sharia state, before becoming another internet jihadist being watched by CSIS.

• For More on the war in Syria see: The Frontline of DIY Weaponry Is in Syria