Jury convicts Canadian woman who ‘answered ISIS’s call’

A Canadian woman who spent four years with ISIS and married two of its fighters is guilty of terrorism, a jury in Brampton, Ont. ruled on Tuesday.

Ammara Amjad, 32, was the first woman to go on trial in Canada for her role in the Islamic State in Syria as it committed widespread atrocities.

The case was a test of whether Canada could bring to justice the women who played support roles in ISIS as wives and mothers but were not armed fighters.

The jury began deliberations on Monday and returned after one day to find Amjad guilty of participating in, or contributing to, the activities of a terrorist group.

A former York University student and Walmart employee, Amjad was living a life of “comfort” in Ontario when ISIS summoned women to Syria, according to the Crown.

The Pakistan-born Canadian flew to Turkey in March 2015, crossed into ISIS territory and remained with the terror group until she was captured four years later.

“She answered ISIS’s call,” the Crown argued in its closing arguments on Friday, as the two week trial came to an end in a courtroom north of Toronto.

Amjad faces a possible sentence of ten years in prison. She was not detained during the trial, having been released on bail after she was charged in 2023.

She did not testify in her defence and her lawyer did not present any evidence, instead arguing the Crown had not proved what Amjad did in Syria.

European and American courts have convicted dozens of women who flocked to Syria to live under ISIS rule. As recently as Oct. 27, a U.S. woman was convicted.

But Canadian authorities have struggled to prosecute citizens for their part in overseas terrorist groups, citing the challenges of collecting evidence in foreign conflict zones.

At least 11 Canadian women suspected of joining ISIS were caught in Syria. Nine were repatriated by the government from 2021 to 2023, but only three have been charged.

Oumaima Chaouay of Montreal pleaded guilty to participating in ISIS last year. She was sentenced to one day, on top of the 110 days she had spent in pre-trial custody.

Kimberly Polman pleaded guilty to the same charge in October. The B.C. resident, who allegedly received weapons training in Syria, is scheduled for sentencing on Nov 30.

Amjad opted to let a jury decide her fate, turning the case into a test of whether Canada could hold to account women accused of joining the terror group.

The defence depicted her as a naive youth who went to Syria to join her boyfriend, and argued that prosecutors had not shown she had knowingly contributed to ISIS.

“Do not convict her because of the place where she lived. Do not convict her because of who she married,” her lawyer Ayeman Kenaway told the jurors.

But the Crown said that not all terrorists carried weapons, and the evidence showed Amjad had participated in ISIS by taking on the domestic tasks it assigned to her.

Amjad married an ISIS fighter, Bilal Khan of Mississauga, Ont. When he died, she married another, British citizen Hamza Parvez, with whom she had two children.

She was on the ISIS payroll, espoused its ideology to family and friends in Canada, and pestered them repeatedly for money, according to the Crown.

“She fulfilled the role of the wife of ISIS fighters and mother to the next generation,” the Crown said, arguing Amjad knew ISIS was a terrorist group before she joined.

“Amjad made a considered, deliberate decision to migrate to Syria and fulfill the role of women in ISIS for the purpose of helping ISIS carry out its terrorist activities.”

Canadian women left B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec to join ISIS after the terror group seized parts of Syria and Iraq that it proclaimed a puritanical Islamic State.

The RCMP was unaware of Amjad until she was captured in March 2019 near Baghouz, the Syrian town where the hardcore of ISIS made their last stand.

The Integrated National Security Enforcement Team was unable to locate any record of her travel because so much time had elapsed since she had left Canada.

But the investigators found she had renewed her Canadian passport in March 2015, bought a plane ticket to Turkey, and allegedly left her parents to pay her credit card debt.

At the time of what she called her “hijra,” Arabic for migration, ISIS was the topic of blanket news coverage, and had left no doubt about what it stood for.

It had called for terrorist attacks in Canada, beheaded prisoners on video, massacred Iraq’s Yazidi minority and abducted young girls to serve as sex slaves.

The abhorrent abuses had led Canada to join an international military coalition assembled to fight the terrorist group, which had emerged from the Al Qaeda branch in Iraq.

“By 2015, ISIS was a notorious terrorist group. It was a listed terrorist entity in Canada for a year before Ms. Amjad made her way to the ISIS territory,” the Crown said.

It was “completely implausible and unbelievable” that Amjad was unaware of that, according to the Crown, adding there was no evidence she was compelled to join ISIS.

“This was a woman committed to her own choices from the beginning to the end, not someone who was forced to do anything against her will,” the Crown said.

The evidence collected by police was described by the judge as circumstantial, but included documents on Parvez that were found in Syria, and which the FBI shared with the RCMP.

The U.K. government, meanwhile, notified the RCMP it had revoked Parvez’s citizenship after he left London, where he was born, to join ISIS, the Crown said.

The RCMP also found thousands of WhatsApp text and audio messages on a phone seized during a search at Amjad’s parents’ house.

The messages show that, while in Syria, Amjad had told her family and friends she was happy, had done the right thing and they had a religious duty to follow in her footsteps.

In November 2015, she contacted Khan’s family in Ontario to announce he’d been “martyred” in a Russian airstrike. As proof, she allegedly sent a photo of his body.

She allegedly later called them back to ask for permission to marry another ISIS fighter, Parvez, a British-Pakistani extremist.

The defence challenged the RCMP translations of her messages, which were mostly in Urdu, and at one point argued unsuccessfully for a mistrial.

Amjad made no effort to leave ISIS until the terror group was surrounded by U.S.-backed Syrian-Kurdish fighters, who captured her and Parvez in March 2019.

For the next four years, she lived at the Al Hol and Al Roj detention camps for the families of ISIS fighters, until Global Affairs Canada secured her release in April 2023.

Her sentencing has been scheduled for Feb. 2.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca