The English Voice of ISIS Comes Out of the Shadows
Mohammed
Khalifa, a 35-year-old Canadian citizen who was born in Saudi Arabia
and is of Ethiopian descent, says he is the narrator of multiple
English-language Islamic State videos.
More than four years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation appealed to the public
to help identify the narrator in one of the Islamic State’s best-known
videos, showing captured Syrian soldiers digging their own graves and
then being shot in the head.
Speaking
fluent English with a North American accent, the man would go on to
narrate countless other videos and radio broadcasts by the Islamic
State, serving as the terrorist group’s faceless evangelist to Americans
and other English speakers seeking to learn about its toxic ideology.
Now
a 35-year-old Canadian citizen, who studied at a college in Toronto and
once worked in information technology at a company contracted by IBM,
says he is the anonymous narrator.
That
man, Mohammed Khalifa captured in Syria last month by an
American-backed militia, spoke in his first interview about being the
voice of the 2014 video, known as “Flames of War.” He described himself
as a rank-and-file employee of the Islamic State’s Ministry of Media,
the unit responsible for publicizing such brutal footage as the
beheading of the American journalist James Foley and the burning of a Jordanian pilot.
