In December 2016, New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi travelled to Canada to meet Shehroze Chaudhry, an Oakville, Ontario man who claimed to have been a part of ISIS in Syria in 2014 before returning to Canada. Callimachi, a foreign correspondent who covered Al Qaeda and ISIS at the time, would turn Chaudhry’s story into the award-winning—and later largely retracted—podcast series, Caliphate. But in this moment, as she left Canada, she felt like Chaudhry simply needed someone to talk to.
She put him in touch with Mubin Shaikh, a counterterrorism and extremism expert. Shaikh then called Amar Amarasingam, an extremism expert and assistant professor at Queen’s School of Religion, to give Chaudhry more support. Amarasingam first spoke to Chaudhry on Dec. 8, 2016 and told The Journal they’ve been “in touch ever since, on and off.”
The Prof is as big a bullshitter as the jihadi wannabe.
