A group of Canadians detained overseas for allegedly being part of ISIS will “highly likely” pose a threat when they return home, warns an intelligence document obtained by Global News.
The Integrated Threat Assessment Centre report was written in June, after Iraq said it had taken custody of an unspecified number of ISIS members from Canada.
The suspects are liable to contribute to extremism once they returned to Canada, “either directly through an act of violence or indirectly by radicalizing others,” the intelligence report said.
“A potential return of Canadian extremist travellers currently in Iraqi custody would highly likely pose a violent extremist threat to Canada,” it said.
The danger posed by returning ISIS supporters was underscored on Saturday when a 21-year-old attacked Berlin’s Pride festival with a vehicle and knife.
A Polish woman died and 29 others were injured. Police killed the suspect, Abdul Ballout, a German citizen, on Sunday.
Prior to the attack, Ballout had travelled to Turkey and Lebanon in an attempt to join ISIS, authorities said.
He was detained in Lebanon and returned to Germany in November. A German court ordered him to attend a de-radicalization program.
A month before the incident, Ottawa’s threat assessment agency warned about the risks posed by Canadians in much the same situation.
Like Ballout, they are allegedly extremists who left home to join ISIS and were taken into custody in the Middle East.
Terrorism analyst Lucas Webber said the Berlin incident showed that even those who tried to join ISIS and failed could be dangerous.
“These individuals pose a long-term national security risk even without immediate involvement in violence,” said Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism.
“Their past commitment to ISIS’s cause means they carry the same latent threat as Ballout: individuals who sought out the battlefield and, regardless of outcome, retain both the ideological drive and the networks to act on it later.”
After ISIS seized a swath of Syria and declared it an Islamic caliphate, dozens of men and women left Canadian cities to join the terrorist group.
While some served in ISIS in Syria and Iraq, others like Aaron Driver and Rehab Dughmosh were stopped along the way and instead conducted attacks in Canada.
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As ISIS began to collapse in 2018, U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters captured Canadians who had been part of the group.
Between 2021 and 2023, the federal government repatriated nine women who had left B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec to join ISIS, as well as their children.
A third of the women have been charged, but most others were placed on terrorism peace bonds that restrict their movement and online access.
The government has not yet repatriated any of the Canadian ISIS men caught in Syria, including self-admitted ISIS sniper Muhammad Ali of Mississauga, Ont.
The others were residents of Edmonton, Windsor and Montreal, as well as a Briton who has never lived in Canada but obtained citizenship through his father.
A sixth Canadian, Mohammed Khalifa, was taken out of Syria by the United States in 2021, flown to Washington, D.C., and imprisoned for life.
Sheryl Saperia, a consultant who advises on security matters, said German authorities appeared to have incorrectly assessed the threat Ballout posed.
“The question that Germany answered wrongly, and that Canada now faces, is: on what evidence do we conclude that someone who set out to join ISIS no longer intends to act on it?”
“The Canadians detained in Iraq got much further than he did,” said Saperia, CEO of Pearl Strategic Counsel and former head of an advocacy group for terror victims.
“They arrived, they lived under ISIS rule, and at least one fought for the group and publicly called for attacks here,” she said.
“Before anyone is repatriated, Ottawa should be able to say what admissible evidence exists to support terrorism charges in a Canadian court, and what the plan is if that evidence is insufficient.”
Two Canadians who had joined ISIS were convicted of terrorism offences last year, including the first woman to be successfully prosecuted after returning from Syria.
But some remain in the Middle East and are trying to come back to Canada, including a Montreal man who was imprisoned in Turkey.
In Iraq, the Supreme Judicial Council said in February it was holding almost 6,000 ISIS members from 61 countries, including Canada.
The statement did name them, but said they had been transferred to Iraq from Syrian prisons and would face investigations and trials.
“Iraqi authorities announced plans as of February 2026 to investigate and prosecute all guilty individuals within a six month period,” the Canadian intelligence report said.
“Canadian authorities are actively monitoring the situation.”
Phil Gurski, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst, said extremists who are returning from abroad pose a higher threat.
That’s because of “the experience they have, the people they met and the anger they are returning to the country with,” he said in an interview.
Despite being all but wiped out in Syria in 2019, ISIS has survived amid what CSIS calls an “increasingly permissive” environment.
The Middle East conflict that began with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel has fuelled what CSIS calls religiously motivated violent extremism.
In its 2025 annual report, CSIS said it had launched seven “priority investigations involving mobilization to violence” motivated by the conflict.
Global News reported last week that Canada had disrupted four “violent extremist plots against Jewish targets” since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict. All were related to ISIS.
ISIS “remains the most significant threat to Western interests, with its enduring objective to seize territory to establish a caliphate,” it said.
The evolving situation in the Middle East could “expedite timelines associated with” the return of ISIS members to Canada, CSIS wrote.
The CSIS report agreed that some of them “would likely pose national security and public safety risks” unless Canada took “sufficient mitigation measures.”
Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca
