Aimee & Ali: The unhappy story of a Canadian ISIS couple | Globalnews.ca

They met at a north Edmonton bar, according to a family member.

She was a Métis with raven hair and looks passed down from her Dene mother and Ecuadoran father.

He was the son of Lebanese immigrants, with an easy smile and the old-fashioned decency to seek her family’s permission before asking her out.

At their wedding, she wore a strapless white gown and veil, and they were Mrs. Aimee Lucia Vasconez and Mr. Ali Abdel-Jabbar, with two sons to follow.

And then, they threw it all away for the Islamic State, the terrorist group he died fighting for in Syria, according to an RCMP report obtained by Global News.

Meanwhile, she is a 40-year-old single mother, living in an Edmonton apartment following her release last year from a detention camp in Syria.

For public safety reasons, her actions were restricted by the Alberta court after the RCMP told a judge that she, too, had joined an ISIS battalion.

“She’s not the same Aimee that we knew,” her sister-in-law Lacey MacMillan told Global News.

“It all happened so fast.”

Ten years after it emerged as a toxic mix of fanaticism and ultraviolence, ISIS has left a trail of ruin in the Middle East, but also in Alberta.

Alberta has played an outsized role in ISIS, with residents “overrepresented” among Canadians who went overseas to join groups like ISIS, a 2019 study said.

A man who robbed an Edmonton jewelry store to raise money for ISIS is serving time in a U.S. prison.

A Calgary man was sentenced to 12 years in 2022 for his role as an ISIS fighter in Syria. His cousin was also charged.

A youth was arrested in Calgary last year over a plot to target Pride month. The investigation resulted in the arrests of three minors.

In July, an Edmonton man, Khaled Hussein, was convicted of terrorism in the United Kingdom along with pro-ISIS preacher Anjem Choudary.

Many others are dead, some killed in coalition airstrikes.

Explanations vary, from a job market that attracts those looking for quick money before going overseas, to the lingering impact of extremists such as Kassem Daher.

A suspected terrorist fundraiser, Daher ran Edmonton-area cinemas and allegedly radicalized others, some of whom remain active today.

The head of RCMP national security investigations, Assistant Commissioner Brigitte Gauvin, said she did not consider Alberta an ISIS “hot spot.”

“I wouldn’t say that there’s a concentration of individuals in Alberta, per se,” she said in an interview.

“I mean, there’s been a number of Canadian extremist travellers that left Canada to join ISIS, and they came from across Canada and not necessarily from Alberta.”

But ISIS documents show that several recruits used phone numbers with Alberta’s 403 area code, and more women who were part of ISIS and were caught in Syria have returned to Alberta than any other province.

Police documents show the RCMP has launched at least two investigations into Alberta residents who joined ISIS, named Project Séance and Project Soldar.

“There’s people that are going around…recruiting for ISIS,” MacMillan said in an interview. “That just blows my mind that’s happening in this city, in Edmonton.”

When Aimee appeared in an Edmonton courtroom on May 22, 2024, she was unrecognizable from the smiling young graphic designer seen in family photos.

Wearing a navy robe and black niqab, she stayed seated at the back of the courtroom upon the arrival of the judge, who paused to remind her that “everyone needs to stand.”

Sixteen years earlier, Aimee had gone to an Edmonton strip mall bar with her cousin, MacMillan said. She wanted to dance. Ali was there with a friend.

“He ended up winning over Aimee’s parents because he had a good job,” she said. “He didn’t drink, he had a good family and had the same values Aimee had.”

Ali studied chemical engineering at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and started his own landscaping business in 2009.

But after they moved to a townhouse in North Edmonton, her family noticed a change. Clean-shaven at their wedding, Ali grew a beard and became more strict with Aimee, she told the FBI.

A Catholic, she had converted to Islam and began wearing a hijab that covered her hair. She also became more reserved, her cousin Sharlyn told the RCMP.

Ali spent little time at home, and the cousin only saw him when he stopped by before prayers, according to the RCMP’s summary of its interview with her.

At a birthday party at Ali and Aimee’s home, guests arrived to find a sheet hung in the room, dividing the women from the men, the cousin told police.

By then, Ali had founded M2M Productions, which produced videos of sermons and interviews with Islamic figures, some of them controversial.

Their next-door neighbours at their townhouse complex were Helena Carson, a Muslim convert like Aimee, and her husband, Yazan Kalouti.

Like Ali, Kalouti ran his own small business, Kalouti Enterprises, which did painting, renovations, moving and maintenance, according to Alberta corporate records.

Kalouti was also learning how to shoot.

On Aug. 14, 2014, Rick Kermode stopped by the Wabamun Gun Club and saw three men dressed in black, firing military-style rifles with illegal, overcapacity ammunition clips.

A member of the club, Kermode checked the logbook and saw they hadn’t signed in. He confronted them and they got upset. Feeling threatened, Kermode left.

He then phoned a club executive, Tim Bennett, who drove out to the range, 70 km west of Edmonton, and saw three Middle Eastern men, according to the RCMP.

Their SKS rifles had magazines with three times the legal limit of ammunition, and they “demonstrated inexperienced, uneducated and unusual gun handling procedures,” the police report said.

Rather than aiming at targets from a stationary position, they were running down the range and firing from the hip like they were playing soldier.

Bennett approached them, and the “confrontation became heated,” the RCMP wrote. One of them produced a membership card that identified him as Ali.

An RCMP investigation subsequently learned the names of the other two: Baris Bagis and Kalouti, but when police went looking for them, they had already left Canada.

Claiming he wanted to live in a Muslim country, Ali had told family members he was moving to the Persian Gulf. But that appears to have been a cover story.

Around that time, former Al Qaeda operative Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had committed an audacious fraud, declaring that Syria and Iraq were now part of a new “Islamic State.”

In August 2014, his extremist fighters began implementing his envisioned intolerant desert kingdom, massacring, raping and enslaving Yazidis, an Iraqi religious minority.

A U.S.-led coalition, joined by Canada, responded with airstrikes. To demonstrate their resolve, ISIS beheaded Western journalists and aid workers on video.

After returning home from Turkey, one of the men caught at the gun range with Ali, Bagis, confirmed what police likely already suspected: Ali “had gone to Syria to fight.”

After Ali left, Aimee went to see MacMillan but before stepping into the house, asked if there were any men inside, she said.

“She never ever said that before, so that was like a red flag,” MacMillan said, describing Aimee as, “very obedient to her husband.”

Now wearing a niqab that shielded her face, she had brought a collection of unused toys, still in their packaging.

Aimee explained they were musical instruments, and her children were forbidden from playing with them. She gave them to MacMillan’s son.

On Feb. 7, 2015, Aimee withdrew almost $50,000 from the bank, which the RCMP said showed she was preparing “for a permanent move to Syria to live under ISIS.”

A month later, her mother, Brenda, drove her to the airport. She asked to see Aimee’s flight itinerary, but her daughter made excuses, the RCMP wrote.

“She told her mom the black flag had risen, whatever that meant, and she had to go to Qatar to see Ali,” MacMillan said.

The ISIS flag is black.

She flew to Istanbul and Ali met her and the kids at the airport. From there, they drove to the border and crossed into Syria on foot.

Bureaucratic terrorists, ISIS kept logs that recorded the names and nationalities of those arriving at its borders.

Many of the files were later collected by the U.S.-led military coalition and shared through what was called Operation Gallant Phoenix.

Ledgers found in the city of Tabqah indicate that Aimee and Ali arrived in ISIS-controlled territory in March 2015.

They entered together with Carson and Kalouti, according to a summary of the records in the RCMP report on its investigation.

Ali underwent a month of training, and was assigned to a brigade for foreign fighters, Aimee told the FBI.

They lived in an apartment in Manbij, but after a year, the city came under attack and they moved to Raqqah.

Ali returned to defend Manbij, but in August 2016, Aimee heard from a friend that he was dead.

Initially, the families in Canada were told he died in a car accident in Qatar. But the Qatar government has no record of such a death.

Aimee later told the FBI he died during fighting. Another Canadian ISIS woman told the RCMP Aimee had confided to her that Ali died in a bombing.

Records the FBI recovered from the battlefield indicate that on Aug. 28, 2016, Aimee wrote to ISIS to apply for “martyrdom benefits.”

In the form she filled out, she indicated Ali had served in the Anwar Awlaki Brigade, a fighting unit made up of western fighters.

According to the RCMP, Ali “was in fact killed in Syria while fighting as a member of the Islamic State.”

Following his death, the RCMP asked MacMillan and her husband to come to the K Division headquarters in Edmonton, she said.

“They were asking us questions over and over again if we knew anything about ISIS,” MacMillan said.

“Of course not!”

The ISIS motto was “remaining and expanding,” but after its initial success in Syria and Iraq, it managed neither.

Coalition airstrikes and pro-U.S. Kurdish forces killed large numbers of ISIS fighters and pushed the rest east towards Iraq.

Suffering significant losses of territory, the ISIS leadership began preparing women to take on fighting roles.

Four months after Ali’s death, Aimee’s name appeared in a form seized from ISIS titled “Training to Fight,” according to the RCMP.

It was addressed to the “female department” of the ISIS governor’s office in Raqqah, and indicates she was assigned to a fighting unit, police alleged.

“It is believed that Aimee joined an ISIS battalion and has likely been trained in military tactics, weapons and techniques by ISIS members,” the RCMP said in its report.

As Raqqah fell, she fled with ISIS, moving southwest along the Euphrates River valley, first to Mayadeen, then to Hajin.

Finally, she reached Baghouz and there was nowhere to go. They were hemmed in against the impassable Iraqi border.

“Mom, it’s getting worse and I don’t know, you’re just going to have to pray for me that we do all survive,” she said in a recording she sent her mother.

Shooting and explosions were audible in the background, as the Syrian Democratic Forces finished off the remnants of ISIS and took thousands of prisoners, many of them foreign extremists.

Aimee was pregnant again. The father was a Bosnian ISIS member who was killed three months after they were married.

Left alone with two kids, and another on the way, she paid a smuggler US$1,000 to take her and the kids to Turkey, but Kurdish fighters captured her on Feb. 6, 2019.

At an assembly point where captives were screened and sent to detention camps, a CNN reporter put his camera on Aimee and she claimed Ali had made her come to Syria.

“He’s like, ‘It’s obligatory for you,’” she said. “And as a Muslim wife you have to obey, even though it was really hard for me to do it.”

Her brother was “mortified” to learn she had married a second ISIS member, MacMillan said. “That’s his baby sister!”

“So that was really hard for him, to hear all this,” she said. “He was mad at her at first, but then he was really mad at Ali.”

Also hard to fathom was her decision to bring her children to a war zone. “She should have left the kids with her mom and dad,” MacMillan said.

The Al Hol detention camp in northeast Syria was a sea of tents enclosed by barbed wire. Kurdish fighters guarded the perimeters.

Later, she was moved to the smaller Roj Camp, where FBI officers interviewed her on May 18, 2021, and shared her responses with the RCMP.

The FBI also sent the RCMP what they called Collected Exploitable Material — evidence found on the battlefield.

Gathered from electronic devices and papers, it included Aimee’s alleged application forms for martyrdom benefits and ISIS training.

While her family wanted her home, the Canadian government argued it had no duty to help her so Aimee’s father contacted the government of Ecuador, according to MacMillan.

“If Canada wasn’t going to do it, Ecuador was going to do it,” she said. The Ecuadoran embassy in Ottawa did not respond to questions sent by Global News.

But following a lawsuit by the families, Canada relented and began shuttling the women back to Quebec, Ontario, B.C. and Alberta.

On April 5, 2023, a Global Affairs Canada delegation travelled to the Semalka border post in northeast Syria to take custody of Aimee.

She flew out the next day aboard a U.S. military plane, along with three Toronto-area women.

The RCMP was ready with an arrest warrant, having convinced an Alberta judge there were reasonable grounds she might commit terrorism once she got home.

For eight years, she had lived under ISIS. She had allegedly sought combat training. She had “expressed no regret,” the RCMP argued in an affidavit.

“To protect public safety, it is necessary to take immediate measures to monitor Aimee’s activities and communications,” the affidavit said.

The plane landed in Montreal and the RCMP took her into custody, but she was not charged. Instead, police asked the court for a terrorism peace bond.

Peace bonds impose court-ordered conditions on suspects, typically for a year. In Aimee’s case, police wanted internet and driving bans, and a curfew, among other restrictions.

The court also sent her to a de-radicalization program. At first, she went to Edmonton’s Organization for the Prevention of Violence.

Her counsellor, Pamela Ferguson, found her “open, accepting and cooperative” at their weekly meetings, she wrote in a letter.

But Aimee did not feel the program was a “good match” and instead got on the waiting list at an Islamic social services agency.

Aimee’s three sons went a public school, but in September 2023 she moved them to an Islamic school and was considering home-schooling.

The counsellor did not hear Aimee say anything that raised safety concerns, she said, but “due to legal proceedings, these areas have not been a topic of discussion.”

The lawyer represented Aimee, Yoav Niv, declined to comment, as did her mother. But MacMillan said she wanted people to know who Aimee was, as opposed to the changed woman who came home from Syria.

“Something obviously happened to her over there. She doesn’t talk about anything, she’s very cold,” MacMillan said.

“That’s not the Aimee I knew.”

Her youngest son was born in Syria. The eldest has hearing loss from all the explosions, she said. MacMillan shudders to imagine what they must have seen.

MacMillan said her husband blames Ali. “But at what point does Aimee not say, ‘Hey, this is not OK.’ That’s the disconnect. Because she was never raised like that.”

“I feel like they forced her, or they brainwashed her. Because Aimee, she’s a good woman. She’s got a good heart, because she took care of those kids over there.”

“Even though she brought them there, she kept them alive,” she said. “We just want Aimee back, we want her and the boys to be able to heal.”

“I want my sister back.”

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca