Growing number of Canadian women joining Daesh: report

By Barry Ellsworth

TRENTON, Ont. (AA) – Terrorists are using encryption messages to help foil national security investigations, says a worrying new report into threats to Canada released Thursday by the federal government.

“The growing use of encryption was brought to public attention during investigations into recent terrorist attacks outside Canada,” the report from Public Safety Canada said. “Encryption technology helps protect the privacy of Canadians, but also creates new barriers in law enforcement and national security investigations.”

The report also noted that more women are leaving Canada to join extremist groups such as Daesh, and in some cases the women have taken their children into virtual war zones.

Lorne Dawson, co-director of the University of Waterloo’s Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, told the Global News television network women are joining extremist groups after establishing an online relationship with women predominately in Syria and Iraq.

The Canadian women are often young and are duped by talk of a life abroad “that has great meaning and purpose, and about proper moral order,” Dawson said.

“We are talking about kids who are struggling with very significant identity issues and a desire to do something dramatically meaningful with their lives, to put it in simple terms.”

The 2016 Public Report On The Terrorist Threat To Canada estimates that about a fifth is female of the 180 people known to have left Canada to join a terrorist group. And the number is growing. In 2014, the number was 130.

More than half of the so-called “extremist travelers” are believed to be in Turkey, Syria or Iraq, CTV News reported.

Canada has not witnessed a major terrorist attack, but the report said there is an ongoing threat.

Earlier this month the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shot and killed Aaron Driver, a would-be terrorist who was planning to set off explosives in a major center. The FBI tipped off the Canadians and Driver was confronted and killed in the driveway of a residence in Strathroy, Ontario. He managed to detonate a bomb in a taxi but injured only himself.

The report noted that in the last six months Daesh has become more secretive online even as it loses on the battlefield and the group has become more security conscious.

The terrorist organization is shifting to Telegram — an encryption cloud-based instant messaging service — from Twitter, and the process of obtaining warrants to gain access to Telegram slows down security forces, Global News reported.

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