By: Nick Ashdown/The Media Line
[Istanbul] –Mohammad Al Rashed, a 28-year-old Syrian dentist was seized by Turkish authorities on February 28 in a southeastern province near the Syrian border. He’s accused of helping threeBritish teenage girls cross from Istanbul to Gaziantep by bus on February 17th to join the Islamic State.
According to a police report quoted by Turkish media, Rashed claims to be working for Canadian intelligence, who allegedly flew him to Jordan to share information with the Canadian Embassy in Amman, and later to Canada.
Canadian authorities said the man is not a citizen of Canada and has never been employedby the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS. However, they did not comment on whether or not Rashed has worked with CSIS in the past.
“They may be trying to figure out who this guy actually is, who the Turks believe he is, what his story is,” says Professor Wesley Wark of the University of Ottawa. But Wark, an expert in intelligence and terrorism, has his own theory as to Rashed’s relationship with CSIS.
“From the information I have I would assume that Rashed was a freelancer who was helping not just these three girls but others cross the border into Syria, presumably for money,” Wark says.
“For various reasons [Rashed] may have approached Canadian intelligence to see if he could […] barter what he knew about people smuggling and travel routes to the Canadian authorities.”
According to the police report, there is no evidence that Canadian intelligence officials sent Rashed money at any point, though he did receive funds from someone in England. He claimed to have worked for CSIS because he wanted Canadian citizenship.
Wark says that CSIS, which has had agents working overseas in anti-terrorism operations at least since the September 11 attacks, may very well be working in the region and is definitely interested in information about ISIS’s foreign fighter routes.One of the agency’s primary jobs is to develop local sources, often as informants, to supplement one Canadian agent or a very small team in the region.
“You wouldn’t have Canadian intelligence operatives themselves trying to penetrate ISIL [ISIS] or engaging in risky cross-border operations into Syria,” he says.
But when CSIS uses assets like this, the Canadians typically inform local authorities about it.
“They would be keeping the Turks apprised of the nature of their operations and the identity of their officials in Turkey,” he says.“Canadian intelligence services are really too small to operate clandestinely in the territory of a friendly NATO partner.”
Sinan Ülgen, a scholar from Carnegie Europe who specializes in transatlantic security relations, says the Turkish authorities aren’t pleased at having been kept out of the loop.
“It has come as a shock to many that an allied country has carried out this operation without informing Turkey,” he says. “There’s a bit of a sour taste to say the least on behalf of the Turkish authorities.”
Turkish Foreign Minister MevlütÇavuşoğlu publicly accused Rashed of working for a country with the anti-ISIS coalition, in effect accusing that country of assisting the militant group, while government sources leaked to local media that the country in question is Canada. Footage of Rashed was also released and government-controlled media accused Canada of supporting ISIS.
Ülgen speculates as to why the Turkish authorities were uninformed, saying it’s either due to a broken chain of communication within Canadian intelligence, or because they were purposefullyconcealing an intelligence operation. He says this isn’t proper policy amongst NATO allies.
“There are foreign intelligence operators working within Turkish territory, but the rule is, whatever they do within Turkish territory, they have to give information to the Turkish authorities.”
However, claims by pro-government Turkish media that Canada is actually assisting ISIS in some way are “totally ridiculous” and “not even worth talking about,” says Ülgen.
Professor Wark is doubtful as to whether CSIS was actually working with Rashed.
“One of the oddities of this case which suggests this guy isn’t really in CSIS’s control, but is a freelancer, is the way in which the Turkish government responded,” he says.
If CSIS didn’t inform the Turkish government about Rashed, they may not have been using him as an asset, says Wark. Rashed may very well have approached the Canadians, as many do, but that doesn’t mean they worked with him.
Either way, Wark doesn’t foresee a degradation in Turkish-Canadian relations, which are generally good. The Canadian government hasn’t been as vocal as other Western countries regarding criticism of Turkey’s authoritarian turn or policies towards ISIS.
“Spy spats always blow over in the end, particularly between partners, so I don’t suppose it’ll have any long-term repercussions.”
He says there’s a lot of animosity between Turkey and Western countries over foreign fighters using the former as a transit route to ISIS-controlled regions of Syria.
“I think the Turkish government is perhaps understandably angry to find what they believe to be some kind of Western intelligence involvement in the very problem they’re under such pressure to deal with,” he says.
“But it may be that they’re exaggerating the circumstances of the case for domestic political consumption, or they don’t know really know the full circumstances of the case at this point.”
However, Ülgen says security relations between the West and Turkey have recently been improving a bit.
“They are getting better. You see this from the increase in the number of no-entry list on the Turkish side, which is now 12,000, compared to a bit more than 1,000 a year ago.”
Meanwhile, Canada is debating a controversial piece of anti-terrorism legislation, Bill C-51, which would give CSIS considerably more power at home and abroad. Country-wide protests against the bill, which would expand CSIS’s role from intelligence gathering to actively disrupting threats, were held on Saturday.