Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi

Shehroze Chaudhry (born 1994/1995 ) is a Canadian who gained international attention under the pseudonym Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi ("Abu Huzaifa the Canadian") as the subject of Caliphate, a podcast hosted by Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times. He had claimed that in 2014, he emptied his bank account, traveled to Syria, and joined the terrorist group Islamic State (IS), where he remained until 2016. In the wake of the podcast's release, Conservative MPs called on the government to find and arrest al-Kanadi amid rumours that he had returned to Canada.

Chaudhry's claims and the podcast were called into question in September 2020, when he was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and charged under Canada's terrorism hoax laws. He claimed he studied at a Pakistani madrassa in 2013. He told his parents he would go to Turkey for a semester abroad and booked a flight from Lahore to Istanbul using his Pakistani passport. He escaped to Turkey, where he was arrested by authorities before being released a week later. A year after Chaudhry returned, he was interviewed by CBC News and stated that he saw violence on a scale he could "never imagine" when he fought for the Islamic State.

Response

After Chaudhry said he fought for the Islamic State, Conservative MPs called for action against him. Opposition House Leader Candice Bergen criticized Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government during Question Period for not ordering law enforcement to arrest him. Bergen also called for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale to reveal whether the government knew where Chaudhry was, but Goodale stated that doing so would be the "opposite of keeping Canadians safe". Trudeau called questions about Chaudhry "divisive" and received criticism from conservative journalist Brian Lilley. In 2018, Chaudhry also received concerns from television journalist Diana Swain that he may have lied to The New York Times or CBC News since his stories to the two outlets contained significant differences.

In September 2020, Chaudhry was arrested by the RCMP's O Division Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) and charged with fabricating his accounts on social media and to CBC about his story of joining the Islamic State. In October 2021, in exchange for the Canadian government dropping charges, he submitted a statement of facts to the court that he never traveled to Syria, and agreed to a peace bond of $10,000. The Times reassigned Callimachi and returned the Peabody Award won by the podcast, and the Overseas Press Club rescinded its Lowell Thomas Award.