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1/Good morning everyone, early on the Islamic State stood out from every jihadist group that had come before in part due to the Hollywood-esque propaganda videos it put out. One of the most famous is “Flames of War,” published in late 2014, narrated by an English speaker.
2/ Immediately, there was interest in the narrator of the video, which shows prisoners forced to dig their own graves before being shot in the head. He sounded North American. The FBI even put out a call to the public asking for help identifying him: fbi.gov/news/stories/h…
3/ That same narrator would go on to narrate the most important English-language releases by ISIS, from its daily radio show, to an audio boasting about the Paris attacks. He was captured last month and @ivorprickett and I were the first to interview him: nyti.ms/2V7bm6r?smid=n…
4/ He reluctantly confessed to being the infamous narrator. Initially, he tried to pass himself off as just a low-level translator for ISIS’ media ministry. To make sure he wasn’t lying, @nytimes called on not one - but three - audio forensic experts to analyze his voice: 
5/ At the University of Montana, Professor Rob Maher compared his utterance of specific words like “Islamic State” comparing the prononciation in the ISIS video to how he sounds now using a spectrogram. He concluded the detainee is the narrator:
6/And at the University of Colorado, a pair of researchers who also do work for law enforcement, Catalin Grigoras and Jeff Smith, gave the match a probability ratio. The detainee is 134x more likely to be the narrator than not:
7/ You can listen and compare yourself. @HKaaman took the time to line up clips from Flames of War with clips of the recently captured fighter:
8/ The identification of the narrator began with the work of @AmarAmarasingam, a Toronto researcher who first noticed Mohammed Khalifa’s Canadian accent. Then a few months ago, he and @StewGlobal interviewed another Canadian detainee in Syria, who said he knew the narrator
9/ Abu Turaab, the second Canadian, confirmed that the narrator is from Toronto and that he went by the nom de guerre Abu Ridwan, but he didn’t know his real name. @ivorprickett and I also saw Abu Turaab, just weeks after the suspected narrator was captured:
10/ I played him a clip of the recently captured man and he exclaimed: “That’s him! That’s Abu Ridwan!” In my interview with him, Mohammed Khalifa said he went by several noms de guerre, including Abu Ridwan. He said he was born in Saudi & moved to Toronto’s Regent Park as a boy
11/ He attended Seneca College where he got a diploma in computer systems technology & then worked for an IBM contractor. My colleague @DanBilefsky called the contractor in Ontario & they confirmed his employment there. He also says he worked at CompuCom, They declined to comment
12/ My friend and colleague @porterthereport worked through the weekend, ordering yearbook after yearbook trying to determine what high school he attended. And @EricSchmittNYT confirmed with a US official that the narrator and Khalifa were one and the same.
13. Here are some of the revealing things he told @ivorprickett and I about the functioning of Diwan al-Ilam, the Islamic State’s Ministry of the Media, which put out the televised beheadings of hostages like James Foley & the burning of a Jordanian pilot: nyti.ms/2V7bm6r?smid=n…
14. In 2014, the Media Diwan was housed inside a villa 20 km outside of Raqqa, along the Euphrates. Its emir was Iraqi national Abu Muhammed al-Furqan. The unit was divided into teams. A video team roamed the caliphate, collecting footage & auditioning potential executioners.
15. Furqan had a “no celebrity” culture, said Khalifa. No executioner should rise above the rest in prominence or fame. The obvious exception is Jihadi John. But other than that, executioners were typically used once. The video team looked for killers from different nationalities
16/ The idea was to show the global reach of the caliphate with recruits from 100 different nationalities, and to strike fear in their home countries. The video team staged the horrific beheadings, like on a film set and brought back the footage on an SD card for editing.
17/ Khalifa said that initially Furqan had a role in all the major releases, carefully watching the video, giving feedback and demanding edits. Videos shot by the group’s affiliates overseas had some level of editing by the central media office, which explains the uniform look
18/ Khalifa helped put to rest an enduring debate among analysts: Is Amaq, the group’s news agency which claims attacks, an official ISIS product? Or is it in some ways independent of ISIS? He said Amaq is 100% core ISIS, but that the Amaq team worked out of a different office.
19/ He also said that beginning in late 2014, after the start of American airstrikes, the media diwan moved into a house in Raqqa proper, and from then on it moved from house to house, always staying close to civilians, aware that their presence protected the terrorists.
20/ He said that at the time of his capture last month, there were still 20 media operatives alive in the last pocket of ISIS control. Furqan was killed in an airstrike years ago. He refused to name the new media emir nor any of the other operatives, keen on protecting them.
21/ He provided insight into other key figures: He says that American John Georgelas was a fellow translator in the media unit & denied reports that he had become a senior official. He said he was killed in Mayadin circa 2017. @gcaw has written about him: theatlantic.com/amp/article/51…
22/ He also denied rumors that British hostage John Cantlie had become one of the editors of Dabiq, the group’s magazine. He said Cantlie was never seen in the office. The hostage wrote his essays somewhere else, presumably in his cell, & they would be delivered to the media unit
23/ It was in a way shocking to sit in Mohammed Khalifa’s presence. I knew his voice well - full of bravado, the voice of a terror group vowing to never be cowed. In person, he was meek, even sheepish. But on one point he was defiant: “No, I don’t regret it,” he told me.
