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Ottawa’s John Maguire understood that his enlistment as a foot soldier in the Islamic State would confound his friends, family and countrymen
So in his now infamous video, a six-minute screed in which he called upon Canadian Muslims to launch new attacks on their native soil, Maguire, 24, addressed his own unlikely radicalization. Released in early December, the video showed him in a shattered Syrian town, wrapped in a keffiyeh with a Kalashnikov rifle at his side. He spoke with strident conviction and careful enunciation.
“I was one of you: I was a typical Canadian,” said Maguire, who styled himself Abu Anwar al-Canadi. “I grew up on the hockey rink and spent my teenage years on stage playing guitar.
“I had no criminal record. I was a bright student and maintained a strong GPA in university. So how could one of your people end up in my place? And why is it that your own people are the ones turning against you at home? The answer is we have accepted the true call of the prophets and the messengers of God.”
The video today serves as Maguire’s last testament: the former University of Ottawa business student was reportedly killed in fighting near Kobani, on the Syrian-Turkish border, last month.
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He leaves behind a shattered family and a host of questions, including the one raised in his propaganda video: How could one of us become one of them? How could a young Canadian, who converted to Islam only five years ago, become so radicalized so quickly? Who convinced him that the West was at war with his religion? What motivated him to join the Islamic State’s barbaric cult?
Canadian authorities are urgently pursuing answers to those questions as they seek to stanch the flow of young men to the battlefields of Syria.
Maguire is one of two Ottawa students known to have answered the call of the Islamic State.
The RCMP this week announced terrorism-related charges against Maguire and the other alleged jihadist, Khadar Khalib, 23, a former Algonquin College student. Both men were charged in absentia. (Maguire was charged because the RCMP have no conclusive evidence that he’s dead.)
According to the RCMP, Maguire and Khalib were part of a connected group of six Ottawa men bent on jihad. Last month, Suliman Mohamed, 21, along with twin brothers Ashton and Carlos Larmond, 24, of Vanier, were arrested and charged with terrorism-related offences. The brothers were both recent converts to Islam.
Awso Peshdary, 25, of Ottawa, was also arrested on terror charges this week. Another former Algonquin College student, Peshdary is alleged to have financed Maguire’s travel to Syria in December 2012.
The International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence has estimated that as many as 100 Canadians have travelled to Syria to fight with the Islamic State — a group so savage that it has been disowned by al-Qaida.
Maguire is one of a dozen Canadians who have died there. Once a motocross enthusiast and punk rocker, he somehow came to believe it was his religious duty to join an armed group dedicated to establishing an Islamic state, a caliphate, by brute force in the Middle East.
Maguire will never return to Ottawa, but the strange story he authored here deserves careful reading by all those who would ensure it’s not repeated.
***
John Maguire as a child.
John Douglas Maguire grew up on the outskirts of Merrickville in a house built by his father, Peter, an auto mechanic and garage-band musician. The son came to share his father’s passions.
As a boy, Maguire played hockey, rode motocross and learned the bass guitar. He would sometimes join his father’s late-night jam sessions in the garage.
“He was as cute as can be,” remembers his mother, Patricia Earl. “And a little bit mischievous, like a lot of boys.”
Schoolmates remember John Maguire — known to many as JMag— as a bright, outgoing, smart aleck. At North Grenville District High School, he was famous for his idiosyncratic approach to the morning announcements, which he delivered with inside jokes and sharp asides. He secured solid grades (80s), won a place on student council, and formed part of the school’s most-envied social circles.
But Maguire was also carefully self-contained. He was strong-willed — he didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol — and was not one to share secrets or confess to inner pain.
His father was still more hard-minded. According to Patricia Earl, who was married to him for 20 years, Peter Maguire insisted the Holocaust did not happen, and argued that the United States deserved the terror wrought by 9/11 because of its aggressive foreign policy.
He favoured books about mind power, she said, and others such as Gods of the New Millennium, which argued that humankind’s evolution was accelerated by the intervention of aliens.
Earl said he was an abusive, controlling man, who once left her at the side of Highway 401 in a snowstorm. Her husband came back to pick her up in a coffee shop hours later, in the middle of the night. “Poor John was in the back seat,” she remembered. “He pokes me and says, ‘Here mom, this is for you.’ He handed me a chocolate bar.”
Peter Maguire could not be reached for comment about the allegations, but his own father told the Citizen he believed his former daughter-in-law’s account. “If she said that, she’s an honest girl,” said John Maguire.
Patricia Earl left her husband several times, but came back for the sake of John and his older sister.
The marriage broke down completely in April 2003 when John was 12 years old. He was buffeted by the acrimony that followed as the couple fought over how to divide their assets. John went to live with his father, and for the next six years, he refused all contact with his mother.
In court files, Earl accused her ex-husband of manipulating their son and poisoning her relationship with him.
Other people, however, saw Peter Maguire as a devoted, loving father. Carol Smith and her husband, Brad, befriended the Maguires in the late 1980s as both families launched into parenthood. They remained close friends as their children grew.
Smith remembers John as a “quiet and thoughtful child,” who did everything with his father, especially in the years after the split.
“Peter was making a lot of sacrifices to be with John and support him,” she said. “They had this nice relationship.”
Although he relied on a disability income and child support payments, Peter Maguire ensured that his son had all the equipment necessary to play hockey, race motocross and play guitar in a punk rock band. He appeared to the Smiths utterly devoted to his son.
John Maguire as a child. The former Kemptville and Ottawa resident was reportedly killed near Kobani, Syria, a town on the Turkish border that ISIL has been struggling to capture from Western-backed Kurdish forces. Maguire converted to Islam after moving to Ottawa, changed his name to “Yahya”, and subsequently traveled to Syria to fight with ISIL.
So it came as a shock when Peter Maguire announced he had met a woman online and was moving to Russia. His plan was to teach English as a second language at a university in Siberia.
Maguire wanted his son to come with him, but John decided to pursue his education in North America.
“I did not believe until the day he left that Peter would actually go,” said Smith. “It was really upsetting…This kid had lost his mother for all intents and purposes, and now he had just lost his father. I remember saying at the time, ‘This is not good.’”
After his father moved to Russia in May 2009, John reconciled with his mother.
Peter Maguire has not kept in touch with the Smiths, his ex-wife or his parents. His parents have not heard from him in three years and have no way to reach him. They don’t know whether he’s heard news of his son’s death or not.
***
John Maguire as a child. The former Kemptville and Ottawa resident was reportedly killed near Kobani, Syria, a town on the Turkish border that ISIL has been struggling to capture from Western-backed Kurdish forces. Maguire converted to Islam after moving to Ottawa, changed his name to “Yahya”, and subsequently traveled to Syria to fight with ISIL.
It appears John Maguire’s first encounter with Islam came in 2009 while he was studying at Los Angeles City College, a place famed for its theatre school. Actors Clint Eastwood and Mark Hamill are among its graduates.
Maguire attended the East Hollywood school after scoring well on his SATs and earning a scholarship to study business.
Although Maguire did not grow up in a religious household – no one in his family was a churchgoer – he quickly formed a deep and defining connection to Islam.
He announced his conversion on Facebook soon after returning to Ottawa, where he enrolled in the University of Ottawa’s business school, the Telfer School of Management, in September 2010, to continue his studies.
He became a regular at the school’s multi-faith prayer room where members of the Muslim Students Association gathered.
Philosophy student and fellow Islamic convert Stéphane Pressault engaged Maguire in a discussion about his “conversion story.” Maguire said he overhauled his lifestyle after embracing Islam — going so far as to smash his once-prized guitar.
“The impression I got was that his identity shift was dramatic. It was a complete, complete change.”
Maguire told Pressault that he discovered Islam while pursuing his interest in eschatology: the study of the world’s end times.
He read the Book of Revelation and Christian theology on the subject then moved to the Qur’an. Muslims believe that on the day of reckoning all of the Earth’s people will be called to Allah for final judgment. “He mentioned once that he felt Islam confirmed what he learned in the Book of Revelation,” Pressault said.
Maguire was at U of O during the Arab Spring of 2011 and he interpreted the upheaval in the Middle East as another sign of the approach of the end times.
“He had an immense interest in eschatology,” Pressault told the Citizen. “He definitely thought the end times were coming: that was what characterized him.”
Maguire’s fascination with the end of the world was also reflected in his Facebook and Twitter accounts. “We live in a world where all the minor signs of yawm-al-qiyyamah (the day of reckoning) have passed,” he Tweeted in September 2012. “We’re just waiting for the major ones.”
At U of O, Maguire was known by his Arabic name, Yahya. He was a regular at daily prayers. “I saw him as someone who had a particular zeal,” said Pressault. “When you convert, you have a desire to learn everything, to know everything. He had that.”
Adam Gilani, then president of the U of O Muslim Students Association, said Maguire was not one to initiate conversations. “He was definitely someone who always did seem isolated,” he said. “He was quite reserved. He was someone who always did a lot more listening than talking.”
Maguire was an accomplished student, earning straight A’s in his business courses.
Quietly, however, he was separating himself from his classmates and from the vast majority of his fellow Muslims.
He began down a radical path set out online in lectures by U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a powerful ideologue who said jihad against the enemies of Islam – including the United States and its allies – was a duty for every Muslim. Al-Awlaki told his followers that U.S. action in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel proved America was at war with Islam.
The message clearly resonated with Maguire who took to Twitter in October 2012 to express his anguish: “How can I sleep with what is happening in Syria…and Palestine?”
Maguire kept his more radical views under tight wrap. At the Independent Grocer on Bank Street, he worked with a stock boy named Ian McMillan. They would often discuss religion and morality, but Maguire offered McMillan no hint of the extremist within.
McMillan blogged recently about the experience: “We talked about the crusades, the religious justification for them and the morality of killing in the name of God. For his part, Yahya shared his personal belief that killing in the name of God was only justifiable if an innocent life was at stake.”
Several students at the university had a fleeting glimpse of the real path Maguire was travelling.
Pressault remembers stopping him in the hallway one day when Maguire was listening to his iPod. He asked him what was playing. “I’m listening to a lecture by Awlaki,” Maguire told him.
Another former university student, who spoke to the Citizen on the condition of anonymity, said Maguire discussed al-Awlaki with him in 2012. Maguire told him he had been impressed by the cleric’s online lectures.
“He became radicalized because he was trying to learn more about his new faith but he unknowingly started listening to the wrong person,” said the student.
Maguire was not the first to fall under al-Awlaki’s powerful spell.
***
Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader who had been born in the United States, was killed by American forces in September 2011.
Although Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed by a 2011 drone strike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama, his provocative online sermons continue to attract jihadists and inspire terrorist acts — most recently the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. One of the gunmen, Cherif Kouachi, told a French TV network that al-Awlaki had a hand in his mission.
Al-Awlaki has been cited as a guiding force by a host of other high-profile terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who exploded bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, and Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. Hasan exchanged emails with al-Awlaki, who was then in Yemen.
Al-Awlaki’s influence has also been felt in Canada. The so-called Toronto 18 terror cell, which planned a major attack in Canada’s largest city, listened to an al-Awlaki sermon at their training camp in Orillia, according to evidence submitted at their trial. And Damian Clairmont, a Nova Scotia-born Islamic State recruit, has said that hearing al-Awlaki preach was a “life-changing event.” Clairmont, 22, a convert to Islam, was killed in Syria last year.
Ottawa’s John Maguire paid homage to Anwar al-Awlaki with his nom de guerre, Abu Anwar al-Canadi. His propaganda video also echoes many of the cleric’s themes.
So what makes al-Awlaki such an influential figure in the world of radical Islam?
Part of his appeal comes from the fact that, as an American-born and educated cleric, he was able to communicate in fluent, colloquial English. His message is simple and emotional: Muslims have an obligation to help their suffering brothers and sisters overseas.
Simon Fraser University criminology professor Garth Davies is among a growing number of Canadian academics now studying the radicalization process.
“If you’re a disaffected kid living in Ottawa or Vancouver, you may not have the kind of background to understand a lot of what these other radical clerics are posting on the Internet: The messages are complicated.
“But al-Awlaki was able to distill things in a way that young people could understand.”
Born in New Mexico, while his Yemeni father was at university, Anwar al-Awlaki spent the first six years of his life in the U.S. He returned to Yemen with his family, but came back to the U.S. to study engineering at Colorado State University then education leadership at San Diego State. He was enrolled in a doctoral program at George Washington University when he decided to leave the country in the aftermath of 9/11.
Al-Awlaki spent two years in London before going back to Yemen, where he became a senior figure in that country’s branch of al-Qaida. He was killed in September 2011 by a U.S. drone that attacked his convoy in northern Yemen. It was the first time in history that a U.S. president had approved the assassination, without trial, of an American citizen.
Professor Amarnath Amarasingam, of the Dalhousie University Resilience Research Centre, said al-Awlaki had a considerable online following before he began to call for jihad against the West.
“He first became famous for his fundamental religious message and his ability to translate the complexities of Islamic history and law for a younger audience,” said Amarasingam.
“So when he himself became radicalized, when he started talking about Western hypocrisy and injustice, and the obligation of jihad and the obligation to fight the oppressor, he already had a foundation of support and respect on which this message was received.”
Many consider his most influential work to be a six-hour audio lecture entitled, ‘Constants on the Path of Jihad,’ in which he argues that Muslims have to fight continuously on behalf of their faith until the end of world and the Day of Judgment.
***
Khadar Khalib, 23, left, John Maguire, 24, centre, and Awso Peshdary, 25, were charged by RCMP on Tuesday, February 3, 2015 in an alleged terrorism conspiracy.
John Maguire didn’t announce his radicalization or his intention to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. One day in mid-December 2012, he told his grandparents that he was studying with a friend. Instead, he boarded a plane to Turkey. He left notes in his bedroom for those closest to him, explaining his decision.
John Maguire didn’t get to Syria on his own. According to the RCMP, he was part of a small group of committed jihadists, which included Aswo Peshdary and others. The men shared ideas and helped each other financially.
Similar extremist “clusters,” as terrorism experts call them, have been exposed in Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Windsor and Montreal.
“These groups are important because they can inspire each other and talk each other into things,” said Prof. Amarasingam.
Peshdary, a former Algonquin College student, met Maguire at a community lecture and the two later exchanged messages on Facebook and Twitter. Peshdary also invited Maguire to celebrate Eid at his house since the convert had no family of his own with which to share the religious holiday.
The men evidently had a meeting of minds since the RCMP allege that they later tried to recruit more young men to fight on behalf of the Islamic State.
Maguire seemed to suffer no doubt that he was on a righteous path.
Although a recent convert to Islam, he castigated those he considered misguided — even one of the country’s most prominent imams.
Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy exchanged Facebook messages with Maguire last summer after publicly denouncing the Islamic State’s murder of journalist James Foley. Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism, called Foley’s beheading a “crime against humanity.”
“Islamic State is using Islam to destroy peace,” Soharwardy said. “They are terrorists and must be punished.”
On Facebook, Maguire told Soharwardy that he was a “deviant imam” who was providing support to Canada’s infidel government.
The imam tried to convince Maguire that he had been misled about the nature of jihad. “But he was not prepared to accept my interpretation of the Qur’an,” said Soharwardy. “He said what he was doing was the Qur’an.”
The conversations ended with Maguire telling Soharwardy that he would be condemned to hellfire.
Stéphane Pressault felt Maguire’s wrath after writing an opinion piece in the Citizen in which he described the “tragedy” of Damian Clairmont, a convert to Islam who was killed fighting for the Islamic State in January 2014. In a Facebook message, Maguire denounced Pressault for his moderate views.
“I just kept thinking, ‘How did that happen?’” Pressault said of Maguire’s radicalization.
According to his mother, Maguire bribed his way past Turkish border guards to get into Syria. He lived for a time in Raqqa, the declared capital of the Islamic State. Last spring, he was betrothed to a 19-year-old named Hedeal. He invited his mother to attend their wedding, but the travel was impossible to arrange.
“I don’t even know what she looks like,” Patricia Earl says of her daughter-in-law.
According to a Twitter account associated with the Islamic State, Maguire was killed in the ultimately unsuccessful battle to capture Kobani, a town on the Turkish border where more than 1,000 jihadists died in heavy fighting with Kurdish forces backed by Western air power.
Not long before he left for Syria, Maguire had a conversation about death with his stepfather, Bill Langenberg.
“Bill, the fire will last forever when you go to hell,” Maguire told him.
“John, no, that’s not the way,” Langenberg replied.
“Bill, you don’t understand,” he said, “You don’t understand the end of life and I do.”
***
Echoes of Anwar al-Awlaki
Ottawa’s John Maguire was heavily influenced by the sermons of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a leading figure in the radicalization of young Muslims from the West. Maguire borrowed from al-Awlaki’s in his now infamous propaganda video issued in December 2014.
Al-Awlaki in a message to the American people in 2010: “To the Muslims in America I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with the nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims?”
Maguire in his 2014 propaganda video: “To the Muslims who are still residing in Canada I say to you: How can you remain living among the disbelievers under their unjust man-made laws which are slowly but surely eliminating the rights of the Muslims especially now that the Caliphate is being established? And furthermore: How can you stand to live among them peacefully when their leaders, who represent the masses are waging a crusade against your Muslims brothers and sisters at this very moment?”
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So in his now infamous video, a six-minute screed in which he called upon Canadian Muslims to launch new attacks on their native soil, Maguire, 24, addressed his own unlikely radicalization. Released in early December, the video showed him in a shattered Syrian town, wrapped in a keffiyeh with a Kalashnikov rifle at his side. He spoke with strident conviction and careful enunciation.
“I was one of you: I was a typical Canadian,” said Maguire, who styled himself Abu Anwar al-Canadi. “I grew up on the hockey rink and spent my teenage years on stage playing guitar.
“I had no criminal record. I was a bright student and maintained a strong GPA in university. So how could one of your people end up in my place? And why is it that your own people are the ones turning against you at home? The answer is we have accepted the true call of the prophets and the messengers of God.”
The video today serves as Maguire’s last testament: the former University of Ottawa business student was reportedly killed in fighting near Kobani, on the Syrian-Turkish border, last month.
Related
He leaves behind a shattered family and a host of questions, including the one raised in his propaganda video: How could one of us become one of them? How could a young Canadian, who converted to Islam only five years ago, become so radicalized so quickly? Who convinced him that the West was at war with his religion? What motivated him to join the Islamic State’s barbaric cult?
Canadian authorities are urgently pursuing answers to those questions as they seek to stanch the flow of young men to the battlefields of Syria.
Maguire is one of two Ottawa students known to have answered the call of the Islamic State.
The RCMP this week announced terrorism-related charges against Maguire and the other alleged jihadist, Khadar Khalib, 23, a former Algonquin College student. Both men were charged in absentia. (Maguire was charged because the RCMP have no conclusive evidence that he’s dead.)
According to the RCMP, Maguire and Khalib were part of a connected group of six Ottawa men bent on jihad. Last month, Suliman Mohamed, 21, along with twin brothers Ashton and Carlos Larmond, 24, of Vanier, were arrested and charged with terrorism-related offences. The brothers were both recent converts to Islam.
Awso Peshdary, 25, of Ottawa, was also arrested on terror charges this week. Another former Algonquin College student, Peshdary is alleged to have financed Maguire’s travel to Syria in December 2012.
The International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence has estimated that as many as 100 Canadians have travelled to Syria to fight with the Islamic State — a group so savage that it has been disowned by al-Qaida.
Maguire is one of a dozen Canadians who have died there. Once a motocross enthusiast and punk rocker, he somehow came to believe it was his religious duty to join an armed group dedicated to establishing an Islamic state, a caliphate, by brute force in the Middle East.
Maguire will never return to Ottawa, but the strange story he authored here deserves careful reading by all those who would ensure it’s not repeated.
***
John Maguire as a child.
John Douglas Maguire grew up on the outskirts of Merrickville in a house built by his father, Peter, an auto mechanic and garage-band musician. The son came to share his father’s passions.
As a boy, Maguire played hockey, rode motocross and learned the bass guitar. He would sometimes join his father’s late-night jam sessions in the garage.
“He was as cute as can be,” remembers his mother, Patricia Earl. “And a little bit mischievous, like a lot of boys.”
Schoolmates remember John Maguire — known to many as JMag— as a bright, outgoing, smart aleck. At North Grenville District High School, he was famous for his idiosyncratic approach to the morning announcements, which he delivered with inside jokes and sharp asides. He secured solid grades (80s), won a place on student council, and formed part of the school’s most-envied social circles.
But Maguire was also carefully self-contained. He was strong-willed — he didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol — and was not one to share secrets or confess to inner pain.
His father was still more hard-minded. According to Patricia Earl, who was married to him for 20 years, Peter Maguire insisted the Holocaust did not happen, and argued that the United States deserved the terror wrought by 9/11 because of its aggressive foreign policy.
He favoured books about mind power, she said, and others such as Gods of the New Millennium, which argued that humankind’s evolution was accelerated by the intervention of aliens.
Earl said he was an abusive, controlling man, who once left her at the side of Highway 401 in a snowstorm. Her husband came back to pick her up in a coffee shop hours later, in the middle of the night. “Poor John was in the back seat,” she remembered. “He pokes me and says, ‘Here mom, this is for you.’ He handed me a chocolate bar.”
Peter Maguire could not be reached for comment about the allegations, but his own father told the Citizen he believed his former daughter-in-law’s account. “If she said that, she’s an honest girl,” said John Maguire.
Patricia Earl left her husband several times, but came back for the sake of John and his older sister.
The marriage broke down completely in April 2003 when John was 12 years old. He was buffeted by the acrimony that followed as the couple fought over how to divide their assets. John went to live with his father, and for the next six years, he refused all contact with his mother.
In court files, Earl accused her ex-husband of manipulating their son and poisoning her relationship with him.
Other people, however, saw Peter Maguire as a devoted, loving father. Carol Smith and her husband, Brad, befriended the Maguires in the late 1980s as both families launched into parenthood. They remained close friends as their children grew.
Smith remembers John as a “quiet and thoughtful child,” who did everything with his father, especially in the years after the split.
“Peter was making a lot of sacrifices to be with John and support him,” she said. “They had this nice relationship.”
Although he relied on a disability income and child support payments, Peter Maguire ensured that his son had all the equipment necessary to play hockey, race motocross and play guitar in a punk rock band. He appeared to the Smiths utterly devoted to his son.
John Maguire as a child. The former Kemptville and Ottawa resident was reportedly killed near Kobani, Syria, a town on the Turkish border that ISIL has been struggling to capture from Western-backed Kurdish forces. Maguire converted to Islam after moving to Ottawa, changed his name to “Yahya”, and subsequently traveled to Syria to fight with ISIL.
So it came as a shock when Peter Maguire announced he had met a woman online and was moving to Russia. His plan was to teach English as a second language at a university in Siberia.
Maguire wanted his son to come with him, but John decided to pursue his education in North America.
“I did not believe until the day he left that Peter would actually go,” said Smith. “It was really upsetting…This kid had lost his mother for all intents and purposes, and now he had just lost his father. I remember saying at the time, ‘This is not good.’”
After his father moved to Russia in May 2009, John reconciled with his mother.
Peter Maguire has not kept in touch with the Smiths, his ex-wife or his parents. His parents have not heard from him in three years and have no way to reach him. They don’t know whether he’s heard news of his son’s death or not.
***
John Maguire as a child. The former Kemptville and Ottawa resident was reportedly killed near Kobani, Syria, a town on the Turkish border that ISIL has been struggling to capture from Western-backed Kurdish forces. Maguire converted to Islam after moving to Ottawa, changed his name to “Yahya”, and subsequently traveled to Syria to fight with ISIL.
It appears John Maguire’s first encounter with Islam came in 2009 while he was studying at Los Angeles City College, a place famed for its theatre school. Actors Clint Eastwood and Mark Hamill are among its graduates.
Maguire attended the East Hollywood school after scoring well on his SATs and earning a scholarship to study business.
Although Maguire did not grow up in a religious household – no one in his family was a churchgoer – he quickly formed a deep and defining connection to Islam.
He announced his conversion on Facebook soon after returning to Ottawa, where he enrolled in the University of Ottawa’s business school, the Telfer School of Management, in September 2010, to continue his studies.
He became a regular at the school’s multi-faith prayer room where members of the Muslim Students Association gathered.
Philosophy student and fellow Islamic convert Stéphane Pressault engaged Maguire in a discussion about his “conversion story.” Maguire said he overhauled his lifestyle after embracing Islam — going so far as to smash his once-prized guitar.
“The impression I got was that his identity shift was dramatic. It was a complete, complete change.”
Maguire told Pressault that he discovered Islam while pursuing his interest in eschatology: the study of the world’s end times.
He read the Book of Revelation and Christian theology on the subject then moved to the Qur’an. Muslims believe that on the day of reckoning all of the Earth’s people will be called to Allah for final judgment. “He mentioned once that he felt Islam confirmed what he learned in the Book of Revelation,” Pressault said.
Maguire was at U of O during the Arab Spring of 2011 and he interpreted the upheaval in the Middle East as another sign of the approach of the end times.
“He had an immense interest in eschatology,” Pressault told the Citizen. “He definitely thought the end times were coming: that was what characterized him.”
Maguire’s fascination with the end of the world was also reflected in his Facebook and Twitter accounts. “We live in a world where all the minor signs of yawm-al-qiyyamah (the day of reckoning) have passed,” he Tweeted in September 2012. “We’re just waiting for the major ones.”
At U of O, Maguire was known by his Arabic name, Yahya. He was a regular at daily prayers. “I saw him as someone who had a particular zeal,” said Pressault. “When you convert, you have a desire to learn everything, to know everything. He had that.”
Adam Gilani, then president of the U of O Muslim Students Association, said Maguire was not one to initiate conversations. “He was definitely someone who always did seem isolated,” he said. “He was quite reserved. He was someone who always did a lot more listening than talking.”
Maguire was an accomplished student, earning straight A’s in his business courses.
Quietly, however, he was separating himself from his classmates and from the vast majority of his fellow Muslims.
He began down a radical path set out online in lectures by U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a powerful ideologue who said jihad against the enemies of Islam – including the United States and its allies – was a duty for every Muslim. Al-Awlaki told his followers that U.S. action in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel proved America was at war with Islam.
The message clearly resonated with Maguire who took to Twitter in October 2012 to express his anguish: “How can I sleep with what is happening in Syria…and Palestine?”
Maguire kept his more radical views under tight wrap. At the Independent Grocer on Bank Street, he worked with a stock boy named Ian McMillan. They would often discuss religion and morality, but Maguire offered McMillan no hint of the extremist within.
McMillan blogged recently about the experience: “We talked about the crusades, the religious justification for them and the morality of killing in the name of God. For his part, Yahya shared his personal belief that killing in the name of God was only justifiable if an innocent life was at stake.”
Several students at the university had a fleeting glimpse of the real path Maguire was travelling.
Pressault remembers stopping him in the hallway one day when Maguire was listening to his iPod. He asked him what was playing. “I’m listening to a lecture by Awlaki,” Maguire told him.
Another former university student, who spoke to the Citizen on the condition of anonymity, said Maguire discussed al-Awlaki with him in 2012. Maguire told him he had been impressed by the cleric’s online lectures.
“He became radicalized because he was trying to learn more about his new faith but he unknowingly started listening to the wrong person,” said the student.
Maguire was not the first to fall under al-Awlaki’s powerful spell.
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Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader who had been born in the United States, was killed by American forces in September 2011.
Although Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed by a 2011 drone strike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama, his provocative online sermons continue to attract jihadists and inspire terrorist acts — most recently the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. One of the gunmen, Cherif Kouachi, told a French TV network that al-Awlaki had a hand in his mission.
Al-Awlaki has been cited as a guiding force by a host of other high-profile terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who exploded bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, and Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. Hasan exchanged emails with al-Awlaki, who was then in Yemen.
Al-Awlaki’s influence has also been felt in Canada. The so-called Toronto 18 terror cell, which planned a major attack in Canada’s largest city, listened to an al-Awlaki sermon at their training camp in Orillia, according to evidence submitted at their trial. And Damian Clairmont, a Nova Scotia-born Islamic State recruit, has said that hearing al-Awlaki preach was a “life-changing event.” Clairmont, 22, a convert to Islam, was killed in Syria last year.
Ottawa’s John Maguire paid homage to Anwar al-Awlaki with his nom de guerre, Abu Anwar al-Canadi. His propaganda video also echoes many of the cleric’s themes.
So what makes al-Awlaki such an influential figure in the world of radical Islam?
Part of his appeal comes from the fact that, as an American-born and educated cleric, he was able to communicate in fluent, colloquial English. His message is simple and emotional: Muslims have an obligation to help their suffering brothers and sisters overseas.
Simon Fraser University criminology professor Garth Davies is among a growing number of Canadian academics now studying the radicalization process.
“If you’re a disaffected kid living in Ottawa or Vancouver, you may not have the kind of background to understand a lot of what these other radical clerics are posting on the Internet: The messages are complicated.
“But al-Awlaki was able to distill things in a way that young people could understand.”
Born in New Mexico, while his Yemeni father was at university, Anwar al-Awlaki spent the first six years of his life in the U.S. He returned to Yemen with his family, but came back to the U.S. to study engineering at Colorado State University then education leadership at San Diego State. He was enrolled in a doctoral program at George Washington University when he decided to leave the country in the aftermath of 9/11.
Al-Awlaki spent two years in London before going back to Yemen, where he became a senior figure in that country’s branch of al-Qaida. He was killed in September 2011 by a U.S. drone that attacked his convoy in northern Yemen. It was the first time in history that a U.S. president had approved the assassination, without trial, of an American citizen.
Professor Amarnath Amarasingam, of the Dalhousie University Resilience Research Centre, said al-Awlaki had a considerable online following before he began to call for jihad against the West.
“He first became famous for his fundamental religious message and his ability to translate the complexities of Islamic history and law for a younger audience,” said Amarasingam.
“So when he himself became radicalized, when he started talking about Western hypocrisy and injustice, and the obligation of jihad and the obligation to fight the oppressor, he already had a foundation of support and respect on which this message was received.”
Many consider his most influential work to be a six-hour audio lecture entitled, ‘Constants on the Path of Jihad,’ in which he argues that Muslims have to fight continuously on behalf of their faith until the end of world and the Day of Judgment.
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Khadar Khalib, 23, left, John Maguire, 24, centre, and Awso Peshdary, 25, were charged by RCMP on Tuesday, February 3, 2015 in an alleged terrorism conspiracy.
John Maguire didn’t announce his radicalization or his intention to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. One day in mid-December 2012, he told his grandparents that he was studying with a friend. Instead, he boarded a plane to Turkey. He left notes in his bedroom for those closest to him, explaining his decision.
John Maguire didn’t get to Syria on his own. According to the RCMP, he was part of a small group of committed jihadists, which included Aswo Peshdary and others. The men shared ideas and helped each other financially.
Similar extremist “clusters,” as terrorism experts call them, have been exposed in Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Windsor and Montreal.
“These groups are important because they can inspire each other and talk each other into things,” said Prof. Amarasingam.
Peshdary, a former Algonquin College student, met Maguire at a community lecture and the two later exchanged messages on Facebook and Twitter. Peshdary also invited Maguire to celebrate Eid at his house since the convert had no family of his own with which to share the religious holiday.
The men evidently had a meeting of minds since the RCMP allege that they later tried to recruit more young men to fight on behalf of the Islamic State.
Maguire seemed to suffer no doubt that he was on a righteous path.
Although a recent convert to Islam, he castigated those he considered misguided — even one of the country’s most prominent imams.
Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy exchanged Facebook messages with Maguire last summer after publicly denouncing the Islamic State’s murder of journalist James Foley. Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism, called Foley’s beheading a “crime against humanity.”
“Islamic State is using Islam to destroy peace,” Soharwardy said. “They are terrorists and must be punished.”
On Facebook, Maguire told Soharwardy that he was a “deviant imam” who was providing support to Canada’s infidel government.
The imam tried to convince Maguire that he had been misled about the nature of jihad. “But he was not prepared to accept my interpretation of the Qur’an,” said Soharwardy. “He said what he was doing was the Qur’an.”
The conversations ended with Maguire telling Soharwardy that he would be condemned to hellfire.
Stéphane Pressault felt Maguire’s wrath after writing an opinion piece in the Citizen in which he described the “tragedy” of Damian Clairmont, a convert to Islam who was killed fighting for the Islamic State in January 2014. In a Facebook message, Maguire denounced Pressault for his moderate views.
“I just kept thinking, ‘How did that happen?’” Pressault said of Maguire’s radicalization.
According to his mother, Maguire bribed his way past Turkish border guards to get into Syria. He lived for a time in Raqqa, the declared capital of the Islamic State. Last spring, he was betrothed to a 19-year-old named Hedeal. He invited his mother to attend their wedding, but the travel was impossible to arrange.
“I don’t even know what she looks like,” Patricia Earl says of her daughter-in-law.
According to a Twitter account associated with the Islamic State, Maguire was killed in the ultimately unsuccessful battle to capture Kobani, a town on the Turkish border where more than 1,000 jihadists died in heavy fighting with Kurdish forces backed by Western air power.
Not long before he left for Syria, Maguire had a conversation about death with his stepfather, Bill Langenberg.
“Bill, the fire will last forever when you go to hell,” Maguire told him.
“John, no, that’s not the way,” Langenberg replied.
“Bill, you don’t understand,” he said, “You don’t understand the end of life and I do.”
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Echoes of Anwar al-Awlaki
Ottawa’s John Maguire was heavily influenced by the sermons of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a leading figure in the radicalization of young Muslims from the West. Maguire borrowed from al-Awlaki’s in his now infamous propaganda video issued in December 2014.
Al-Awlaki in a message to the American people in 2010: “To the Muslims in America I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with the nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims?”
Maguire in his 2014 propaganda video: “To the Muslims who are still residing in Canada I say to you: How can you remain living among the disbelievers under their unjust man-made laws which are slowly but surely eliminating the rights of the Muslims especially now that the Caliphate is being established? And furthermore: How can you stand to live among them peacefully when their leaders, who represent the masses are waging a crusade against your Muslims brothers and sisters at this very moment?”
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