Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi

Shehroze Chaudhry was raised in or near Toronto, Canada. He attended Lester B. Pearson High School in Burlington, ON. He went to Pakistan as a teenager to study. 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. Prior to leaving Toronto in 2014, he claimed to have cleaned out his bank account. He returned to Canada in 2016 where he was reportedly attending a university in the Toronto area. ==Islamic State claims==

Chaudhry claimed to The New York Times that he left Canada in 2014 to join the Islamic State group. Upon arrival in Turkey, he says he was met by a former resident of Mississauga—a city in the Greater Toronto Area—and visited the Syria–Turkey border town of Jarabulus to cross into Syria at night. He escaped to Turkey, where he was arrested by authorities before being released a week later. After his release, he allegedly returned to Pakistan, where he claimed to have stayed for two years, before returning to Canada. ==Return to Canada==

. Upon his return, he had discussions with Callimachi; she stated that he initially felt confident that he had escaped law enforcement. 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. ==References==