The recent arrests of three men in the Greater Toronto Area on a litany of terrorism and hate crime charges have forced a stark reality into public view: violent jihadist extremism is not just a foreign threat but is being actively cultivated and operationalized on Canadian soil.
A Disturbing Escalation in the GTA
In late 2025, law enforcement in the Greater Toronto Area arrested Waleed Khan, Osman Azizov, and Fahad Sadaat. The case began with what appeared to be two separate armed attempts to abduct women from public streets in Toronto and Mississauga. It rapidly escalated into one of the most serious terrorism and hate-crime investigations in recent Canadian memory.
The trio now faces dozens of charges, including firearms offences, conspiracy to commit hostage-taking, and sexual assault with a weapon. Police allege the men specifically targeted women and members of the Jewish community, with the crimes being motivated by antisemitism.
ISIS Links and a Parallel National Security Case
In a parallel national-security investigation, the RCMP laid explicit terrorism charges against Waleed Khan, naming the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) as the involved terrorist entity. The allegations are severe and wide-ranging, encompassing participation in a terrorist group, facilitating terrorist activity, terrorist financing, and conspiracy to commit murder in association with ISIS.
Authorities accuse Khan of providing funds and property to ISIS, a group that continues to orchestrate global atrocities. This point was grimly underscored by the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia, which occurred just days before the Canadian arrests were publicly announced.
This case is not an isolated incident. It fits a troubling pattern of Canada disrupting multiple ISIS-linked plots in recent years, often involving radicalized youth or family networks.
Interception vs. Prevention: A Critical Failure
The police operation, dubbed Project Neapolitan, is credited with intercepting a dangerous escalation and likely preventing tragedy by seizing firearms. This success in interdiction highlights Canada's proficiency in law enforcement disruption.
However, disruption represents only half the battle, and arguably the easier half. Where Canada has consistently fallen short, according to security analysts, is in confronting the ideological ecosystem that produces radicalization in the first place. The nation has been criticized for a dangerous complacency in addressing the root causes.
While ISIS itself is almost universally condemned by governments, Muslim organizations, and civil society, critics argue there is a persistent reluctance to name the specific Islamist ideology that animates such violence. This ideology is described as a supremacist, antisemitic, and eliminationist worldview, for which groups like Hamas often serve as an ideological avatar in Western discourse.
Since the October 7th attacks, Canadian public discourse has been saturated with rhetoric that dehumanizes Jews, reframes terrorism as "resistance," and levels accusations of genocide against Israel, often stripped of context or moral proportion. Calls to target Jews "globally," recycled blood-libel tropes, and the portrayal of Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate have been allowed to spread, often unchallenged by institutions with a duty to uphold civil discourse.
The ideology behind the recent alleged plot may be imported, but the threat is unequivocally homegrown: the planning and activation occurred within Canada. The arrests in the GTA serve as a urgent wake-up call. Canada excels at interception, but it must now commit with equal seriousness to prevention and uprooting the conditions that allow violent extremism to take hold.
