As a teenager, Boyle became a Wikipedia editor — part of the nerdy, often pretentious, male-dominated community that types in content for the world’s largest online encyclopedia. During that time, he was also drawn into online Islamic propaganda. The two interests meshed as Boyle spent thousands of hours of unpaid research and writing on Wikipedia as “Sherurcij.” He claimed to have written most of Wikipedia’s entries on Islamic-inspired terrorism. Friends said he did this research to learn more about what attracted people to extremism, but the interest seems to have seeped from his online life into the real world.
In 2006, police swept up the Toronto 18, a group of hapless would-be terrorists whose bizarre bombing and assassination plots were supposed to climax with the public beheading of the prime minister. Boyle, now Wikipedia’s self-styled authority on Islamic-themed terrorism, showed up at their court hearings. So did Zaynab Khadr and her mother.
Boyle was drawn to these celebrities. Zaynab Khadr, who had become a target of online hatred after she denounced Western morality on a CBC television interview, avoided Boyle because someone in their overlapping circle of friends had told her of Boyle’s fantasy of joining CSIS. But Boyle didn’t give up, and by 2008 they were engaged — and Boyle was acting as the spokesman for the Khadr family.
After she met Boyle, Khadr continued to be a dial-a-quote for journalists looking for inflammatory copy. She obliged with tirades on the decadence of Western child-rearing and justified the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
Boyle always stuck by his wife. “Are any of us honestly able to say that we have never uttered any phrases which, if they ran beside our name in the paper every month for five years, would paint an unflattering mental image in the public perception?” he asked, adding, “Let he without sin cast the first stone.”
They travelled though Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. These are backwaters that few people visit. Boyle claimed he was there to write freelance travel articles for Western media. Coleman had agreed to go if Boyle promised not to go into Afghanistan.
They went to Afghanistan.
Boyle gives differing reasons for going. He says he wanted to do volunteer aid work yet claims in a court document to have been trying to break into journalism. In 2012, the Haqqani, a Taliban-allied group, snatched them from a cab in Kabul. Coleman was five months pregnant.
In her affidavit, she strongly suggests Boyle and his captors were on the same wavelength and she didn’t share their radical ideology. “I would like to stress, most strongly, that for more than a decade, the respondent [Boyle] has had an interest in extremist ideologies and in the complete subservience of women."
From Smiths Falls to Afghanistan to family court: Unravelling the Bizarre Case of Joshua Boyle
An aspiring journalist, Boyle had wanted to meet the Taliban, she said, so that he could “get the real story” since he felt they were misrepresented in the Western media.
Caitlan Coleman recounts abuse by Joshua Boyle while held hostage in Afghanistan
The so-called Toronto 18 case was electric. Sweeping police raids on June 2, 2006, nabbed 18 people accused of planning spectacular terrorist acts, including detonating truck bombs, shooting into crowds, storming the Parliament buildings and beheading Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Zaynab is the eldest daughter of Ahmed Said Khadr, an al-Qaida member and the family had spent years in Afghanistan, including in Osama bin Laden’s compound.
At a time when Boyle’s employment seemed itinerant — there are accounts of him working as a parking lot attendant and in the University of Toronto’s library — Boyle started coming to court as well, friends said. He was solicitous and fawning to the Khadrs.
The Post has discovered that as a Wikipedia editor, Boyle made 809 edits to the online entry on Omar Khadr, Zaynab’s brother, and 377 to Ahmed Said Khadr, Zaynab’s father, his two most active page edits.
His third most active interest was Charles Whitman, an American mass murderer known as the “Texas Tower Sniper” and his fourth the Wikipedia entry on Ahnenerbe, a Nazi Germany project to research the history of the Aryan race.
The many winding paths of Joshua Boyle
