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In it, he says he came from Canada in 2013 and fought with ISIL, first as it expanded and then retreated under international counterattack.

“I was captured by them (Kurdish forces) after attacking one of their points and entering into a gun battle with them,” the prisoner says, with a large bandage on his forehead.

“After they called me to surrender, I surrendered myself.”

He said there are still thousands of ISIL soldiers in the shrinking ISIL-held territory in eastern Syria and many are trying to flee to Turkey by using smugglers.

He said increasing airstrikes and drone attacks are taking a toll.

“The soldiers are not fighting open so much, but rather are restricting themselves to small groups and are resorting to tunnels and trenches and so on.”

These video appearances are being examined and compared to previous video and audio recordings distributed by ISIL. The prisoner’s voice sounds similar and he shares some physical resemblance to the ISIL propagandist, from what can be seen behind the mask.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who co-directs a study of Western foreign fighters based at the University of Waterloo, says his information is that the captured man is, in fact, the narrator of some of ISIL’s most notorious propaganda.

Photo by File

Flames of War, a slickly produced 51-minute video distributed by ISIL media in 2014 features, in the climactic scene, an English-speaking, masked ISIL soldier who speaks while looking directly into the camera.