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Carlos, 25, was arrested as he was boarding a January 2014 flight overseas with the hopes of fighting for ISIL, the jihadist movement that aspires to establish an Islamic caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria. Ashton had been recruiting because his own plans to join ISIL had been scuttled after his passport was revoked.

The RCMP case against the twins was anchored in wiretap evidence that captured their extremist plans and many hateful conversations about them wanting to kill infidels.

Their life story, in their own words, has gone untold until now.

In their interviews obtained by APTN and the Citizen, the Larmonds both say they’ve blocked out a lot of memories from their childhood. Both recall mostly awful scenes, beyond the two years when they lived at their grandfather’s home in Texas. In Ottawa, where they spent most of their childhood, it was ugly all around. The gutter, as they call it.

“No kid should have to go through what I went through,” Carlos says in the taped interviews.

They were both raped as children. They both witnessed their mother being abused by men, including the time when they saw a man trying to drown her in a bathtub. They recall her face, just as her head was to be dunked again. They remember her saying “It’s OK, sweetheart.” And they remember running.

The twins heard more violence than they saw, and it was, at times, overwhelming. “A lot of yelling, a lot of thumping, and screaming and stuff.”

“The abuse I suffered is the only thing I remember from my childhood,” Ashton says.