Canadian authorities are looking for at least four teenagers who may have flown to Turkey in a bid to join ISIS, the latest in a string of such defections by Westerners lured to the Middle East fight for the Islamist group, a police source said. Asked about the reports, Canadian Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said on Thursday he couldn't comment on operational matters. But he added that reports of such recruitments highlight the need for legislation the government is trying to pass to deter so-called high-risk travelers. Two of the four teenagers are women from Laval, Quebec, while at least one is a male from Montreal, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. The teenagers reportedly flew from Montreal to Turkey in mid-January. Two days later, family members alerted the police. It's unclear where the teens are now. Three of them attended a Montreal community college that has now suspended its lease arrangement with an Islamic group after finding evidence of what administrators described as "hate speech" involving one of the group's leaders, according to a school official. It's not clear yet if the three had any connections to the organization. Canadian authorities say they are looking at the possibility that other youths may have followed a similar path, but they won't say how many. The disappearances are the latest example of a troubling trend for Western authorities: a steady flow of young Muslims born or raised in the West, lured to Iraq and Syria by slick propaganda churned out by the Islamist group. Some 3,400 Westerners have gone to fight for ISIS, Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in recent U.S. congressional testimony. Inside the ISIS recruitment machine. In the Canadian case, three of the four students attended Montreal CEGEP Collège de Maisonneuve, according to an official there. On Thursday, the school said it had decided to stop leasing classroom space to an Islamic organization that provided Arabic and Koran studies. The organization, Ecole des Compagnons, was suspended because the college found evidence of "hate speech and non-respect for our values" involving one of the group's leaders, spokeswoman Brigitte Desjardins said. "We are going to interrupt the contract we have with this organization until we have more information," she said. The agreement is less than a year old, Desjardins said. The group's representative, Adil Charkaoui, said on Twitter that he would discuss the issue Friday. Charkaoui describes himself on his Twitter account as "Coordinator of the Collective Against Islamophobia Quebec, Professor, PhD student in Educational Sciences." Some students at the school interviewed by the CBC were baffled by the news that some contemporaries might go fight for ISIS. "It's shocking, I don't understand how this could happen," one student told the network. "It just makes us think, what were they thinking?" another student said. Canadian authorities believe four young men and two women who disappeared from Quebec in January have traveled to the Middle East to fight with Islamic State, media reported on Thursday.
