In December 2019, prosecutors laid out their case against Isaac El Matari in a Sydney courtroom. The transcripts are damning—not just for El Matari, but for understanding what a teenage boy in his orbit was being exposed to.
El Matari called himself “IS Commander Australia.” The title wasn’t delusion. Surveillance captured him running an actual cell, planning actual attacks, recruiting actual followers. He spoke about establishing “an [Islamic] state out in the bush here like the boys in Marawi did.” He praised “the brothers in the Philippines” who had “achieved great success.”
This was the man Naveed Akram was “close” to, according to ABC News reporting citing intelligence sources.
What the court documents reveal—across more than a dozen terrorism prosecutions between 2014 and 2023—is not a loose collection of angry young men. It was an ecosystem. A machine for manufacturing extremists. And at its centre sat a converted warehouse in Bankstown that Australian authorities knew about, documented extensively, and did not shut down until after the worst terrorist attack in Australia’s history.
The Factory
The Al Madina Dawah Centre operated from 54 Kitchener Parade, Bankstown—an industrial building converted into a prayer space. Three hundred to four hundred people showed up for Friday prayers. The founder, Wissam Haddad, built something that functioned simultaneously as mosque, community centre, and radicalisation pipeline.
The Federal Court case Wertheim v Haddad [2025] FCA 720 would later document what Haddad was doing there. The judgment found AMDC promoted “antisemitic views” and “extremist ideology.” Twenty-five separate antisemitic imputations were identified in the case.
During the years Naveed Akram was frequenting the centre, AMDC operated freely.
What was Haddad teaching? Court documents from related cases provide fragments:
He promoted a binary worldview: believers versus disbelievers. The West as enemy. Jews as particular targets. He ran the “Dawah Van”—a mobile proselytising unit that took street preaching across Sydney. According to post-attack reporting citing senior officials, Naveed Akram was “a street preacher for Mr Haddad’s Dawah Van”—though the Street Dawah Movement later disputed this, stating Akram had “attended several events” but was not a formal member.
The ISIS Connection
ASIO identified Haddad as “the most important jihadist, extremist preacher in Sydney.” The assessment wasn’t speculation.
In January 2015, according to media reports, police raided Haddad’s home. What they reportedly found: an ISIS flag. ISIS DVDs, including sermons by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor organisation. A machete. Tasers. Capsicum spray. Newspaper clippings about counter-terrorism operations.
Haddad wasn’t charged.
According to an ABC investigation citing ASIO informant “Marcus,” Haddad referred to ISIS as “the brothers.” When asked about the black flag—the shahada banner ISIS adopted as its symbol—Haddad reportedly said: “This is the flag of the Muslims.”
Khaled Sharrouf—the ISIS fighter later photographed while his seven-year-old son held a severed head—frequented Al-Risalah (Haddad’s previous centre) before traveling to Syria in 2013. So did Mohamed Elomar, who posed with severed heads himself before being killed in a drone strike. Mostafa Mahamed, who became a spokesman for al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, was a frequent speaker at the centre.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) maintains a collection titled “Pro-ISIS Australian Sheikh Wissam Haddad”—years of documented statements, sermons, and social media posts. In one 2023 Instagram post documented by MEMRI, Haddad declared:
“We hate the disbelievers. The sword is the only weapon to deal with such people.”
None of this resulted in terrorism charges. Haddad’s sermons were assessed as “not meeting the legal threshold.” He remained free to preach—and to run the centre where Naveed Akram came to pray.
The Agent Inside
ASIO knew what Haddad was doing because they had someone inside.
In April 2025—eight months before the Bondi attack—ABC Four Corners aired “The Agent Inside.” A former ASIO undercover agent, codenamed “Marcus,” broke his cover to reveal what he’d witnessed. Marcus had posed as an imam and teacher, infiltrating Haddad’s network for six years. His intelligence, ABC reported, “led to multiple arrests.”
What Marcus told Four Corners was damning. He described Haddad’s centre as “feeling like an ISIL camp.” He said he infiltrated the Dawah Van and “witnessed how it was indoctrinating teenagers into violent extremism.” He confirmed Haddad called ISIS “the brothers” and the black flag “the flag of the Muslims.”
Most critically: Marcus said he “repeatedly warned the agency that Haddad was indoctrinating young people at his Bankstown prayer centre.”
When ABC confronted Haddad with the allegations, his response was telling: “If I am a leader of violent extremism, why is it that people on the grapevine are saying these words, but law enforcement don’t have the same information?” He denied being part of al-Muhajiroun—but called its founder Omar Bakri and convicted terrorist recruiter Anjem Choudary “brothers in Islam” and “people who are going through a struggle for speaking the truth.”
Marcus explained Haddad’s model: he was attempting to “copy Choudary’s experience into the Australian community.” Choudary—the British extremist who ran a network responsible for radicalizing dozens of terrorists—was the template. Haddad was building the Australian franchise.
Six years of intelligence. Repeated warnings about youth indoctrination. An agent describing the place as “an ISIL camp.” And the outcome: Haddad never charged. The centre stayed open. The Dawah Van kept rolling.
What Haddad Taught
In May 2025, Haddad filed an affidavit in proceedings against him in the Federal Court of Australia. His own sworn statement reveals the ideological pipeline he built.
Haddad admits studying under Dr Bilal Phillips at the Islamic Online University. Phillips has been banned from multiple countries for extremist views and counter-terrorism researchers have documented his role in radicalising jihadists across multiple continents. This was Haddad’s teacher.
Earlier, in 2010-2011, Haddad completed studies of a text called “Al wala wal barra”—“Loyalty and Disavowal.” The concept is foundational to Salafi-jihadi ideology: absolute loyalty to Muslims, absolute rejection of non-Muslims. It provides the theological framework for viewing the world in binary terms—believers versus disbelievers, us versus them.
His affidavit confirms he taught youth. Classes of “15 youth members between the ages of 12 to 21.” Later, “approximately 20 male youth members.” Weekly lessons in Islamic scripture and ideology. This is what Marcus warned ASIO about: systematic youth indoctrination.
The affidavit also reveals what Haddad was preaching after October 7, 2023. In November, he delivered a lecture series called “The Jews of Al Madina.” He admits quoting Sahih al-Bukhari 3593—the hadith that reads: “The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, O Muslim! there is a Jew behind me; kill him!”
When media reported on the sermon, Haddad’s response—captured in his own affidavit—was telling: “but since this hadith angered you, I want to increase this anger by quoting more scripture.”
The ideology wasn’t ambiguous. And Naveed Akram was in the audience.
The centre also served as connective tissue. People who came through AMDC’s doors kept appearing in terrorism prosecutions. Isaac El Matari. Youssef Uweinat. The network wasn’t abstract—it gathered in the same room every Friday.
The Recruiters
Youssef Uweinat’s story illuminates how the machine worked.
R v Uweinat [2021] NSWSC 1256 documents his journey. At fourteen years old, Uweinat was recruited by street preachers the court described as “well-known to national security authorities.”
By the time of his arrest, Uweinat was an ISIS recruiter himself. According to post-attack reporting, he served as a youth leader at AMDC. His job was finding the next generation.
The court judgment describes his ideology in clinical terms: commitment to violent jihad, rejection of secular authority, glorification of ISIS. But what matters for understanding Akram is this: Uweinat was specifically tasked with young people at AMDC. He was the youth leader during the period Akram attended.
Akram was seventeen. Uweinat was his youth leader. The ideology Uweinat promoted—the same ideology that got him convicted—was what Akram was being taught.
The Commander
Isaac El Matari styled himself the military commander. R v El Matari [2021] NSWSC 1260 lays out what that meant—and what it meant for a teenager in his orbit.
El Matari was first exposed to radical beliefs at fifteen or sixteen, the court found. By eighteen, in September 2017, he’d been arrested in Tripoli, Lebanon, for attempting to join ISIS in Syria. Lebanese authorities sentenced him to a year in prison. He served nine months. During that time, according to his own account documented in the judgment, he gained “significant exposure to, and contact with, IS members and sympathisers.” Prison didn’t deter him. It networked him.
He returned to Australia in June 2018 and immediately resumed planning.
His own father knew. Surveillance captured El Matari telling a friend: “My dad says that he refuses to fund me, he said to me ‘you already tried to do terrorism things and now you want to do even more terrorism stuff? … Haven’t you had enough?’”
He hadn’t.
Surveillance captured El Matari’s vision: establishing a militant cell in rural Australia modelled on ISIS operations in the Philippines. The Marawi siege of 2017—where ISIS-aligned fighters held a Philippine city for five months.
“So that the brothers would start a STATE out in the bush here like the boys in Marawi did.” — Isaac El Matari, May 2019 (surveillance transcript)
Even arrest didn’t stop him. In September 2019, police searching a cell adjacent to El Matari’s at the High Risk Management Correctional Centre found a three-page letter he’d written to fellow inmate Tukiterangi Lawrence. He was recruiting from inside prison. The letter laid out operational doctrine:
“My suggestion is the establishment of a small enclosed battalion to exploit the landscape, taking to remote regional areas to plan the orchestration of attacks.”
El Matari wasn’t fantasizing. He was planning. Court documents show he discussed specific targets, specific methods, specific timelines. He claimed “there were about a thousand males in Australia who were followers of IS.” He told his wife “we make up at least a thousand boys of DAWLA State.”
But he was frustrated. In one recorded conversation, El Matari “lamented that he could not get any support for his plans in Australia. He said that he thought that IS supporters in Australia were cowards and not truly committed supporters.”
Five years later, someone from his network would prove him wrong.
Naveed Akram was “close” to El Matari, according to post-attack intelligence reporting. Close to this—to a man actively planning mass-casualty attacks while preaching the Philippines model. El Matari was radicalized at fifteen. Akram appeared in Street Dawah videos at seventeen. The pattern repeated.
The Street Preachers
The Street Dawah network functioned as the public-facing recruitment arm. Young men would set up on Sydney sidewalks—Parramatta, Bankstown, the CBD—engaging passersby in religious conversation. Cameras rolled. Videos went online.
What looked like earnest proselytisation was something else. Court documents from five separate terrorism prosecutions explicitly identify street dawah as the recruitment vector:
R v Azari [2019] NSWSC 314: Omarjan Azari radicalized through “street preaching” with Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf in Parramatta, 2012. Both would later die fighting for ISIS in Syria.
R v Uweinat [2021] NSWSC 1256: Uweinat recruited at age fourteen by street preachers “well-known to national security authorities.”
R v Halis [2021] VCC 1277: Hanifi Halis and Ertunc Eriklioglu both radicalized through street dawah activities at MyCentre youth organization in Melbourne—a mirror operation to Sydney’s network.
R v Bayda; R v Namoa [2019]: Alo-Bridget Namoa recruited at age fourteen and a half by female street preachers in Sydney.
Five convictions. Five cases where prosecutors documented street preaching as the entry point into terrorism.
In 2019, CNN would identify Naveed Akram in Street Dawah videos. One showed him outside a Sydney train station, urging strangers to embrace Islam. Another captured him telling two young boys that “the law of Allah” was “more important than anything else.”
The Propaganda Shift
To understand what Naveed Akram was absorbing, you need to understand what ISIS was telling its followers—and how that message changed.
When ISIS declared its caliphate in June 2014, the propaganda was clear: migrate. Perform hijra. Leave the land of disbelief and join the Islamic State.
The message worked. Australians left. Court documents track dozens who attempted the journey. Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf—the street preachers who recruited Omarjan Azari in Parramatta—both made it to Syria. They posed for photographs with severed heads. They died there.
But by 2019, the dream was dying. The caliphate collapsed. Baghouz fell in March 2019. There was nowhere to migrate to anymore.
ISIS adapted. If followers couldn’t come to the caliphate, they should bring the caliphate to them.
Then came October 7, 2023. Hamas attacked Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
What happened next in jihadist circles reveals something crucial: ISIS and Hamas are not allies. They are enemies. ISIS had declared takfir—excommunication—on Hamas years earlier. When Hamas attacked on October 7, ISIS was notably slow to respond. Al-Qaeda immediately praised the operation. ISIS said nothing for twelve days.
ISIS couldn’t praise Hamas without contradicting years of takfir declarations. But ignoring the moment meant irrelevance. The solution: redirect.
On October 19, 2023, ISIS published an infographic titled “Practical ways to support Muslims in Palestine.” It didn’t call for support of Hamas. It called for global attacks on Jews—targeting “Jewish neighbourhoods,” “Jewish temples (synagogues),” and “Jewish economic interests.”
The key instruction: educate “generations that the battle with the Jews is purely religious and ideological, not patriotic or nationalistic.”
On January 4, 2024, ISIS made it official. Spokesperson Abu Hudhayfah al-Ansari released an audio message titled “And Kill Them Wherever You Overtake Them”—the group’s first global attack call since 2022.
By mid-2025, antisemitic messaging had surged dramatically across jihadist Telegram channels. Pro-ISIS magazines ran articles titled “The Nation Deserving Holocaust the Most.” Telegram channels circulated attack manuals for synagogue bombings “timed for religious festivals.”
Akram attacked Jews in Australia during Chanukah. Exactly as instructed.
What Akram Absorbed
Reconstruct what Naveed Akram was exposed to between 2017 and 2025:
- ISIS doctrine filtered through El Matari’s vision—violent jihad, rejection of secular authority, the Philippines as operational model.
- The 25 imputations documented in the Haddad case weren’t abstract theology. They were targeting guidance. Jews as enemies. Religious obligation to act.
- El Matari’s surveillance transcripts show sophisticated planning—target selection, methodology, timing. Even if Akram wasn’t directly involved, he was proximate to this thinking.
- Belonging. Brothers in struggle. The convicted terrorists from street dawah weren’t cautionary tales—they were models.
- ISIS propaganda explicitly directing attacks on Jewish communities worldwide. Religious festivals as optimal timing. The battle framed as “purely religious and ideological”—exactly the framing Akram would echo in his manifesto video.
At seventeen, Akram was developmentally primed for this influence. Adolescent identity formation, desire for meaning, susceptibility to charismatic authority. The network exploited all of it.
The machine had done its work. What happened next was transformation—slow, unobserved, and lethal.