I Was Told to Come Alone Page 27

  “What do you think is happening with him now?” she asked. “What will he do there?”

  “Let’s talk about it when we meet in person.” I didn’t want to tell her over the phone that Pero was probably on a journey to become a jihadist, that he was probably now in the midst of being indoctrinated, or that he might end up fighting and perhaps dying far from home, with boys he barely knew.

  “Souad, my family and I, we want to speak to you. Please, can you come?”

  On the flight to Germany, I thought about the thousands of other families who were also seeing their children head off to fight a war that had begun as part of the illusory Arab Spring.

  Pero’s family was devastated. I arranged to meet his parents, two sisters, and aunt at the boy’s family home. His mother, Bagica, cried throughout the meeting, while his father, Mitko—Serce’s brother—begged her to stop. They accused each other of not realizing soon enough what was happening to their son.

  “Enough now!” Serce finally shouted. “You guys have to stop and think about helping Pero now.”

  “I have no idea why he would think that he has to go to Syria now. This is not our war,” Mitko said. “And then all this talk about jihad? I don’t understand.”

  What have we done wrong, the families of boys like Pero would often ask. Why my child? Many times, there was a deep-rooted conflict between the parents, or a conflict between the father and his sons. These were common problems in Muslim migrant families, including Pero’s.

  Pero was now sixteen. His family had emigrated from Macedonia before his birth, and they doted on him. Whenever I visited, his aunt would cuddle him or lightly squeeze his jaws, while his grandmother was always telling him to eat more of her beef stews and meatballs. They practiced a liberal form of Islam that included dancing and occasional drinking. They were hardworking, middle-class people. My friend Serce had run her own business for years. Bagica worked in a grocery store. Pero’s father, Mitko, was the wild card. Serce had often told me that her brother had a temper. “I have done a lot of things wrong in the past,” Mitko said. “I paid a heavy price and I have learned my lesson.” He’d been arrested and convicted on a drug charge when Pero was a boy and had missed much of his son’s childhood.

  Bagica tried to stop crying. “What are they doing now with him there? Is he in danger?” she asked me.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. “Please start from the beginning.”

  Bagica explained that on the night Pero left, he was supposed to sleep over at a friend’s house. “He came to me, gave me a long hug, kissed me, and said he was going to a rally in the city center,” she recalled, crying.

  “What rally?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Something about Syria. Some German preacher who he wanted to listen to—what was his name again?”

  “Was it Pierre Vogel?” I asked. I had followed Vogel’s activities for years. A former boxer, he had converted to Islam in 2001 and had become one of Germany’s prominent self-proclaimed preachers. He liked to give public speeches in slang-laden, colloquial language that was especially attractive to young people and those who didn’t know much about Islam. He was one of those people the German authorities kept an eye on, and I’d long wondered how people like him made a living and paid for rallies across Germany. Lately, he’d been talking a lot about the need to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. While some German Salafists publicly encouraged young Muslims to join the fight against Assad, Pierre Vogel’s position was contradictory, arguing at different times both for and against joining the fight, though he always called for donations to support Syrian groups.

  This was the very man Pero had gone to hear, I learned. “He told me that he would come back the next day, but he didn’t,” Bagica said, bursting into tears again. The family tried to call him all day. They called his friends asking where he was, but no one knew.

  The next morning, Bagica’s cell phone rang. “It was Pero,” she said. “I asked him where he was. He said, ‘I’m in Syria.’”

  Pero’s sisters began to wail, and Mitko stood up to leave the room. I suspected he didn’t want us to see that he was crying, too.

  I asked if she’d heard any more from Pero.

  “Yes. Sometimes he sends a message on WhatsApp.”

  “Do you know who he’s with?”

  “No. He only speaks about some emir who decides when he can use his phone.”

  “What do they do all day?” I asked.

  “He said there was a sheikh who speaks to them about Islam, and they show them the videos and pictures of dead Syrians, you know, the people killed by what’s-his-name…” Bagica trailed off.

  “Assad?”

  She nodded. She told me that they didn’t often talk about politics or foreign affairs at home. But about five months earlier, Pero suddenly developed a keen interest in the Middle East. He also tried to grow a beard but only ended up with a soft fuzz on his chin.

  He would meet with his friends every day to pray in mosques and study in small groups at somebody’s home, Bagica said. They also set up stands in the city center, giving away Korans and inviting people to learn more about Islam.

  I asked what they wanted me to do. “You know I am a journalist, not the police,” I reminded them.

  They told me they had gone to the police but were told they couldn’t do much. “We can’t just wait here and do nothing,” Mitko said. “This is my child we’re talking about.”

  “Did Pero say anything about returning to Germany?”

  “No, but it seems the emir is always reading the messages before he sends them,” Bagica said.

  Of course he is, I thought. They didn’t want recruits to disclose their exact location. I didn’t know exactly where Pero was, either, but I knew time was short. Once the “religious teachings” were finished, his handlers would send him to a training camp, where he would be forced to choose whether to become a “fighter” or a suicide bomber, known as undertaking a “martyrdom operation.”

  I didn’t want to tell his parents this, but I offered to write about their son’s case, and in that capacity maybe I could ask authorities what they were planning to do or ask my own sources in the Turkish-Syrian border region and elsewhere if they’d heard anything about Pero’s whereabouts.

  “I saw you once wrote about this preacher who was doing some deradicalization work, the one who looks like Osama bin Laden,” my friend Serce said. “Please can we get in touch with him? Maybe he can help.”

  I knew who she meant, and I couldn’t help smiling. “You better not tell him he looks like bin Laden,” I told her. I said that I couldn’t give them his number without asking him, but I could give him their number if they wanted. They agreed.

  Before I left, Mitko had a final request: “Souad, if we decide to go to the Turkish-Syrian border region, would you maybe go with us?”

  I knew I couldn’t. The German authorities had told me to stay away.

  “Let me see,” I said. I told him it would be up to my editors and that I would likely ask a second reporter to work with me on the piece. If there was a need to travel to the border and I couldn’t go, maybe my colleague could.

  As soon as I left their apartment, I sent a text message to Hesham Shashaa, who was also known as Abu Adam, the imam Serce mentioned. He was a onetime journalist who now traveled around the world preaching against militant groups and worked with the German authorities to persuade young people not to join. I’d profiled him several years earlier. He called the family right away.

  My next call was to my former colleague Peter Finn, who was now the national security editor at the Washington Post. He was trying to get me to start writing regularly for the paper again, but I was still pitching stories one by one rather than working on contract. He agreed that I should do a story about Pero for the Post, but he told me, “You have to stay out of the Turkish-Syrian border region. There is no way I will let you travel there now.” In addition to the warning from the Germ
an intelligence services, U.S. officials had also picked up a possible threat against my life from the border region, which they conveyed to a lawyer for the New York Times, who passed the information on to me.

  I told Peter that sources from the former rapper Abu Talha’s group had told me there was nothing to worry about.

  “Okay, if they say so,” he said. “But you are not going at this stage.”

  Peter put me in touch with Michael Birnbaum, the Post’s bureau chief in Germany, who agreed to jump on the story as soon as possible. Abu Adam also called and said he would visit the family the following day. Michael and I arranged to meet him there.

  In the meantime, I learned from German national security sources that Pero had left for Turkey with twenty-two other young men, including at least four other teenagers. Like Pero, most had been born in Germany but came from immigrant families. “They took a cheap flight from Frankfurt to Antalya, and most likely someone picked them up from there and took them to Syria,” one of my sources said.

  I wasn’t surprised to hear any of this, but never would I have thought it would happen to someone I knew personally. I knew that parents and other relatives often don’t realize how serious these situations can be. Their children’s companions often instruct them not to trust their parents because they don’t follow the “right interpretation” of Islam.

  Now, in the midst of a destabilizing civil war, Syria had become littered with camps where militants trained young men like Pero from all over the world. While his parents—like any other parents—were only thinking about getting their son back, I wondered if he was already so completely brainwashed that he might become a threat to the rest of his family or the community if he returned.

  Pero’s mother told me that before he left he’d begun to talk about the “anti-Muslim” rhetoric in Europe. “He said, ‘This is not our country. Many people in Europe, they hate Islam and Muslims,’” she told me. Even though he was born in Germany, he’d begun to feel more alienated the longer he spent with his new friends.

  Michael and I showed up at Pero’s family home the next day, at about the same time Abu Adam arrived. Serce wasn’t the first to think he resembled Osama bin Laden; people had been saying that about him for years. Maybe it was his white clothes and checked kaffiyah, a traditional Islamic head scarf for men, or his long face and black and gray beard. He and I had spoken about his appearance before, and he said that it was crucial for the young men and women he was helping to see him as someone they could respect. “Imagine if I wore a suit and tie,” he argued. “Do you think they would trust or listen to me?”

  Abu Adam had four wives, but he never judged anyone else’s lifestyle. Years ago, I’d visited his home and met his wives, who all told me they had married him of their own free will and that they felt like sisters.

  At the time, I told them I didn’t know how they could share the man each of them loved; by the end of my visit, after listening to the imam argue with his wives about whether their next vacation should be a trip to Spain (his choice) or to EuroDisney (the wives’ pick, perhaps on account of their many children), I turned to him. “Actually, the question should also be, how are you handling this?” I asked.

  “With a lot of patience,” he answered, laughing.

  Later, he and his wives sent me pictures from their vacation in southern Bavaria. I saw the four women dressed in black from head to toe, with their faces covered, on a sled sliding down a mountain.

  Abu Adam had successfully deradicalized several people in different countries and had made plenty of enemies among jihadis. “There are many people who consider me a threat in their scheme,” he told me. As a result, he always walked around with at least one acolyte as his bodyguard.

  Pero’s family repeated their story. Bagica cried again, while Mitko did most of the talking. Abu Adam listened and took notes.

  “First when he began to go to the mosque every day, I was happy and also somehow proud,” Mitko said. Then he turned to Abu Adam. “I’m being very honest with you. I am not the most religious person, you know. Okay, I pray sometimes, but not five times a day. So I was proud to see Pero’s dedication.… I wanted my son to go the way of God. It’s the best way. But not this.”

  Pero quickly grew more observant. At one point, he even told his father that he disapproved of him drinking alcohol and that he should be more religious. Since he left, his parents had kept in touch with him via his German prepaid cell phone. “I am making sure to add money, so we can speak to him,” Mitko said. But Pero had less of a relationship with his father and kept in closer touch with his mother.

  Mitko and Bagica were upset that the German authorities hadn’t stopped their son and other minors from traveling. Why was it so easy for their son and his friends to get radicalized, and then sent to fight in Syria?

  “Have you asked him to come back?” Abu Adam asked.

  “Yes, I told him, ‘I am not upset with you. Just come back home,’” Mitko said. His words had no apparent effect.

  Mitko grew distraught as he repeated his shock that this had happened to his son here, in Germany, far from the war in his own native country and from conflicts in the Middle East. “I had no idea how to handle Pero’s growing religiosity,” Mitko said. “I thought it would be enough to make sure my children weren’t lacking for money.”

  “I think his leader, this emir, is listening to every conversation we have with him, and they control him,” Bagica said.

  In the weeks before he had left, Pero constantly watched videos of alleged atrocities committed by the Assad regime. Pero told his parents that the world was at war with Islam.

  “He mentioned that Syria was the latest example of this war and that it was the duty of Muslims to go and help other Muslims,” Mitko said.

  In one of their recent conversations, Pero had mentioned that the emir and others had told him about creating an Islamic state. His family didn’t know what group he was with, but they mentioned one other teenager who had run away with their son, who had told his parents he was planning to join an Al Qaeda affiliate.

  “One time I spoke to the emir, and he told me the best we could do for our son was to send him enough money to buy an AK-47 and a bulletproof vest,” Mitko told us. “What kind of person would say this to the parents of a sixteen-year-old?”

  I knew that this meant their boy had been chosen to become a fighter. During one of his most recent calls, Pero had told his mother that he would pledge allegiance to a fighting group shortly after the Eid al-Adha holiday, just weeks away. They were running out of time.

  Abu Adam suggested they reason with Pero, telling him that the Koran puts family obligations first and condemns violence. If that didn’t work, maybe they could persuade him that his mother was sick, which she surely was from worry, so it wouldn’t be a lie, and that he needed to come home, or at least to visit her in Turkey, rather than in Syria.

  “It’s not going to be as easy as, ‘Oh, habibi,’ and falling into each other’s arms and then leaving,” he told them, using the male form of the Arabic word for “darling.”

  Mitko and Bagica had already promised Pero a new start if he came home to Germany. “I told him, ‘My son, just come home, all will be good. I promise I will be a better father.’” Mitko said, and I saw tears pooling in his eyes. “But this didn’t change his mind.”

  Mitko had also tried telling Pero that his mother was seriously ill. That hadn’t worked, either.

  Then Abu Adam suggested another idea: “Kidnap him.”

  He advised the family what to tell Pero so that the emir wouldn’t see any way out and would allow Pero to meet his mother one last time and get her blessing before he headed out to fight.

  “Maybe this is our last chance,” Bagica told me that evening. I stayed out of sight when she talked to Pero on Skype, in case the emir was with him. I listened to Pero’s voice as he told his mother that she and his aunt would be picked up in Antakya and brought to see him in Syria.

  Abu Ada
m had told them that Pero’s emir might try to ask the women to cross the border for security reasons. “But don’t agree to this,” he told them. “You can tell him that under Islamic law, he has already committed a sin by leaving to fight jihad without his parents’ permission. You are two women who cannot travel with strange men into Syria, and he as your son will have to come and see you.”

  Bagica told Pero exactly this. After speaking to another man who seemed to be in the room with him, Pero finally agreed. He also asked his mother to bring him warm socks, his leather jacket, T-shirts, and penicillin and other antibiotics.

  “He looked very tired,” Bagica said afterward. “He was wearing a T-shirt. And he wasn’t alone.”

  “He might not come alone,” Mitko said in a worried tone. “It might be a bit dangerous, but I can’t stand here and watch as I lose my son.”

  I contacted Peter Finn and told him the family was getting ready for their trip to Antakya. “I still don’t want to see you near the border at the moment,” Peter told me. “We have to be careful.”

  I was disappointed not to be able to go with Pero’s family to Turkey, but I kept in touch with Serce via text messages and phone calls. Mitko had a contact in the Turkish police, a family friend who put him in touch with the counterterrorism unit in the Turkish-Syrian border region.

  Bagica stayed in contact with her son, telling him that only she and Serce were coming to see him. Unbeknownst to Pero, his father had flown to Turkey a few days earlier to meet the police in the border region.

  Pero was supposed to meet Bagica and Serce at a hotel in Antakya. The plan was for him to spend a few hours with them and collect the clothes and other things he’d asked his mother to bring.

  “Is he there, did he come?” I anxiously texted Serce from Germany while she and her sister-in-law waited in the hotel lobby.

  “Not yet,” she replied. He was already twenty minutes late.

  Everyone was worried that Pero wouldn’t come alone and that whoever might be with him would attack the family for trying to take him away. The police and Mitko were hiding in a car outside the hotel. The plan was for Turkish antiterrorism police to take Pero into custody, to make it seem that they had arrested him, and then drive Pero and his family to the airport so they could fly back to Germany the same day.