I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  “I wrote him a message and asked, where are you? He just wrote back and said he was coming at 3 p.m.,” Serce texted me.

  At about 2:30 p.m. her time, she called to say that police officers in plainclothes had posted themselves inside the lobby and in cars parked at the exits. “This is like in a movie. I am so nervous, Souad! How do you do your job? I don’t understand.”

  Thirty minutes later, I received a text from Serce: “He has sent a message to my sister-in-law. He asked where she was and said that he is coming.”

  I watched my phone nervously, unable to concentrate on anything else. Ten minutes later, another text arrived: “He is here, the police are with us, we are all crying, can’t talk now but we are taking off to the police station now and then the airport. I will arrive tonight.”

  Pero had arrived alone, by bus, I learned later. Mitko, hiding with one of the police officers, had signaled that this was his son. Then the police got out of their cars, grabbed Pero by the arms, and brought him into the hotel, where his mother and aunt were waiting.

  Serce later told us that even Mitko was crying when he saw Pero embracing his mother, the first time that Serce could remember having seen her brother weep.

  “The little one was a bit shocked that he had been captured,” she told me. He asked the police officers if he could pray before they took him, which they allowed him to do.

  Serce showed Michael and me a video she had taken with her cell phone while they were driving to the airport with Pero. In it, a Turkish police officer turns around and speaks to Pero. “If you had stayed longer there, and you had taken the next step, you would have understood that you were on the wrong path,” the officer says. “Be grateful to Allah that you got out now.”

  Pero says nothing.

  “Who has the right to call for jihad? It’s not so easy just to call for it. There are rules,” the officer continues. “What is important is the family. Never leave them behind the way you did.”

  “I thought it was the right path,” Pero says.

  When Pero and his mother and aunt arrived at the airport in Frankfurt, he was arrested by German border police and taken to the main police headquarters in Frankfurt. That’s where I met Serce, while she waited for her sister-in-law and nephew to come out.

  Pero’s family and Abu Adam worked on a program for him to reintegrate himself into German society. He was away from the group now, but the indoctrination had been very strong. “I told the family we must work a lot now, so he will not end up going back there,” Abu Adam told me. “I am sure they will try to contact him and ask him to get back.”

  He was right. I’d seen other cases of people who had been caught on their way to join jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Somalia, or Yemen. They might not make it the first time, but they would often be contacted by their old circles and succeed with their journey on a second attempt. In fact, once they finally made it, they would enjoy even more respect because they hadn’t stopped pursuing what they saw as the right path or the chance to die as martyrs. Pero’s case was different; he wasn’t truly convinced by the jihadist ideology but was more someone who followed orders. In fact, Pero thought he was saving “oppressed Muslim Syrians from being slaughtered by Assad.” That was the story he had been told, and that was what he knew the duty of any Muslim man to be. There was still room to bring him back into society, but it would take a lot of effort, not only from his family but also from religious scholars who could explain to him that his friends or the “emir,” as he called his group leader, had gotten the verses of the Koran out of context or explained them in a way that served their own objectives.

  “We have to now wash his brain,” Abu Adam continued. “It’s dirty and we have to clean it.”

  Pero was lucky. He got out alive. Most of the others who had left with him did not.

  Abu Adam and the family worked together for months to get Pero out of the circles he was in. They closed all his email accounts, changed his phone numbers, and shut down his Facebook page. Then there was the man Mitko suspected of making travel arrangements for his son and the other young men. Mitko had spoken to the police about this man. The police said they knew him and had him on their radar, but they didn’t have enough evidence to put him behind bars.

  Mitko wanted to make sure that this man, who was a German of Turkish descent, would stay away from his son, so he took matters into his own hands. “I went to his apartment,” he told me, “and said to him, ‘If you or any of your so-called brothers ever come close to my son again, I swear to God, your head will roll right in front of the feet of your emir. Do you understand?’”

  The man nodded and Mitko left, satisfied that his message was received. The man and his associates never again got close to Pero or his family.

  Pero finished school and cut off contact with his old friends. I saw him once on the street, about a year and a half later, holding hands with a young girl. Both wore jeans and trendy clothes, and the girl’s hair flowed free, unburdened by a head scarf. He was laughing and joking. He reminded me once again of the little boy who had carried the Miss Piggy cake all those years earlier.

  Some of his friends would later leave the group they’d been with in Syria and join a new one that called itself the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, whose existence had been proclaimed the summer before. I learned that Abu Talha, the onetime rapper known as Deso Dogg, had also joined them.

  13

  Brides for the Caliphate

  Germany and France, 2014–15

  On January 7, 2015, Europe was hit. Two brothers, Chérif and Said Kouachi, carried out a deadly attack in central Paris on staffers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose depictions of the Prophet Muhammad had enraged Islamists, murdering twelve people before being killed by police after a standoff in Dammartin-en-Goële, a town north of the French capital.

  On January 9, another man, Amedy Coulibaly, assaulted a kosher supermarket in another part of Paris, killing five more people and taking fifteen others hostage. He was also ultimately shot dead by police.

  France has been a target of religiously motivated terrorism for some time, and its own history of colonization and intervention in the Middle East and North Africa is characterized by violence. With its conquest of Algeria in the nineteenth century and its control of Syria and Lebanon after World War I, France came to be seen by many Muslims as arrogant and imperious. The long and bloody Algerian war of independence and the delayed reappraisal of France’s role in it, which still has not been fully accepted by all parts of French society, further exacerbated hostility in the Muslim world. In 1983 the Lebanese militia Hezbollah bombed the French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, and in the 1990s the Algerian Islamist terrorist group GIA hijacked a French plane and bombed Métro stations in Paris. Jewish institutions all over France, including schools, restaurants, and synagogues, have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist terror attacks.

  Many French Muslims experienced one of France’s colonial conflicts firsthand or through their family members’ accounts. These communities have historically felt excluded from the full benefits of French society, not least because of their difficult economic situation. From the 1970s on, the banlieues, suburban high-rise estates originally a sign of the economic boom after World War II, were inhabited mostly by immigrants from North Africa. They have since become synonymous with high unemployment and weak social structures. Whoever could afford to leave, left. Today, the banlieues are still inhabited mainly by immigrants and their families, and they have often been the scene of antigovernment protests.

  The Kouachi brothers claimed that they had committed the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the name of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, while a video showed Coulibaly pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

  Like hundreds of journalists from all over the world, I headed to Paris to cover the attacks. I was particularly interested in the role of Coulibaly’s wife, Hayat Boumeddiene. She had last been seen in a video on January 2, accompa
nied by another man with terrorist ties, at passport control at an Istanbul airport. Intelligence officials believed that she had since crossed into Syria and was living “under the protection of the caliphate.” Photographs showing her years earlier in a bikini with Coulibaly made their way around the media, raising questions about how and why their lives had changed.

  I had followed the phenomenon of women’s radicalization for years, and I wondered if there were parallels between Boumeddiene’s case and others. Years earlier, I’d met Fatiha al-Mejjati and Malika el-Aroud, two women who hadn’t shown much interest in religion when they were young adults but who found their way to Islamic radicalism nevertheless.

  These women had told me that their ways of living and their clothing choices had once been very Western—Malika had even had a daughter out of wedlock before finding her way to Islam. They said that their interest in religion was spurred by international political circumstances: the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the war in Iraq, the war in Chechnya. Both women would become catalysts for their husbands’ radicalization.

  The two women had never met in person, but their husbands would grow very close to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, where they all lived in the early 2000s.

  I met Fatiha for the first time in Casablanca in 2007. Years earlier, she had been a teacher at a private school in Morocco, but when she grew interested in Islam her colleagues noticed changes; she stopped wearing skirts and began covering her hair. The director of the school urged her to reconsider, but she refused.

  One of her male students, Abdulkarim al-Mejjati, was fascinated by her religious devotion. They began meeting to talk about Islam and politics. Al-Mejjati told Fatiha he wanted to marry her. She demurred, pointing out that he was younger than she.

  “The Prophet Muhammad was also younger than his wife,” al-Mejjati responded.

  His wealthy family opposed the union, but al-Mejjati was determined. They married, and Fatiha gave birth to a son, whom they named Adam; two years later, they had another boy, Ilyas. Along the way, she and al-Mejjati grew even more radical, and in the spring of 2001 they moved to Afghanistan.

  “It was the best times in my life, and I am praying to God that I will be living again under the flag of the Taliban,” she told me, raising her hands as if in prayer.

  From there, the family moved to Saudi Arabia. One day in 2005, while Fatiha was at the doctor’s with Ilyas, Saudi antiterrorism police stormed their apartment and killed al-Mejjati and Adam, then ten years old. Saudi authorities suspected that bin Laden had sent al-Mejjati to lead an Al Qaeda offshoot and that he was planning attacks there.

  Fatiha and eight-year-old Ilyas were arrested and held for months in a Saudi prison. Then they were repatriated to Morocco, where they spent a couple of months in a detention facility. Besides being interrogated about Afghanistan and her husband’s contacts, she said, she could hear other detainees screaming, presumably under torture. Fatiha was not mistreated physically, but she said that her son had been psychically scarred for life.

  I interviewed Fatiha after her release and spoke to her several other times as well. She said her views had not changed in prison; instead she became even more radical. When I saw her in 2011, she still spoke about jihad and the need to fight America and its allies, and she praised bin Laden, who had recently been killed. She referred to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar as “Emir al Mouminin,” or “leader of the faithful,” and told me she wished she could live “under an Islamic leader in a truly Islamic land.”

  In July 2014, she left Morocco for Syria and joined ISIS. She appeared in a few online videos and tweeted that she was planning a suicide attack. Then she disappeared. I heard that she had married an ISIS commander and that Ilyas had gone to work for the group’s media division.

  I met the other woman, Malika el-Aroud, in Brussels in 2008. At the time, she was a prominent Internet jihadist, encouraging men to fight and women to support them. I called her and asked if we could speak about her life and her role as a woman in the world of jihad.

  During that first phone conversation she took notes. When I’d finished speaking, she asked for my name again. “You may call me back in two days,” she said.

  On that second call, her voice was much friendlier. “Salam, sister,” she said warmly. “I spoke to the brothers from the Rafidain Center, and they said it’s okay, I can talk to you.”

  I had no idea what she meant by the Rafidain Center. I thought it might be her mosque. I said I wanted to talk to her, but also to visit some of the places where she spent time. “Maybe we could go to the Rafidain Center,” I suggested.

  There was a long pause. “What?” she asked. She explained that she was talking about the people who translated Osama bin Laden’s speeches online and that no one knew where they were.

  Malika was born in northern Morocco but grew up in Belgium. As a child, she had rebelled against her religion. She married for the first time at eighteen, split up with her husband, and gave birth to a child on her own.

  At a time when she was desperate and poor an imam helped her. She couldn’t read Arabic, but she read the Koran in French and was drawn to a strict version of Islam. As she moved into more radical circles, she met and married a Tunisian fighter loyal to Osama bin Laden named Abdessater Dahmane.

  From the beginning, Malika’s religious fervor was mixed with a feeling of secular outrage. She felt the whole world was against Muslims. In 2001, like Fatiha, she moved with her husband to Afghanistan, where he trained in an Al Qaeda camp, and she lived in Jalalabad, in a compound with other foreign women.

  Malika said the Taliban were a model Islamic government. Her only rebellion was against wearing the burka, the restrictive garment they forced on women, which she called “a plastic bag.” As a foreigner, she was allowed to wear a long black veil instead. “Women didn’t have problems under the Taliban,” she told me. “They had security.”

  Her husband was one of two assassins ordered by bin Laden to kill the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001, two days before the attacks on New York and Washington. Posing as Arab TV journalists who had come to interview the famed resistance leader, the men carried a camera packed with explosives. Dahmane survived the attack but was shot while trying to flee.

  Malika was briefly detained by Massoud’s followers. Frightened, she convinced Belgian authorities to arrange for her safe passage home after the United States began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001.

  Back in Belgium, Malika was one of nearly two dozen defendants tried for complicity in the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud. Wearing a black veil, she testified that she had been doing humanitarian work and was unaware of her husband’s activities. In the end, there was not sufficient evidence to convict her.

  Meanwhile, she rose in stature as the widow of a martyr. She told her story to a journalist who helped write her memoir, and she gained a reputation for urging others to jihad via the Internet. Online, she met Moez Garsallaoui, a Tunisian several years younger who had political refugee status in Switzerland. They married and moved to a small Swiss village, where they ran several pro–Al Qaeda websites and Internet forums that were monitored by Swiss authorities as part of the country’s first Internet-related criminal case.

  Swiss police raided their home and arrested them at dawn in April 2005. A source of mine who headed up the Special Forces unit said that her husband had rushed to the computer to delete incriminating material and that he’d begun trembling when they arrested him. Malika, meanwhile, was absolutely cool. Wearing pajamas, she demanded to be allowed to put on her hijab and cover her face. “She’s quite a strong character,” my source told me.

  Malika later said that the Swiss police beat and blindfolded her husband and manhandled her while she was sleeping unveiled. Convicted in 2008 of promoting violence and supporting a criminal organization, she received a six-month suspended sentence.

  Her husband, who was convicted of more serious charges, was released after just t
wenty-three days in prison. The Swiss authorities suspected he was recruiting to carry out attacks and that he had connections to terrorist groups operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan. By 2014, the authorities said that they had lost track of him after he was released from jail, and Malika wouldn’t tell them where he was, saying only, “He is on a trip.” Malika was eventually sentenced to an eight-year prison term in Belgium.

  Now, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, there was another woman of North African descent who was the widow of a “martyr” in a major international operation. I was now working on contract for the Post, and my colleague Michael Birnbaum and I began to dig into the life of twenty-six-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene. We visited the places where she or her family members had lived, and spoke to her relatives and friends. I also noted that French investigators had found a copy of Malika’s memoir among the belongings in her apartment.

  Along with our French stringer Cléophée Demoustier, Michael and I visited Villiers-sur-Marne, where Boumeddiene had grown up with her parents and siblings.

  Most of the buildings there looked as if they’d needed maintenance ten years ago but had been abandoned. Graffiti covered the walls, and I heard children cursing each other in a mixture of Arabic and French as they stood around watching videos on their smartphones.

  I had been to these suburbs several times before and was familiar with the contrast between the glamorous Paris portrayed in romantic Hollywood movies and the lives of the people in these buildings. Residents complained of racism, saying that when they applied for jobs, the combination of an Arabic-sounding name and their address would often make employers choose someone else. Some even told me they were considering changing their names to sound more French.