I Was Told to Come Alone Page 29

  As my colleagues and I walked around the area where Boumeddiene had grown up, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have become of me if I had come of age in a place like that. What would have become of anyone?

  It wasn’t an excuse for turning into a terrorist or a criminal. But growing up in a place like Villiers-sur-Marne can make it easy for youngsters to feel alienated. I remembered the mixture of anger and fear I felt as a teenager when I learned that the houses of Turkish migrants had been burned in Solingen and Mölln. Living in an affluent neighborhood such as Holzhausen had meant we weren’t surrounded by other migrants who felt frustrated by persistent discrimination. I’d been inspired by the words my grandparents spoke to me as a child and the presence of my parents and my godparents, who constantly told me that if I worked hard I’d have a chance in life.

  What encouragement did Hayat Boumeddiene have? And what about some of the teenagers and young men we saw now, standing around these public housing complexes? The place was not inviting. Many of the kitchens looked identical, with packages of vegetables or shelf-safe milk in the windows. African and Arabic music played through open windows, and people talked loudly inside the apartments. There was concrete everywhere, and no greenery or playgrounds. Small children didn’t play here, it seemed, though we did see four guys standing in a circle in a shadowy corner, handling something we thought might be drugs. As we watched, an old man in a prayer cap passed, leaning on a stick.

  Boumeddiene had grown up in one of these buildings. Her mother had died from a heart ailment when she was eight years old, family friends told us. “Her father had six children. He had to work and thought he had no other choice but to marry another woman,” one of his friends said. It sounded like a convenient explanation for questionable behavior.

  He remarried within a month of his first wife’s death. But his new bride clashed with her stepchildren. “There was constant fighting at home,” one of the family friends told us. “The father eventually took the side of his new wife.”

  For Boumeddiene and her siblings, that meant being thrown out of the house or given away. She was sent to a group home when she was thirteen. The family she stayed with came from the same Algerian city as her father.

  Boumeddiene favored makeup and rambling phone calls with friends, said Omar, her foster brother, who spoke on the condition that his family’s last name not be published. We met him in front of his parents’ modest house. It was only a short distance from the tall gray towers of the banlieues, but in a much nicer neighborhood.

  He said that his family was shocked when they learned that she might have been involved in her husband’s plan. To Omar, it was as if they were speaking about a different person. “She was fragile and clearly shaken by her mother’s death,” he said. She wasn’t often in touch with her father, who didn’t seem very interested in her well-being.

  “We introduced her to a very nice man in Algeria, but she didn’t like him,” Omar told us. When she turned eighteen, she moved to Paris, a long-cherished dream. Hungry for freedom and captivated by the idea of travel, she got a job selling sandwiches and coffee on a high-speed train. She loved to go out with friends and window shop. In 2007, a high school friend introduced Boumeddiene to one of her boyfriend’s prison buddies, Amedy Coulibaly, who had just been released after serving time for armed robbery. Like her, he came from a migrant family and had been born in France.

  Back at our hotel in Paris, we examined court documents we’d gathered from various sources, including a police interrogation of Boumeddiene in 2010, after Coulibaly was charged with trying to break a top militant out of a French jail. She said that neither she nor her husband had been very religious when they met, but they’d changed together.

  She told the police about her difficult past and how Islam had answered all her questions and brought her peace. She had grown interested in the faith after she met Coulibaly, when she befriended the wives of some of his prison acquaintances, including the wife of one of the Kouachi brothers. Two years after they met, she and Coulibaly were married in a religious ceremony. (Such marriages are not recognized by French law.) Boumeddiene didn’t attend, explaining that Islam doesn’t require a woman to be present at her wedding. “My father stood in for me,” she told police.

  Boumeddiene quickly became more observant than her husband. He prayed at the mosque “on his own timetable,” every three weeks or so. She, meanwhile, started wearing a full-face veil and quit her job as a cashier at a bakery. She also told police about the circles she and Coulibaly moved through, and how they grew close to Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the future Charlie Hebdo attackers.

  Boumeddiene spoke of “innocent people massacred in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, where Americans send bombs and all that—and they’re not terrorists?” She continued: “When Americans kill innocent people, it’s of course justifiable that men should take up arms to defend their wives and children.”

  At some point during this period, she reconnected with her father. But when I reached him in Algeria after the attacks, all I heard were accusations and excuses. “This girl didn’t grow up in my house. She grew up in the house of nonbelievers. She made all these decisions on her own,” he told me.

  I was taken aback by his coarseness. “That’s all you have to say?” I asked. It was.

  I knew from my own experience how important it was to have a circle of family and friends who were there in moments of adolescent anger, when it was easy to listen to people who told us what we wanted to hear, namely that we were victims—and that all the millions of Muslims in the world were victims.

  In October 2014, Boumeddiene and Coulibaly went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. I asked a Saudi intelligence official if he’d received any information or warnings from his French counterparts about Coulibaly’s terrorism ties when he visited.

  “No, we did not,” he said, “and it’s especially upsetting, because we had no options to decide if we wanted such a person in our country or to react accordingly and follow him so we could see if he was in touch with other people.”

  I asked one of my French sources why France hadn’t shared its information with the Saudis. He told me that the government had hoped that Coulibaly and Boumeddiene “would leave Europe and not come back.” This also helped to explain how so many people who were already well known to police and intelligence services made it to Syria and were now living and fighting there on behalf of the Islamic State.

  In Boumeddiene’s interrogation and according to her friends, she complained about Western policies toward Muslim countries and spoke of racism, discrimination, and the “evil done to innocents in occupied lands.” Yet Boumeddiene had left the country of her birth and joined the so-called Islamic State, whose leaders forced their rules and “laws” upon millions of Syrians and Iraqis, who faced harsh measures when they didn’t obey. As I’d seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don’t notice when they become oppressors.

  * * *

  SEVERAL OF MY sources in the Islamic State had told me that lots of women from Europe were contacting them, hoping to marry members of ISIS. To find out why, I’d started looking for such women. That’s how I found Meryam, a young German convert to Islam. In 2014, one of Meryam’s best friends got in touch and arranged for me to meet her in Berlin.

  We agreed to meet at a subway station and go where we could speak freely. Meryam wore black gloves and a full Islamic veil, with only her green eyes and a slice of pale skin visible through the narrow slit. “Do you like chicken burgers?” she asked me. “It’s halal, of course.”

  I followed her to a restaurant in a neighborhood where many Muslim families lived. The women in this neighborhood might wear hijab, but they also favored bright colors; no one was wearing the full veil. Meryam drew many looks, and she knew it. “Let them watch. I’m used to it. I don’t care.”

  When we entered the restaurant, she greeted the cashier with “As’salam alaikum,” but she spoke Arabic with a heavy
German accent.

  “Good day,” he answered in German.

  Meryam ordered a crunchy spicy chicken burger, fries, and a lemonade. “I don’t drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi. That’s all from kuffar,” she told me.

  In the women’s and family section of the restaurant, she lifted her veil and I saw that her face was spotted with pimples, which made her look as if she was in the midst of puberty. I later learned she was eighteen. As we talked, it became clear that she had been so deeply indoctrinated that she saw the world entirely in black and white. She spent hours in front of the computer and on WhatsApp, chatting with her “brothers and sisters in Syria.” They had answers to all the questions she was asking and sent her links to YouTube videos or pictures from the “caliphate.” One of her friends, an Afghan girl, had already traveled to Syria and was living in a house with other single women, waiting to get married. Meryam told me that life in Germany was unbearable for her. She called the society “racist and lost.” In her eyes, Islam and Muslims were the main targets of oppression and unfair treatment.

  I asked her when and why she got interested in Islam.

  “Bismillah ar rahman ar Rahim,” she began, using an Arabic phrase that means “In the name of God, the most merciful and the most beneficent.” It’s often used by Muslims as an invocation to guarantee the truth of what they’re about to say. “I was fourteen when I converted. A close Muslim friend was killed after a stabbing in the neighborhood, and then I went to his mosque, where the community had gathered to pray for him. That’s when I began to be interested in Islam.”

  She liked the way that in Islam, families and members of the community were supposed to care for one another. People shared food and helped those in need, she said. She felt acceptance and warmth she hadn’t felt in her own family in a long time. Her divorced parents were surprised but took no action to stop her conversion.

  She says that she and other devout Muslims feel ostracized in German society. When she first started wearing a partial head covering, she said, she was already being turned down for jobs. When she started wearing the niqab, it became impossible to find work. At sixteen, she married for the first time. Her husband was a fellow convert, and they discussed going to Syria to live in the caliphate. Meryam said she believed it was her duty as a Muslim to live in an Islamic state, but her husband didn’t want to. She said he wasn’t a real man. She asked for a divorce, and she now had to wait a prescribed period of time before she could remarry.

  Like Meryam, large numbers of Western jihadists have come from troubled or broken homes, where poverty, joblessness, and upheaval are the norm. She reminded me in that sense of Pero, whose parents’ marriage had had problems and whose father had spent time in prison.

  Meryam also had much in common with Hayat Boumeddiene. Like Boumeddiene’s parents, Meryam’s mother and father were divorced. Her father drank, and her mother didn’t take much interest in Meryam or her other children. Growing up, Meryam had to care for her younger siblings.

  In Europe, society is atomized. ISIS advertises its commitment to sisterhood, friends, and family, equality no matter where you come from—Arab, German, American, we’re all Muslims. It represents a utopian vision that many European converts crave. Meryam longed for what she saw at her young friend’s Muslim funeral: a broader, supportive community.

  When I called Meryam’s mother, she had only one question: “How much money are you paying her? We could give her story to a tabloid and get a couple hundred euros.”

  I told her I wasn’t paying and that Meryam had agreed to talk to me.

  It sounded as if Meryam, like Boumeddiene, wanted to fight those she saw as oppressors. And the roles seem very clear to her: “America, Europe, the Arab leaders” were all “taking from the oil and richness in the Islamic world and don’t share with the poor.” There was a “war against Islam,” she said. To her, ISIS and Al Qaeda were heroic. She spoke about “Sheikh Osama” and “Sheikh Abu Musab,” and now, finally, the caliphate.

  “But there are lots of Islamic scholars who say this isn’t the real caliphate and who have spoken up against ISIS,” I countered. “What do you think about this?”

  “Yes, I know,” she answered. “I discussed it with the brothers and sisters online, and they explained to me that those scholars were all paid by the West and the rulers. They were all lying.”

  I asked her who those “brothers and sisters” were.

  “They are in the caliphate. They said what we read and see here in the media is all wrong, and that life is very good there.”

  “What is missing in your life here?” I asked.

  “I don’t feel safe in Europe. All those right-wing parties, they hate Muslims.”

  “But if this is about safety, why would you go to Syria, where there is a war?”

  “It is our duty to leave the land of the unbeliever, to go and live in the caliphate,” she said. “Also, I want to get married to a real man, someone who is living his religion the right way and is willing to fight for it.”

  Various intelligence sources had told me that they saw a growing fascination with the idea of the caliphate among young people from Europe, including women. Meryam’s plans to move to Syria were real, and she was already picturing her future there. The man she planned to wed was a Tunisian-born fighter for the Islamic State, she said. “He came to Europe with a group of other fighters of Yemeni and Chechen descent.”

  “How did they get here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know for sure, I think via Tunisia, but we don’t speak about such things.”

  I thought she must be naïve not to understand the danger she faced, until she added, “I don’t want to know these details. There are so many informants in the community, and intelligence services are listening to calls and reading messages, so when I don’t know about things, I cannot speak about them.” She smiled.

  I wondered if it was her way of telling me that she wasn’t as innocent as she seemed.

  “What are they doing here?” I asked.

  She said they sometimes went around and met with people, but he wouldn’t tell her where and with whom. Meryam and her boyfriend once visited a mosque in Berlin called the House of Peace, where her betrothed was outraged by the imam’s sermons against the Islamic State. “He said … these people are nonbelievers,” Meryam told me.

  I asked if she was in love with her future husband. “He is handsome, and he loves his religion,” she began. “But it’s very difficult to communicate because he speaks Arabic and French, and I only speak German and some English.”

  She would become his second wife. She worried she might be jealous.

  “But you still would accept to become the second wife?”

  “Yes. I believe I have found the right man.” She grabbed a few French fries. “Don’t you want to get married and have kids? Isn’t something missing in your life now?”

  I took a big bite of my chicken burger, not because I was hungry, but because I wanted a few seconds to think about how to answer.

  “If your question is, do I want to get married and have children, well yes, that would be wonderful,” I said. I thought that was the end of the conversation.

  “Maybe I can ask my future husband if he knows one of the brothers there who is looking for another wife,” she said, laughing.

  I thanked her for the kind offer but told her it wasn’t really for me. I did ask Meryam if I could meet her future husband, though. “Maybe we can have a coffee somewhere, or another of these chicken burgers?”

  It seemed unlikely that he would agree, but I figured it was worth a try. She promised to ask him and get back to me.

  My conversation with Meryam was in December 2014, just a month before the Paris attacks. I tried to get back in touch with her afterward, but her phone number had been disconnected.

  She must have gone, I thought. I wondered if she and Hayat Boumeddiene would meet.

  Meanwhile, one of Germany’s best-known talk shows, Günther Jauch, named for its
host, asked me to discuss the Paris attacks, cartoons about Muhammad, and what would come next. The invitation didn’t thrill me. Yes, I was a professional journalist. Yes, I had covered extremism and the so-called War on Terror for many years. But I knew there was a big risk that I would be pushed into the role of “the Muslim” in a forum like this. Yet I accepted. Maybe this would be a good moment to build bridges, to explain and reach wise and moderate Muslims and others who could speak up, too, and contribute to a healthy debate.

  The other guests were Germany’s interior minister; the CEO of the Axel Springer publishing house; and a German journalist and former news presenter who had lived in France for many years. We debated freedom of the press, the reason why groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS had called for the killing of cartoonists, and so on.

  I made it very clear that killing journalists or cartoonists was unacceptable based on my understanding of Islam and my own principles, even if people disagreed with what somebody had drawn or written. Günther Jauch asked why such drawings didn’t make it to the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post. I explained that the leading American newspapers didn’t publish satirical or otherwise offensive drawings that could spur hate against a particular race or religion.

  I went on to tell the group that I’d recently been in the United States for book talks about The Eternal Nazi, and I related how some Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community said they’d been worried when they saw some of the drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Europe. “They said it reminded them of how the Nazis insulted Jews and Judaism. So maybe it would be important to have a discussion about when does freedom of speech end and hate speech begin?”

  The moment I said this, Mathias Döpfner, the Axel Springer CEO, seemed to grow enraged. I waited until he finished and explained that he had misunderstood me. I wasn’t saying that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and Nazi propaganda were identical, only relaying what members of the Jewish community in the United States had said.