I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  At the same time, I saw how highly emotional the situation had become. I tried to hide my discomfort, but when I reached for a glass of water, I felt my hand shake.

  I tried to listen to my inner voice, which said, keep calm. I remembered my grandmother, who didn’t shy away from uncomfortable confrontations and from speaking up. We must show Muslim youth in this country that there are peaceful ways to disagree, I told myself.

  The discussion turned to questions of “Western values” and the rights that Europeans have enjoyed since the Enlightenment. I said that at some stage, it would be important that we as journalists not step into the trap of double standards. If we all agreed that there should be no restrictions on drawings, caricatures, or writing, we couldn’t use different rules depending on what religion we were speaking about.

  As an example, I mentioned the discussion around the so-called Muhammad cartoons that had been published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ten years earlier. The cartoons grew notorious after they were reprinted in a Norwegian magazine, spurring outrage and protests across the Middle East. In January 2006, gunmen raided the European Union’s office in Gaza, demanding an apology. Jyllands-Posten apologized, but newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain reprinted the cartoons as a mark of defiance. Danish and Norwegian embassies across the Middle East were attacked. That February, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons and was sued by Muslim groups for publicly insulting Islam, a claim that was later dismissed.

  In 2008, several Danish papers, including Jyllands-Posten, reprinted one of the cartoons. Osama bin Laden responded with a video threatening revenge. In the years that followed, a Somali Muslim was jailed for entering the home of a Danish cartoonist with an ax and a knife, five men were arrested for allegedly planning a massacre at Jyllands-Posten, and Charlie Hebdo’s offices were burned and its website attacked after it published more Muhammad cartoons. In 2013, two years before the Paris attacks, the magazine was sued again by Muslim groups for inciting racial hatred.

  What the whole world remembers are the pictures of violent protests in various countries, some radical groups calling for the killing of the cartoonists, and several Muslim countries boycotting Danish products. Politicians and journalists in Europe immediately spoke about freedom of speech, and for weeks and months there were debates about whether Muslims were capable of living in a democracy.

  But the story of the “Muhammad cartoons” wasn’t that simple. For an earlier book, Die Kinder des Dschidad (The Children of Jihad), my coauthors and I had gone to Denmark and researched the whole story. We learned that before the Muhammad cartoons were published, Jyllands-Posten had refused to print cartoons depicting Jesus in a derogatory manner because they believed those drawings would hurt readers’ feelings.

  I told this story to my fellow guests. Döpfner said he had never heard this, and if it turned out to be true, it would indeed be a scandal. It occurred to me that many people didn’t seem to know even the basic facts about these controversies. They didn’t seem to understand that by enforcing double standards and being unwilling to engage in an honest and healthy discussion about ethics, freedom of speech, and hate speech, the West would keep losing more young Europeans into the hands of radicals who told them that the West was at war against Islam.

  When I checked my email, Twitter, and Facebook accounts after the debate, I found a few supportive messages from people who said they were grateful that I’d stood my ground.

  But there were many more attacks and threats. Some urged me to “pack and go back to Turkey.” I was called a “Muslim bitch” and a “whore.” A couple of people seemed especially upset about my “daring to contradict a German man like Mr. Döpfner.”

  There were also two threats against my life. “We will get you,” one email read. It contained an attachment with drawings of knives and guns. The other message called me an “enemy of the German race” and said that I would soon be dealt with.

  I spoke to one of my police sources about the emails. He told me to keep an eye out for similar messages and cautioned me not to reveal my home address. Even publicly identifying my home city could be dangerous, he told me.

  The backlash after the TV roundtable followed me for some time. Two journalist friends stopped speaking to me because they were upset by my suggestion that we needed to talk as a society about where freedom of speech ended and hate speech began. During a heated debate with another journalist at a friend’s dinner party, I asked why, if freedom of speech was sacrosanct, I was being attacked and threatened simply for saying what I thought.

  “All those Muslims who are complaining about our freedom of speech or who feel offended by our cartoons and our values, they don’t belong here and should just leave,” she replied.

  I told her that if she wanted to ban Muslims or other people from speaking freely and peacefully raising questions, it would be the beginning of the end for “freedom of speech.” The whole time, I couldn’t stop wondering where we were heading if even people who considered themselves liberal intellectuals were trying to ban speech that made them uncomfortable. “So does that mean the ‘good and acceptable’ Muslim has to shut up, not participate in intellectual debate, and shouldn’t dare to disagree with the prevailing wisdom?” I asked. Or are people like me, who have lived here all our lives, to keep quiet, or else we will be seen as siding with Al Qaeda or ISIS? I didn’t say this out loud, but it weighed on my mind.

  I said that killing journalists or people who drew unpopular cartoons should never be an option. But I also asked if she was aware that there had been a time when Jews had been attacked in cartoons in Germany, too. Hadn’t we been taught in school that something like that shouldn’t happen again?

  14

  The Search for an Islamist Beatle, or Finding Jihadi John

  Britain, 2014–15

  The email from David Bradley arrived one day in October 2014. Bradley was the chairman of Atlantic Media in Washington, DC, the publisher of the Atlantic and several other U.S. media outlets. I didn’t know him personally, but he was contacting me as part of a mission to free several journalists who had been kidnapped by ISIS.

  “I’m raising a topic that may tax your sources unfairly,” Bradley wrote. “I’m writing you to ask if you have any idea how I can open a back channel to the ISIS leadership.”

  Bradley’s connection to the ISIS hostages had begun with James Foley, a freelance journalist from New Hampshire who had been kidnapped in Syria in November 2012. Bradley had gotten to know Foley’s family a year earlier, when Foley had been held hostage in Libya. Bradley had helped free Foley along with another reporter, Clare Gillis, who was freelancing for the Atlantic.

  This time, Foley had been captured in Syria while on assignment for the website GlobalPost, along with the photographer John Cantlie. Foley was moved often and tortured. By the spring of 2014, he and several other hostages had reportedly been moved to a prison on a mountain fifteen miles east of the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was now the capital of the Islamic State. The whole place was a heavily fortified military zone; by now its existence was an open secret. It was known locally as one of the three most important ISIS prisons in Raqqa Province. Even Amnesty International knew about it.

  The U.S. military had raided the prison in July, but by then the hostages had been moved again. Foley’s family received a final email from his captors in early August, and two weeks later he was beheaded; a video of his killing was posted to YouTube on August 19. In September, the group executed Steven Sotloff, another American journalist.

  Now Bradley was directing his efforts toward freeing an American soldier turned humanitarian worker named Peter Kassig, who was still being held by the Islamic State. I spoke to Bradley and began looking for more information about Kassig and the circumstances of his captivity. Because he had been a soldier in the U.S. Army, I worried that he might be working for an intelligence agency and that he was only posing as an aid worker. But when I saw how easy it was to learn of his former mil
itary service online, I realized that was wrong. If he’d been undercover, there would have been more done to erase public information about his past.

  Bradley told me that he had been in touch with some tribal chiefs in Iraq, but when I asked if he was in contact with anyone at ISIS, he said no. The tribal chiefs had access to parts of Iraq where ISIS was operating, but that was as close as they came to the terrorist group.

  Peter Kassig had been raised in Indiana and had enlisted in the army as an infantryman in 2006. He served with the army’s Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, deploying to Iraq from April to July 2007, and was medically discharged later that year.

  In March 2012, while on spring break from Butler University, he traveled to Lebanon to work as a volunteer emergency medical technician. Several months later, he founded Special Emergency Response and Assistance (SERA), an NGO devoted to providing emergency medical supplies for Syrians living in the conflict zone. In 2013, he moved SERA’s base of operations to Gaziantep, Turkey. He was seized that October in eastern Syria, while traveling in an ambulance.

  His family said that he’d developed a deep interest in Islam before his capture and had begun the conversion process to Islam the previous year. He had changed his name to Abdul-Rahman Kassig.

  In addition to Foley and Sotloff, ISIS had also beheaded two British hostages, David Haines and Alan Henning. There was usually just a short period of time between the killings and when the videos appeared on the Internet, showing the victims dressed in orange jumpsuits that were supposed to look like those worn by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

  The same masked man always spoke first in the beheading videos, addressing President Obama directly and attacking him and his allies. He was known as Jihadi John, a name given to him by former hostages who reported that he and three other ISIS guards came from the United Kingdom. The hostages called them “the Beatles,” and Jihadi John was their most prominent member.

  Bradley’s aim was to get Kassig out alive. I made a list of all the things I’d learned about Kassig. I Skyped with Bradley and asked if my information about his conversion was accurate. Bradley said it was, as far as he knew.

  “This could be of huge help,” I told him. I noted down some names on a piece of paper, sources of mine who were members and sympathizers of ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and various go-betweens. I would contact them all to help free Kassig.

  Even though ISIS had not recently had good relations with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, I knew that there were still links among them. Maybe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, would think twice before killing a Muslim man whom other militants vouched for.

  “Are you sure he is Muslim, and he was Muslim before he was taken?” one former bin Laden associate asked when I contacted him.

  “Yes, Sheikh, he is Muslim and was before he was kidnapped,” I answered, even though I felt a hostage’s life shouldn’t depend on whether he was Muslim. But it was the only obvious argument we had, one chance to avoid another beheading.

  For a brief period, I checked in with Bradley and my sources almost daily. I heard that lots of people, including tribal chiefs from Iraq’s Anbar Province, had been mobilized. Videos usually appeared a week to ten days apart. When no new one emerged, our hopes grew.

  “Tell her the shura is discussing his case,” ISIS commander Abu Yusaf told a contact, who relayed the message to me. The shura was a council that advised al-Baghdadi. In the end, it would be his decision to make. (Abu Yusaf was the commander I’d interviewed near the Turkish-Syrian border earlier that year, soon after the German intelligence services assured me that it was again safe for me to travel there.)

  Then suddenly things changed. Media reports now said that Kassig and several other hostages had converted to Islam only after they were taken, to get better treatment from their captors. A short time later I received a message asking me to call the man who was acting as a go-between in relaying messages to and from Abu Yusaf.

  “You saw the articles?” my contact said when I reached him. “You know what this means, right?”

  “Maybe the articles are not accurate. Have you thought about this?”

  “Souad, the people from the shura read as well. There were already some who had this suspicion, and now they say even the media is confirming it.”

  I felt helpless as I racked my brain for arguments to convince him otherwise.

  “Please, what can we do? There must be something,” I said.

  “There is nothing. It’s better for you to stop insisting; otherwise they will think you knew he was not Muslim and lied.”

  I went home with the devastating feeling that this was it for Kassig. I reached out to Bradley and asked if he had seen the reports. He had, and he was surprised. He told me he appreciated all the help, but he understood that this might jeopardize my relationship with my sources and said he wouldn’t want to put me in that danger.

  “I am very sorry,” I told him, “and I am sorry for the family.” In the days that followed, I scoured the Internet for any news or ISIS publications. I was hoping that Kassig might still have a chance.

  On November 16, our hopes were dashed. A video appeared, showing ISIS executioners simultaneously beheading several Syrian pilots, followed by the man in black talking directly to Obama and the American people about Peter Kassig. It ended with a shot of Kassig’s severed head on the ground between Jihadi John’s legs.

  It felt like a personal defeat. I stared at my laptop screen and asked the masked man, “Why are you doing this?” It was clear from the way he spoke English that he had either grown up in the United Kingdom or spent a lot of time there.

  There he was, hiding behind his mask and taking someone else’s life. I fervently hoped that one day his mask would be torn off and the world would learn his true identity.

  * * *

  ABOUT A WEEK after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, while I was still in Paris, I got a call from Peter Finn. He wanted me to talk to another Post reporter, Adam Goldman, who was trying to identify the ISIS militants known to hostages as “the Beatles.”

  Adam’s booming voice and thick New York accent reminded me of a character from a detective movie. He told me he’d heard that Jihadi John was of Yemeni descent, that his first name was Mohammed, and that he came from East London. He asked if I had good contacts in the Yemeni community in London. Not exactly, I told him, but I did have sources among radical Muslims there. I had reported in London and its suburbs after the transit attacks of 2005, and I’d interviewed Omar Bakri, a prominent British Islamist cleric, and some others who didn’t often talk to reporters. I told Adam I’d ask around.

  I made some calls, but no one wanted to talk on the phone, so I flew to London. Once there, I reached out to ISIS and Al Qaeda supporters, jihadi recruiters, and a handful of Bakri’s former students. The identities of “the Beatles” was a hot topic around London, I learned. Some of my sources told me that even if they knew who the men were, they wouldn’t tell me for fear of being punished as collaborators or supporters, since they hadn’t shared their information with the police.

  One of my sources was a bit older and lived outside the city. He had been involved with a couple of high-level Al Qaeda operatives and was seen as a sort of godfather by many radical young men in and around London. The man said he’d heard rumors about Jihadi John, and he thought he might have met him before he left to join ISIS.

  “Is he Yemeni?” I asked.

  There was silence, then laughter. “Who told you Yemeni?”

  “So it isn’t Mohammed from Yemen?”

  “It is Mohammed, but not from Yemen.”

  “East London?”

  “Not East. And I tell you, Souad, this man’s story is different than anything before. I can’t say more than that.”

  He wouldn’t tell me the man’s surname or his country of origin. The name “Mohammed” is as common as John, Paul, or George in London.

  I called Adam. Was he sure that Jihadi John was Yemeni? That’s
what his sources had told him, he said. I suggested we broaden our search. I spent the next day in my hotel room, going over notes from my interview with Abu Yusaf, especially the parts when he talked about the “brothers from Britain.” I also reviewed published interviews with released ISIS hostages in which they spoke about “the Beatles” and learned that one hostage reported that Jihadi John was obsessed with Somalia and would show the captives videos about it. I had met one former French hostage myself, and I pored over my notes from our conversation, looking for clues. Finally I watched some of the terrible ISIS beheading videos again and listened to what Jihadi John said and how he said it. Then I made a list:

  Mohammed

  videos of Somalia

  London (not East)

  not Yemeni

  The ISIS commander told me, “We have brothers from Britain of various descents: Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, and even Kuwaiti.”

  educated/university degree

  deep hatred/personal vendetta

  The last two items were based in part on instinct. In the ISIS videos, Jihadi John sounded educated; Abu Yusaf had also told me about the “brothers from Britain” with university degrees, and one of the freed hostages had said that his captors seemed well educated. “Deep hatred/personal vendetta” was a hunch based on Jihadi John’s tone as he raged against British prime minister David Cameron, President Obama, and U.S. foreign policy. Something had angered him; the wound seemed personal.

  I looked again at Abu Yusaf’s words: We have brothers from Britain of various descents: Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, and even Kuwaiti. I knew already from Adam’s information that Jihadi John must be of Arab descent, so I crossed out “Pakistani” and “Somali.” That left Kuwait as his most likely country of origin. I made a new list:

  Mohammed

  Kuwaiti

  London

  hatred/personal vendetta

  educated/university degree

  videos about Somalia

  I set up another round of meetings, including one with a source linked to the Finsbury Park mosque in North London, a well-known center of jihadist recruiting. We met at 2:00 a.m. on the outskirts of the city. I took a taxi to a cabstand, paying in cash so the intelligence services, if they were watching, couldn’t track my whereabouts too easily. My source picked me up there and drove me to a coffee shop owned by a friend. The place was closed at that hour, and it was just the three of us: my source and me sitting at a small table while the owner did paperwork at his desk in back.