As we drove, he explained his vision: ISIS would free Muslims from Palestine to Morocco and Spain and then go farther, spreading Islam all over the world. Anyone who resisted would be treated as an enemy. “If the U.S. hits us with flowers, we will hit them back with flowers,” Abu Yusaf said. “But if they hit us with fire, we will hit them back with fire, also inside their homeland. This will be the same with any other Western country.”
ISIS had plenty of resources and expertise, he told me. In fact, the group had begun quietly establishing itself long before it appeared on the world stage. Its members included educated people from Western countries, highly trained security officers from Saddam Hussein’s presidential guard, and former Al Qaeda acolytes. “You just think we have nutcases coming to join us?” he asked. “No. We have people from all over the world. We have brothers from Britain with university degrees and of various descents: Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, and even Kuwaiti.” Later, I would realize that he was also talking about the guards that several ISIS hostages would dub “the Beatles”: Jihadi John and three others with English accents.
I asked what had pushed him to join the group. Abu Yusaf said that he’d grown fed up with the hypocrisy of Western governments, which were always talking about the importance of human rights and religious freedoms, while relegating their Muslim residents to a kind of second-class citizenship. “In Europe, look how we have been treated,” he told me. “I wanted to be in the society I grew up with, but I felt, ‘You’re just the Muslim, you’re just the Moroccan, you will never be accepted.’”
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been unjust, he said: there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraqis were tortured in Abu Ghraib, and the Americans faced no consequences. “Then they’re pointing at us and saying how barbaric we are.”
“You say you’re against the killing of innocent people,” I said. “So why are you killing and kidnapping innocent people?”
He was silent for a few seconds. “Every country has a chance to get their people free,” he said. “If they don’t, that’s their problem. We didn’t attack them; they attacked us.”
“When you take people hostage, what do you expect?” I responded.
He then started talking about his Moroccan grandfather, who had fought the French colonialists for freedom, drawing a parallel between that jihad and this one. “This is all the outcome of the Americans colonizing Iraq,” he said. “Now we’re fighting the jihad to free the Muslim world.”
But my grandfather had been a freedom fighter in Morocco, too. When I was a little girl, he’d talked to me about that “jihad,” about how Muslims and their “Jewish brothers” had fought to expel the French who had seized control of their ancestral lands. “We did not kill any women and children, and no civilians,” my grandfather had told me. “That’s not allowed in jihad.” His rebellion was nothing like the horrors perpetrated by ISIS.
“But he was in his country,” I said. “This is not your country.”
“This is Muslim land. This is the country of all Muslims.”
“I grew up in Europe like you,” I told him. “I studied like you in Europe.”
“Why do you still believe the European system is fair and just?” he asked.
“What is the alternative?”
“The alternative is the caliphate.”
Our debate had grown heated, personal. There seemed to be so many parallels between his background and mine. Yet we had chosen different paths, and mine wasn’t what he would call the “right way” for a Muslim woman, not the Islamic way.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked. “You really believe that the West respects us? Treats us Muslims equally? The only right way is our way,” by which he meant the way of the so-called Islamic State.
“I’ve read your stuff,” he told me. “You interviewed the head of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Why are you just a reporter? Why don’t you have your own TV show in Germany? Why are you not making a career in Germany, with all the awards you’ve won?”
I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about. Coming of age and making my way professionally as a Muslim in Europe had at times been trying. I don’t wear a head scarf; I’m considered a liberal and a feminist; I’ve cowritten a book about finding one of the last living Nazis in Cairo and won prestigious fellowships in America. But Abu Yusaf was right: I don’t have a TV show in Germany. To rise in my home country as a Muslim migrant, or even as the child of migrants, you have to toe the line and praise Europe’s progressiveness. If you criticize the government too loudly or raise serious questions about anything from foreign policy to Islamophobia, the backlash can be intense.
I obviously didn’t agree with Abu Yusaf that the caliphate was the solution. But I couldn’t help thinking that Western societies and politicians have made little progress toward addressing the policies that radicalize young men like him. More intelligence services putting more restrictions on people is not the solution, nor are global surveillance networks that compromise the privacy of the innocent along with the guilty. Abu Yusaf was part of a generation of young Muslims who were radicalized by the invasion of Iraq, much as the generation before him had been radicalized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In some ways, he reminded me of my younger brother, and I felt a big sister’s responsibility to protect him. But I knew it was too late for that.
“You may be right that we face discrimination and the world is unfair,” I told him. “But this is not the jihad, what you’re fighting. Jihad would have been if you’d stayed in Europe and made your career. It would have been a lot harder. You have taken the easiest way out.”
For a few seconds, no one said anything.
Abu Yusaf had insisted on taking me back to Antakya rather than returning to our original meeting point, and by this time we were close to my hotel. I thanked him and climbed out of the car. Even at this hour, the coffee shops were busy with people eating before dawn, as is common in Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day. I felt glad to have gotten the interview, but I was also worried. Abu Yusaf had spoken with such confidence and fury. “Whoever attacks us will be attacked in the heart of their countries,” he had said, “no matter if it’s the USA, France, Britain, or any Arab country.”
We’re losing one after the other, I thought. This guy could have been somebody different. He could have had a different life.
1
Stranger in a Strange Land
Germany and Morocco, 1978–93
I was born with thick, curly black hair and big brown eyes. My parents were more or less the only immigrants in our Frankfurt neighborhood, and I became something of a local curiosity. Even then, I had a particularly expressive face, but I also drew attention because I didn’t look German. In the park, parents would leave their children and come to look at me. Many U.S. soldiers and their families were stationed in Frankfurt, not far from Klettenbergstrasse, where our apartment was, and they would greet us kindly.