He said that from an early age, he’d trained himself in Thai boxing, tae kwon do, and Brazilian jujitsu. Social workers in Germany later sent him to a working farm in Namibia that aimed to put juvenile delinquents on a better path. The point of the place was to shock him and others out of their aggression and show them how good they had it back home. It was like going into the army, Cuspert said. They had to wake up at dawn to work on the farm, which grew vegetables and fruit and raised animals. It was a structured environment with strict discipline, but for Cuspert it was also the first time he lived in a mainly black community. He enjoyed the few weeks he spent there, but his behavior and worldview didn’t change much.
In the 1990s, he found a new outlet for his anger when he started rapping under the name Deso Dogg, “Deso” being short for “Devil’s Son.” Cuspert felt that through music he would be able to reach hundreds or thousands of young people, air his political grievances, and speak frankly about social issues. He rapped about a stint in juvenile detention, racism, war, and occasionally religion. In 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, Cuspert and his stepfather engaged in endless political arguments.
“Were you doing all this to piss your stepfather off,” I asked, “or because you really believed Saddam Hussein was innocent?”
He paused for a few seconds. “I think I wanted to piss my stepfather off, but I also was against this U.S. imperialism. They always think they can decide what should happen in other countries, and I didn’t like it.”
“But if I remember right, the Gulf states supported the U.S. intervention in 2003, because Saddam’s army had entered Kuwait in 1990. Or at least they didn’t object to the invasion.”
He smiled. “Yes indeed, you are right. But those rulers are all in the pockets of America. They are all traitors, and so, God willing, soon they will all disappear.”
His music career soared. In 2006, he toured with the American hip-hop artist DMX. Cuspert’s most famous song, which begins, “Welcome to my world, full of hatred and blood,” was featured in the 2010 German film Civil Courage. The video shows Cuspert engaged in the ritual washing that Muslims practice before prayers.
As his reputation grew, he gained fans. If he’d kept at it, he might have become as famous as Bushido, a half-German, half-Tunisian rapper who rose to prominence at about the same time and went on to fill stadiums and make millions. But after a bad car accident in 2010, Cuspert said that he began to feel that he’d been wasting his life in the pursuit of fame and recognition. He grew restless and started digging into his background. His biological father had been Muslim, but Cuspert had not been raised in the faith. Now he began to learn more about Islam, and in time he grew convinced that Allah had allowed him to survive the car accident so he could find a new path in life.
He stopped rapping. He now saw such music as haram: forbidden. Instead, he began singing the Islamic songs known as nasheeds, which often serve as sound tracks to videos issued by ISIS and other jihadi groups, and he turned his attention to fighting the United States and the West. He told me he’d reached out to a Taliban contact and sworn his allegiance to Mullah Omar, and that he began to follow the teachings of preachers such as Anwar al-Awlaki, the charismatic American-born inspiration to a generation of young jihadists, who would be killed in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011 after joining Al Qaeda in Yemen. He also listened to the speeches of Osama bin Laden, whom he saw not as a terrorist but as a Robin Hood type who’d left a comfortable life to help those less fortunate. When bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in May 2011, Cuspert would tell me he was happy the Al Qaeda leader had died a martyr.
I sensed that Cuspert was looking for answers, but I also knew that most imams, at least in Germany, wouldn’t provide them. If he went to their mosques, started talking about politics, and asked what the religion would say about these matters, they’d have been inclined to turn him away out of concern that the intelligence services might shut them down. So instead of discussing his concerns, he began connecting with like-minded people online and grew even more radical.
While many in the West viewed the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere across the region as harbingers of democratic change, Cuspert saw them as an opportunity for anti-Western Islamists to gain power and operate more freely.
“What democracy?” he asked me. “This is not compatible with Islam, and all the people want Islam.”
I asked where he had gotten the idea that Islam wasn’t compatible with democracy. He smiled and answered that he had heard the sermon of a sheikh online—he refused to tell me the man’s name—and then chatted with him about it. Cuspert seemed troubled about his own life, as well as what he saw as Western hegemony. His disaffection made him easy prey for jihadist recruiters, who knew exactly what to say to people like him. While three of the four September 11 pilots had been recruited and influenced by jihadi veterans or preachers, we were now dealing with a new, European-born generation of radicals, such as the Austrian Mohamed Mahmoud, whom Cuspert had also mentioned as an inspirational figure. Mahmoud not only spoke fluent German but also understood the language of youth, which made him even more compelling to Cuspert, who didn’t speak Arabic at the time.
“But that’s not what most of the people are marching for,” I told him. I hadn’t seen anyone demonstrating in favor of Sharia law.
He smiled again. “Don’t think about what you see. The world will worry about what can’t be seen now.”
He told me he had been in touch with “brothers” in Tunisia who had been imprisoned because they were preaching about Islam. “Can you imagine?” he said. “They were jailed and tortured by people who also call themselves Muslims, but God gave them patience and they are free now, thanks to Allah.”
And thanks to the Arab Spring, I thought. I asked Cuspert if he planned to go and fight.
“God willing, when my time comes, I will,” he answered, adding only that he would do battle “in a country where they speak the language of the holy Koran.”
This was the first of several conversations I had with Cuspert that spring. The more we spoke, the more I wondered if there was some kind of underground network of jihadists that was taking advantage of the Arab Spring. I wasn’t sure how seriously to take what he was telling me, so I asked around.
“This guy is just a bigmouth. We don’t think he matters,” one security official told me. “You’re wasting your time with him.”
But I remained intrigued, especially by Cuspert’s certainty.