I met with the police the next day. We were four people around a table. One of the men read from a file. He explained that apparently the German ex-rapper Cuspert, aka Deso Dogg, aka Abu Maleeq, and now known as Abu Talha al-Almani, had had a conversation with one of his comrades somewhere along the Turkish-Syrian border. “There was some talk about whether you were married or not,” the German official said, looking down at his file. “And, well, apparently the plan was to get you to the Turkish-Syrian border region, supposedly for an exclusive interview.”
His voice sounded as if he were just reading from some file, but it was my life he was talking about. “So basically,” he continued, “if you went there for the interview, they would kidnap you and tell you to marry one of them or you would be beheaded, and a video would be made of this.”
“They want to force me to marry one of them?” I said.
“That’s what the threat says.”
I was told not to travel to the border region, or anywhere nearby.
Since I didn’t know who had reported the threat to the Germans, I decided to reach out to my contacts around the ex-rapper now calling himself Abu Talha.
“Maybe they were making some bad joke once about this, because Abu Talha asked if you had gotten married since you met last time, but there is nothing serious, by God,” one of the jihadists told me. “Maybe some intelligence services want to silence you because you don’t write the way they want? Arab Spring and so on.”
I had reached the point where I didn’t know whom to believe. Anyone might have taken what I wrote personally and decided to personally get back at me. I decided to take off for Morocco and spend a few days in the mountains. I needed a break.
The morning I was supposed to leave for the airport, I received a Facebook message: “As’salam alaikum, Sister Souad. I am supposed to send you regards from Abu Talha. He said he has no problem with you, what you heard is not true, and he wishes you all the best, wa alaikum as ’salam.”
12
Boys for the Caliphate
Germany, 2013
In the fall of 2013, I was interviewing a Syrian refugee family in the Zaatari camp in Jordan when my phone vibrated in my bag. My voice mail picked up, and the buzzing stopped. Then it started again. On the screen, I saw an old friend’s number blinking, followed by a text message: “Please call me back. It’s urgent.”
As soon as we were out of the camp, I returned the call.
“Souad, thank God you called back. We have a big catastrophe. You remember my nephew, Pero? He has left Germany with a group of people and gone to Syria.”
I thought I had misheard her. “What are you saying? Pero?” I said, trying to piece it together. “Your Pero, who was giggling about the Miss Piggy cake we got some years ago for your birthday?”
I could hear her fighting back tears. “Yes, my Pero,” my friend whispered. She asked me not to use her name or the names of her family members, so I’ll call her Serce.
In my mind I played back a scene from eight years earlier, when we’d celebrated Serce’s thirtieth birthday with her family, including Pero and his sisters. The highlight had been a specially made cake in the form of Miss Piggy, because Serce had been a great fan of the Muppets as a kid. My friends and I got her the cake as a joke.
It was Pero, eight years old at the time, who had carried the cake into the room and giggled when his aunt kissed him. Now she was telling me that he’d begun to spend hours each day with a new group of friends his age. “He changed. He didn’t go out much and started talking about religion,” she said. I told her it was a typical pattern, one that had been described to me by many other parents whose children had left.
“What do you think is happening with him now?” she asked. “What will he do there?”
“Let’s talk about it when we meet in person.” I didn’t want to tell her over the phone that Pero was probably on a journey to become a jihadist, that he was probably now in the midst of being indoctrinated, or that he might end up fighting and perhaps dying far from home, with boys he barely knew.
“Souad, my family and I, we want to speak to you. Please, can you come?”
On the flight to Germany, I thought about the thousands of other families who were also seeing their children head off to fight a war that had begun as part of the illusory Arab Spring.
Pero’s family was devastated. I arranged to meet his parents, two sisters, and aunt at the boy’s family home. His mother, Bagica, cried throughout the meeting, while his father, Mitko—Serce’s brother—begged her to stop. They accused each other of not realizing soon enough what was happening to their son.
“Enough now!” Serce finally shouted. “You guys have to stop and think about helping Pero now.”
“I have no idea why he would think that he has to go to Syria now. This is not our war,” Mitko said. “And then all this talk about jihad? I don’t understand.”
What have we done wrong, the families of boys like Pero would often ask. Why my child? Many times, there was a deep-rooted conflict between the parents, or a conflict between the father and his sons. These were common problems in Muslim migrant families, including Pero’s.
Pero was now sixteen. His family had emigrated from Macedonia before his birth, and they doted on him. Whenever I visited, his aunt would cuddle him or lightly squeeze his jaws, while his grandmother was always telling him to eat more of her beef stews and meatballs. They practiced a liberal form of Islam that included dancing and occasional drinking. They were hardworking, middle-class people. My friend Serce had run her own business for years. Bagica worked in a grocery store. Pero’s father, Mitko, was the wild card. Serce had often told me that her brother had a temper. “I have done a lot of things wrong in the past,” Mitko said. “I paid a heavy price and I have learned my lesson.” He’d been arrested and convicted on a drug charge when Pero was a boy and had missed much of his son’s childhood.
Bagica tried to stop crying. “What are they doing now with him there? Is he in danger?” she asked me.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. “Please start from the beginning.”
Bagica explained that on the night Pero left, he was supposed to sleep over at a friend’s house. “He came to me, gave me a long hug, kissed me, and said he was going to a rally in the city center,” she recalled, crying.
“What rally?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Something about Syria. Some German preacher who he wanted to listen to—what was his name again?”