“Was it Pierre Vogel?” I asked. I had followed Vogel’s activities for years. A former boxer, he had converted to Islam in 2001 and had become one of Germany’s prominent self-proclaimed preachers. He liked to give public speeches in slang-laden, colloquial language that was especially attractive to young people and those who didn’t know much about Islam. He was one of those people the German authorities kept an eye on, and I’d long wondered how people like him made a living and paid for rallies across Germany. Lately, he’d been talking a lot about the need to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. While some German Salafists publicly encouraged young Muslims to join the fight against Assad, Pierre Vogel’s position was contradictory, arguing at different times both for and against joining the fight, though he always called for donations to support Syrian groups.
This was the very man Pero had gone to hear, I learned. “He told me that he would come back the next day, but he didn’t,” Bagica said, bursting into tears again. The family tried to call him all day. They called his friends asking where he was, but no one knew.
The next morning, Bagica’s cell phone rang. “It was Pero,” she said. “I asked him where he was. He said, ‘I’m in Syria.’”
Pero’s sisters began to wail, and Mitko stood up to leave the room. I suspected he didn’t want us to see that he was crying, too.
I asked if she’d heard any more from Pero.
“Yes. Sometimes he sends a message on WhatsApp.”
“Do you know who he’s with?”
“No. He only speaks about some emir who decides when he can use his phone.”
“What do they do all day?” I asked.
“He said there was a sheikh who speaks to them about Islam, and they show them the videos and pictures of dead Syrians, you know, the people killed by what’s-his-name…” Bagica trailed off.
“Assad?”
She nodded. She told me that they didn’t often talk about politics or foreign affairs at home. But about five months earlier, Pero suddenly developed a keen interest in the Middle East. He also tried to grow a beard but only ended up with a soft fuzz on his chin.
He would meet with his friends every day to pray in mosques and study in small groups at somebody’s home, Bagica said. They also set up stands in the city center, giving away Korans and inviting people to learn more about Islam.
I asked what they wanted me to do. “You know I am a journalist, not the police,” I reminded them.
They told me they had gone to the police but were told they couldn’t do much. “We can’t just wait here and do nothing,” Mitko said. “This is my child we’re talking about.”
“Did Pero say anything about returning to Germany?”
“No, but it seems the emir is always reading the messages before he sends them,” Bagica said.
Of course he is, I thought. They didn’t want recruits to disclose their exact location. I didn’t know exactly where Pero was, either, but I knew time was short. Once the “religious teachings” were finished, his handlers would send him to a training camp, where he would be forced to choose whether to become a “fighter” or a suicide bomber, known as undertaking a “martyrdom operation.”
I didn’t want to tell his parents this, but I offered to write about their son’s case, and in that capacity maybe I could ask authorities what they were planning to do or ask my own sources in the Turkish-Syrian border region and elsewhere if they’d heard anything about Pero’s whereabouts.
“I saw you once wrote about this preacher who was doing some deradicalization work, the one who looks like Osama bin Laden,” my friend Serce said. “Please can we get in touch with him? Maybe he can help.”
I knew who she meant, and I couldn’t help smiling. “You better not tell him he looks like bin Laden,” I told her. I said that I couldn’t give them his number without asking him, but I could give him their number if they wanted. They agreed.
Before I left, Mitko had a final request: “Souad, if we decide to go to the Turkish-Syrian border region, would you maybe go with us?”
I knew I couldn’t. The German authorities had told me to stay away.
“Let me see,” I said. I told him it would be up to my editors and that I would likely ask a second reporter to work with me on the piece. If there was a need to travel to the border and I couldn’t go, maybe my colleague could.
As soon as I left their apartment, I sent a text message to Hesham Shashaa, who was also known as Abu Adam, the imam Serce mentioned. He was a onetime journalist who now traveled around the world preaching against militant groups and worked with the German authorities to persuade young people not to join. I’d profiled him several years earlier. He called the family right away.
My next call was to my former colleague Peter Finn, who was now the national security editor at the Washington Post. He was trying to get me to start writing regularly for the paper again, but I was still pitching stories one by one rather than working on contract. He agreed that I should do a story about Pero for the Post, but he told me, “You have to stay out of the Turkish-Syrian border region. There is no way I will let you travel there now.” In addition to the warning from the German intelligence services, U.S. officials had also picked up a possible threat against my life from the border region, which they conveyed to a lawyer for the New York Times, who passed the information on to me.
I told Peter that sources from the former rapper Abu Talha’s group had told me there was nothing to worry about.
“Okay, if they say so,” he said. “But you are not going at this stage.”
Peter put me in touch with Michael Birnbaum, the Post’s bureau chief in Germany, who agreed to jump on the story as soon as possible. Abu Adam also called and said he would visit the family the following day. Michael and I arranged to meet him there.
In the meantime, I learned from German national security sources that Pero had left for Turkey with twenty-two other young men, including at least four other teenagers. Like Pero, most had been born in Germany but came from immigrant families. “They took a cheap flight from Frankfurt to Antalya, and most likely someone picked them up from there and took them to Syria,” one of my sources said.
I wasn’t surprised to hear any of this, but never would I have thought it would happen to someone I knew personally. I knew that parents and other relatives often don’t realize how serious these situations can be. Their children’s companions often instruct them not to trust their parents because they don’t follow the “right interpretation” of Islam.
Now, in the midst of a destabilizing civil war, Syria had become littered with camps where militants trained young men like Pero from all over the world. While his parents—like any other parents—were only thinking about getting their son back, I wondered if he was already so completely brainwashed that he might become a threat to the rest of his family or the community if he returned.