“He might not come alone,” Mitko said in a worried tone. “It might be a bit dangerous, but I can’t stand here and watch as I lose my son.”
I contacted Peter Finn and told him the family was getting ready for their trip to Antakya. “I still don’t want to see you near the border at the moment,” Peter told me. “We have to be careful.”
I was disappointed not to be able to go with Pero’s family to Turkey, but I kept in touch with Serce via text messages and phone calls. Mitko had a contact in the Turkish police, a family friend who put him in touch with the counterterrorism unit in the Turkish-Syrian border region.
Bagica stayed in contact with her son, telling him that only she and Serce were coming to see him. Unbeknownst to Pero, his father had flown to Turkey a few days earlier to meet the police in the border region.
Pero was supposed to meet Bagica and Serce at a hotel in Antakya. The plan was for him to spend a few hours with them and collect the clothes and other things he’d asked his mother to bring.
“Is he there, did he come?” I anxiously texted Serce from Germany while she and her sister-in-law waited in the hotel lobby.
“Not yet,” she replied. He was already twenty minutes late.
Everyone was worried that Pero wouldn’t come alone and that whoever might be with him would attack the family for trying to take him away. The police and Mitko were hiding in a car outside the hotel. The plan was for Turkish antiterrorism police to take Pero into custody, to make it seem that they had arrested him, and then drive Pero and his family to the airport so they could fly back to Germany the same day.
“I wrote him a message and asked, where are you? He just wrote back and said he was coming at 3 p.m.,” Serce texted me.
At about 2:30 p.m. her time, she called to say that police officers in plainclothes had posted themselves inside the lobby and in cars parked at the exits. “This is like in a movie. I am so nervous, Souad! How do you do your job? I don’t understand.”
Thirty minutes later, I received a text from Serce: “He has sent a message to my sister-in-law. He asked where she was and said that he is coming.”
I watched my phone nervously, unable to concentrate on anything else. Ten minutes later, another text arrived: “He is here, the police are with us, we are all crying, can’t talk now but we are taking off to the police station now and then the airport. I will arrive tonight.”
Pero had arrived alone, by bus, I learned later. Mitko, hiding with one of the police officers, had signaled that this was his son. Then the police got out of their cars, grabbed Pero by the arms, and brought him into the hotel, where his mother and aunt were waiting.
Serce later told us that even Mitko was crying when he saw Pero embracing his mother, the first time that Serce could remember having seen her brother weep.
“The little one was a bit shocked that he had been captured,” she told me. He asked the police officers if he could pray before they took him, which they allowed him to do.
Serce showed Michael and me a video she had taken with her cell phone while they were driving to the airport with Pero. In it, a Turkish police officer turns around and speaks to Pero. “If you had stayed longer there, and you had taken the next step, you would have understood that you were on the wrong path,” the officer says. “Be grateful to Allah that you got out now.”
Pero says nothing.
“Who has the right to call for jihad? It’s not so easy just to call for it. There are rules,” the officer continues. “What is important is the family. Never leave them behind the way you did.”
“I thought it was the right path,” Pero says.
When Pero and his mother and aunt arrived at the airport in Frankfurt, he was arrested by German border police and taken to the main police headquarters in Frankfurt. That’s where I met Serce, while she waited for her sister-in-law and nephew to come out.
Pero’s family and Abu Adam worked on a program for him to reintegrate himself into German society. He was away from the group now, but the indoctrination had been very strong. “I told the family we must work a lot now, so he will not end up going back there,” Abu Adam told me. “I am sure they will try to contact him and ask him to get back.”
He was right. I’d seen other cases of people who had been caught on their way to join jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Somalia, or Yemen. They might not make it the first time, but they would often be contacted by their old circles and succeed with their journey on a second attempt. In fact, once they finally made it, they would enjoy even more respect because they hadn’t stopped pursuing what they saw as the right path or the chance to die as martyrs. Pero’s case was different; he wasn’t truly convinced by the jihadist ideology but was more someone who followed orders. In fact, Pero thought he was saving “oppressed Muslim Syrians from being slaughtered by Assad.” That was the story he had been told, and that was what he knew the duty of any Muslim man to be. There was still room to bring him back into society, but it would take a lot of effort, not only from his family but also from religious scholars who could explain to him that his friends or the “emir,” as he called his group leader, had gotten the verses of the Koran out of context or explained them in a way that served their own objectives.
“We have to now wash his brain,” Abu Adam continued. “It’s dirty and we have to clean it.”
Pero was lucky. He got out alive. Most of the others who had left with him did not.
Abu Adam and the family worked together for months to get Pero out of the circles he was in. They closed all his email accounts, changed his phone numbers, and shut down his Facebook page. Then there was the man Mitko suspected of making travel arrangements for his son and the other young men. Mitko had spoken to the police about this man. The police said they knew him and had him on their radar, but they didn’t have enough evidence to put him behind bars.
Mitko wanted to make sure that this man, who was a German of Turkish descent, would stay away from his son, so he took matters into his own hands. “I went to his apartment,” he told me, “and said to him, ‘If you or any of your so-called brothers ever come close to my son again, I swear to God, your head will roll right in front of the feet of your emir. Do you understand?’”
The man nodded and Mitko left, satisfied that his message was received. The man and his associates never again got close to Pero or his family.