Pero finished school and cut off contact with his old friends. I saw him once on the street, about a year and a half later, holding hands with a young girl. Both wore jeans and trendy clothes, and the girl’s hair flowed free, unburdened by a head scarf. He was laughing and joking. He reminded me once again of the little boy who had carried the Miss Piggy cake all those years earlier.
Some of his friends would later leave the group they’d been with in Syria and join a new one that called itself the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, whose existence had been proclaimed the summer before. I learned that Abu Talha, the onetime rapper known as Deso Dogg, had also joined them.
13
Brides for the Caliphate
Germany and France, 2014–15
On January 7, 2015, Europe was hit. Two brothers, Chérif and Said Kouachi, carried out a deadly attack in central Paris on staffers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose depictions of the Prophet Muhammad had enraged Islamists, murdering twelve people before being killed by police after a standoff in Dammartin-en-Go?le, a town north of the French capital.
On January 9, another man, Amedy Coulibaly, assaulted a kosher supermarket in another part of Paris, killing five more people and taking fifteen others hostage. He was also ultimately shot dead by police.
France has been a target of religiously motivated terrorism for some time, and its own history of colonization and intervention in the Middle East and North Africa is characterized by violence. With its conquest of Algeria in the nineteenth century and its control of Syria and Lebanon after World War I, France came to be seen by many Muslims as arrogant and imperious. The long and bloody Algerian war of independence and the delayed reappraisal of France’s role in it, which still has not been fully accepted by all parts of French society, further exacerbated hostility in the Muslim world. In 1983 the Lebanese militia Hezbollah bombed the French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, and in the 1990s the Algerian Islamist terrorist group GIA hijacked a French plane and bombed Métro stations in Paris. Jewish institutions all over France, including schools, restaurants, and synagogues, have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist terror attacks.
Many French Muslims experienced one of France’s colonial conflicts firsthand or through their family members’ accounts. These communities have historically felt excluded from the full benefits of French society, not least because of their difficult economic situation. From the 1970s on, the banlieues, suburban high-rise estates originally a sign of the economic boom after World War II, were inhabited mostly by immigrants from North Africa. They have since become synonymous with high unemployment and weak social structures. Whoever could afford to leave, left. Today, the banlieues are still inhabited mainly by immigrants and their families, and they have often been the scene of antigovernment protests.
The Kouachi brothers claimed that they had committed the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the name of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, while a video showed Coulibaly pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.
Like hundreds of journalists from all over the world, I headed to Paris to cover the attacks. I was particularly interested in the role of Coulibaly’s wife, Hayat Boumeddiene. She had last been seen in a video on January 2, accompanied by another man with terrorist ties, at passport control at an Istanbul airport. Intelligence officials believed that she had since crossed into Syria and was living “under the protection of the caliphate.” Photographs showing her years earlier in a bikini with Coulibaly made their way around the media, raising questions about how and why their lives had changed.
I had followed the phenomenon of women’s radicalization for years, and I wondered if there were parallels between Boumeddiene’s case and others. Years earlier, I’d met Fatiha al-Mejjati and Malika el-Aroud, two women who hadn’t shown much interest in religion when they were young adults but who found their way to Islamic radicalism nevertheless.
These women had told me that their ways of living and their clothing choices had once been very Western—Malika had even had a daughter out of wedlock before finding her way to Islam. They said that their interest in religion was spurred by international political circumstances: the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the war in Iraq, the war in Chechnya. Both women would become catalysts for their husbands’ radicalization.
The two women had never met in person, but their husbands would grow very close to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, where they all lived in the early 2000s.
I met Fatiha for the first time in Casablanca in 2007. Years earlier, she had been a teacher at a private school in Morocco, but when she grew interested in Islam her colleagues noticed changes; she stopped wearing skirts and began covering her hair. The director of the school urged her to reconsider, but she refused.
One of her male students, Abdulkarim al-Mejjati, was fascinated by her religious devotion. They began meeting to talk about Islam and politics. Al-Mejjati told Fatiha he wanted to marry her. She demurred, pointing out that he was younger than she.
“The Prophet Muhammad was also younger than his wife,” al-Mejjati responded.
His wealthy family opposed the union, but al-Mejjati was determined. They married, and Fatiha gave birth to a son, whom they named Adam; two years later, they had another boy, Ilyas. Along the way, she and al-Mejjati grew even more radical, and in the spring of 2001 they moved to Afghanistan.
“It was the best times in my life, and I am praying to God that I will be living again under the flag of the Taliban,” she told me, raising her hands as if in prayer.
From there, the family moved to Saudi Arabia. One day in 2005, while Fatiha was at the doctor’s with Ilyas, Saudi antiterrorism police stormed their apartment and killed al-Mejjati and Adam, then ten years old. Saudi authorities suspected that bin Laden had sent al-Mejjati to lead an Al Qaeda offshoot and that he was planning attacks there.
Fatiha and eight-year-old Ilyas were arrested and held for months in a Saudi prison. Then they were repatriated to Morocco, where they spent a couple of months in a detention facility. Besides being interrogated about Afghanistan and her husband’s contacts, she said, she could hear other detainees screaming, presumably under torture. Fatiha was not mistreated physically, but she said that her son had been psychically scarred for life.
I interviewed Fatiha after her release and spoke to her several other times as well. She said her views had not changed in prison; instead she became even more radical. When I saw her in 2011, she still spoke about jihad and the need to fight America and its allies, and she praised bin Laden, who had recently been killed. She referred to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar as “Emir al Mouminin,” or “leader of the faithful,” and told me she wished she could live “under an Islamic leader in a truly Islamic land.”