I asked one of my French sources why France hadn’t shared its information with the Saudis. He told me that the government had hoped that Coulibaly and Boumeddiene “would leave Europe and not come back.” This also helped to explain how so many people who were already well known to police and intelligence services made it to Syria and were now living and fighting there on behalf of the Islamic State.
In Boumeddiene’s interrogation and according to her friends, she complained about Western policies toward Muslim countries and spoke of racism, discrimination, and the “evil done to innocents in occupied lands.” Yet Boumeddiene had left the country of her birth and joined the so-called Islamic State, whose leaders forced their rules and “laws” upon millions of Syrians and Iraqis, who faced harsh measures when they didn’t obey. As I’d seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don’t notice when they become oppressors.
*
SEVERAL OF MY sources in the Islamic State had told me that lots of women from Europe were contacting them, hoping to marry members of ISIS. To find out why, I’d started looking for such women. That’s how I found Meryam, a young German convert to Islam. In 2014, one of Meryam’s best friends got in touch and arranged for me to meet her in Berlin.
We agreed to meet at a subway station and go where we could speak freely. Meryam wore black gloves and a full Islamic veil, with only her green eyes and a slice of pale skin visible through the narrow slit. “Do you like chicken burgers?” she asked me. “It’s halal, of course.”
I followed her to a restaurant in a neighborhood where many Muslim families lived. The women in this neighborhood might wear hijab, but they also favored bright colors; no one was wearing the full veil. Meryam drew many looks, and she knew it. “Let them watch. I’m used to it. I don’t care.”
When we entered the restaurant, she greeted the cashier with “As’salam alaikum,” but she spoke Arabic with a heavy German accent.
“Good day,” he answered in German.
Meryam ordered a crunchy spicy chicken burger, fries, and a lemonade. “I don’t drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi. That’s all from kuffar,” she told me.
In the women’s and family section of the restaurant, she lifted her veil and I saw that her face was spotted with pimples, which made her look as if she was in the midst of puberty. I later learned she was eighteen. As we talked, it became clear that she had been so deeply indoctrinated that she saw the world entirely in black and white. She spent hours in front of the computer and on WhatsApp, chatting with her “brothers and sisters in Syria.” They had answers to all the questions she was asking and sent her links to YouTube videos or pictures from the “caliphate.” One of her friends, an Afghan girl, had already traveled to Syria and was living in a house with other single women, waiting to get married. Meryam told me that life in Germany was unbearable for her. She called the society “racist and lost.” In her eyes, Islam and Muslims were the main targets of oppression and unfair treatment.
I asked her when and why she got interested in Islam.
“Bismillah ar rahman ar Rahim,” she began, using an Arabic phrase that means “In the name of God, the most merciful and the most beneficent.” It’s often used by Muslims as an invocation to guarantee the truth of what they’re about to say. “I was fourteen when I converted. A close Muslim friend was killed after a stabbing in the neighborhood, and then I went to his mosque, where the community had gathered to pray for him. That’s when I began to be interested in Islam.”
She liked the way that in Islam, families and members of the community were supposed to care for one another. People shared food and helped those in need, she said. She felt acceptance and warmth she hadn’t felt in her own family in a long time. Her divorced parents were surprised but took no action to stop her conversion.
She says that she and other devout Muslims feel ostracized in German society. When she first started wearing a partial head covering, she said, she was already being turned down for jobs. When she started wearing the niqab, it became impossible to find work. At sixteen, she married for the first time. Her husband was a fellow convert, and they discussed going to Syria to live in the caliphate. Meryam said she believed it was her duty as a Muslim to live in an Islamic state, but her husband didn’t want to. She said he wasn’t a real man. She asked for a divorce, and she now had to wait a prescribed period of time before she could remarry.
Like Meryam, large numbers of Western jihadists have come from troubled or broken homes, where poverty, joblessness, and upheaval are the norm. She reminded me in that sense of Pero, whose parents’ marriage had had problems and whose father had spent time in prison.
Meryam also had much in common with Hayat Boumeddiene. Like Boumeddiene’s parents, Meryam’s mother and father were divorced. Her father drank, and her mother didn’t take much interest in Meryam or her other children. Growing up, Meryam had to care for her younger siblings.
In Europe, society is atomized. ISIS advertises its commitment to sisterhood, friends, and family, equality no matter where you come from—Arab, German, American, we’re all Muslims. It represents a utopian vision that many European converts crave. Meryam longed for what she saw at her young friend’s Muslim funeral: a broader, supportive community.
When I called Meryam’s mother, she had only one question: “How much money are you paying her? We could give her story to a tabloid and get a couple hundred euros.”
I told her I wasn’t paying and that Meryam had agreed to talk to me.
It sounded as if Meryam, like Boumeddiene, wanted to fight those she saw as oppressors. And the roles seem very clear to her: “America, Europe, the Arab leaders” were all “taking from the oil and richness in the Islamic world and don’t share with the poor.” There was a “war against Islam,” she said. To her, ISIS and Al Qaeda were heroic. She spoke about “Sheikh Osama” and “Sheikh Abu Musab,” and now, finally, the caliphate.
“But there are lots of Islamic scholars who say this isn’t the real caliphate and who have spoken up against ISIS,” I countered. “What do you think about this?”
“Yes, I know,” she answered. “I discussed it with the brothers and sisters online, and they explained to me that those scholars were all paid by the West and the rulers. They were all lying.”
I asked her who those “brothers and sisters” were.
“They are in the caliphate. They said what we read and see here in the media is all wrong, and that life is very good there.”
“What is missing in your life here?” I asked.
“I don’t feel safe in Europe. All those right-wing parties, they hate Muslims.”
“But if this is about safety, why would you go to Syria, where there is a war?”