Undercover Jihadi Bride: Inside Islamic State’s Recruitment Networks

My boyfriend was due to arrive. I called to tell him I wanted to spend the night at his apartment. I didn’t say anything about how I’d spent the evening, only that I wanted to sleep next to him.

Saturday morning

Milan handed me a Diet Coke, M, which is a weekly magazine published by Le Monde, and his iPad. Coke is my morning coffee; I still haven’t learned to drink grown-up beverages at their designated times. Milan is familiar with my routine, and his tablet is always connected to Mélodie’s Facebook account. That way I can keep an eye on her News Feed. While we were sleeping, Abu Souleyman,* a young Alsatian in Syria, died. A picture of his body, a faint smile on his lips, was being widely shared and commented on by dozens of users. Milan cuddled up to me and sipped his coffee. He looked at me tenderly, shaking his head. “Is this going to take long?” he asked, still half asleep. I smiled and kissed him. He flipped through a magazine on French cinema while I scanned the day’s comments on the “martyr.” Nothing original. Apparently Souleyman was in a better place. God was proud of him. And we should be “proud he died for his cause” at the age of twenty-one.

Other conversations interested me more. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, was said to have almost fallen into an ambush by Jabhat al-Nusra. The al-Nusra Front is one of the principal armed terrorist groups associated with al-Qaeda in Syria. This group is often wrongly conflated with ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Although the groups’ relations were once cordial, and even harmonious, that is no longer the case. Their goals and adversaries are not the same. Al-Qaeda’s enemy continues to be the West—those of the cross. ISIS seeks to create an Islamic State, a Sunni caliphate somewhere between Iraq and Syria. ISIS’s aim is to eliminate from power all those directly or indirectly related to Shiites, starting with the minority Alawite branch, which runs the country, before dislodging Shiite power in Iraq. A return to the Middle Ages, a triumphant Islam, and territories seized through force: those are the methods and aims of the Islamic State. Al-Qaeda shares this same ideology but first seeks to diminish Western power and demonstrate its own force, as in the attacks of September 11, 2001. To simplify matters, ISIS seeks to eliminate heretics from its geographical area, while al-Qaeda targets infidels.

Whenever my interviews lead me to a jihadist, I question him on his ambitions in the event the organization manages to achieve its goals and conquer the Middle East. I usually get the same story: “The Islamic State will wage war on the United States and force its people to submit to God’s will. Then we’ll abolish all borders, and the earth will be one Islamic State under sharia law.” By creating a territorial seat for its utopia, ISIS has succeeded where al-Qaeda has failed. While the latter has tediously built cells throughout the world, ISIS has waged war, implemented real policies, and grown an army of fanatics—officially in Syria and unofficially in Iraq. ISIS’s army first consisted of Sunnis hostile to the American invasion of Iraq; later thousands of foreign fighters swelled the ranks. Meanwhile, the terrorist organization has also refined its favorite weapon: digital propaganda. The image of Afghanis in caves doesn’t entice. Jihadism 2.0’s new communication strategy has hit the mark. The Islamic State has inundated YouTube with ultraviolent videos that stick in the minds of thousands of Westerners lobotomized by the group’s swiftness of action and execution of threats. Promises bind only those who listen to them, it is said. Sadly, that truism especially applies to these young jihadists. Desperate for attention, the majority leave for the front with the ultimate ambition of posting pictures online of themselves dressed as soldiers. There they are sure to be noticed and feel important, and they can also express their exploits over Facebook and Twitter. Andy Warhol’s 1968 pronouncement, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” has never been so apt.

I was born in the early eighties. Religion was already an issue for teens back then, but it didn’t motivate them to act the way it does today, even if some young men did become jihadists. These days, would-be jihadists aren’t drawn by easy money, guns, or drug dealing. Instead they dream about being respected and gaining recognition. They want to be “heroes.” Becoming the neighborhood big shot and hanging out over PlayStation is one thing; playing war and creating a state is quite another. Still, there’s more than one type of jihadist. Recent cases of young people moving to the Middle East have often involved solitary radicalization. I’m thinking of a young girl from Normandy who thought she’d found the answers to her existence, alone, on the Net. A few weeks later, the converted Christian girl left to join the ranks of Islamist fighters. I imagined my Toulousain avatar, Mélodie, to be an extremely sensitive girl; being dominated would give her life a sense of purpose. Like so many other young people—from throughout history and regardless of social milieu—she lived a life of desperation.

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