Anna Erelle - Undercover Jihadi Bride - Inside Islamic State’s Recruitment Networks

In 2014, journalism was no longer a respected profession. And when one worked on “societal” issues, it was out of passion. If only I could write about this topic in a new way, one that avoided treating individuals as part of a succession of similar cases. I wanted to investigate the roots of “digital jihadism” and get to the bottom of an evil phenomenon affecting more and more families—of all religious backgrounds. To dissect how kids here fell into the trap of propaganda, and to grasp the paradox of soldiers there who spent their days torturing, stealing, raping, killing, and being killed, and their nights staring into their computers and bragging about their “exploits” with the maturity of video-game-obsessed preteens.

Deep in reflection, I was feeling discouraged but unwilling to give up, when my computer alerted me to three messages sent to “Mélodie’s” private inbox from . . . Abu Bilel. It was surreal. There I was, at ten o’clock on a Friday night in spring, sitting on my sofa in my one-bedroom Parisian apartment, wondering how to continue my investigation on European teenagers tempted by Islamic extremism, when a French terrorist based in Syria all of a sudden started writing me. I was speechless. At that moment, the only thing of which I was certain was that I hadn’t imagined starting my weekend like this.

“ Salaam alaikum , sister. I see you watched my video. It’s gone viral—crazy! Are you Muslim?”

“What do you think about mujahideen?”

“Last question: are you thinking about coming to Syria?”

He certainly gotstraight to the point! I didn’t know what to do. I instantly understood that speaking with this jihadist offered a unique opportunity that might lead to a mine of information, and I was eager to respond. When you present yourself as a journalist, it’s difficult to get people to speak sincerely. In this case, my interlocutor didn’t know who I was. Using this account to request information for an article didn’t bother me. However, the idea of starting a conversation with a person who didn’t know who I was introduced an ethical problem. I took five minutes to think. Long enough to consider his code of ethics . . . and then I replied:

“ Walaikum salaam . I didn’t think a jihadist would talk to me. Don’t you have better things to do? LOL. I’m not prejudiced against fighters. Anyway, it depends on the person.”

I also told him I’d converted to Islam, but didn’t offer any details. I deliberately included spelling mistakes, and I tried to use teen vocabulary—LOL, LMAO, ROFL, *and other acronyms they pepper into their correspondence. I waited for his reply, a knot in my stomach. I wasn’t afraid; I just couldn’t believe this was happening. It seemed too big to be true. I’d interviewed mujahideen before, but never anyone over twenty years old, and never anyone who expressed anything outside of the official propaganda. While I waited, I surfed the Web, scanning other pages. Barely three minutes had passed when my computer alerted me to a new message.

“Of course I have a lot of things to do! But here it’s eleven o’clock at night and the fighters are finished for the day. Do you have any questions about the video you shared? I can tell you about everything going on in Syria—the only real truth: Allah’s truth. We should talk over Skype. I’ll give you my username.”

Bilel was direct . . . and authoritative. Skype was out of the question! I ignored his proposal and suggested we talk another time. Mélodie wasn’t available now. Abu Bilel understood; he didn’t want to bother her. He’d make himself available for her tomorrow whenever she wanted.

“Tomorrow?” I asked, surprised. “Are you sure you’ll have Internet access?”

“Of course. I’ll be here. I promise.” Then, a minute later:

“You converted, so . . . you should get ready for your hijrah . I’ll take care of you, Mélodie.”

First Skype, now hijrah ! Abu Bilel didn’t lose any time! This was our first encounter. We’d only exchanged a few lines. He didn’t know anything about this girl, except that she’d converted to Islam, and he was already asking her to join him in the bloodiest country on earth. He was shamelessly inviting her to abandon her past, her home, and her family—that is, unless they perhaps wanted to join her on her spiritual journey? He was asking her to be reborn in a new land and wait for God to open his doors to her. After an initial shock, I felt a mix of feelings. I had trouble distinguishing them all, but I was sure of one thing: I was disgusted. Bilel was targeting the weak, and whenever they took his bait, he and others like him from the Islamic State tried as hard as they could to reformat them, erasing their pasts as one would clean up a disk before recording new information. Thinking about this process and the girls he preyed on infuriated me. Going after a girl like Mélodie was so easy—and so unfair. I’d met a thousand girls like her. They hadn’t had stable upbringings. Nor had they received a proper education. They didn’t have any guidance, so they were prone to believing rumors. It was the same for boys. It made me so angry, I wanted to punch him.

What was I getting myself involved in? I sensed it would go much further. But I never imagined that six months later, at the present moment of writing, Abu Bilel would continue to impact my life. For the time being, all I could think of was the fact that if I wanted to glean information from this terrorist, Mélodie would really have to exist. As in spy stories, I needed to craft a story for her. She would step through the looking glass, and perhaps even be sacrificed in the end. I would give her traits from all the kids I’d met who’d succumbed to jihadism. She would be a melting pot of Norah, Clara, Leila, Élodie, the Bon brothers, Karim, and Karim’s best friend. Their families had to go to the border between Turkey and Syria just to obtain proof that they were alive. Most returned empty-handed. If Mélodie began corresponding with this man, who seemed experienced, given his age, perhaps he would reveal useful pieces of information. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, I had too many unanswered questions. Any answers I could obtain would be precious for future stories. I undertook this project as an anthropological study. For now, however, it was getting late, and I wanted to stop thinking about Abu Bilel.

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.

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.