Ben Taub, a recent M.A. graduate of Columbia
Journalism School, and one of the OPC’s newest members, landed a major story
for the June 1st issue of The New Yorker. His piece, “Journey to
Jihad,” follows a radicalized teenager from Belgium to Syria and back. He won a
2015 Emanuel R. Freedman scholarship, and has a fellowship at the Reuters
bureau in Jerusalem.
Last summer, I was living in Kilis, Turkey, a
dusty town by the Syrian border, when two Belgian fathers showed up on an
unusual quest. One of them, Dimitri Bontinck, was trying to help the other, Pol
Van Hessche, plan a trip into parts of Syria controlled by ISIS, to search for
Pol’s runaway jihadi son.
Dimitri had previously undertaken a similar
hunt. In early 2013, his own son, Jejoen, a teen-age Muslim convert, travelled
to Syria to fight against Assad’s army, expecting to “fall martyr within a
short time.” Desperate to retrieve him, Dimitri soon crossed into Syria as
well, but was captured, beaten, and humiliated by Jejoen’s comrades, and soon
released with warnings to never return. After more than half a year without
contact, Jejoen wrote a message to his father announcing his intention to go
back to Belgium. Federal police arrested him within hours of arrival.
In Kilis, Dimitri told me that even if I
travelled to Belgium, I could not speak with his son. Jejoen and his associates
would soon be tried in court, for belonging to a terrorist organization, and
the proceedings would only magnify Jejoen’s usual reluctance to recount his
time in Syria. Still, my chance encounter with Dimitri and Pol provoked a deep
interest in the lives of parents whose children run away to join ISIS and
al-Qaeda. Dimitri and I remained in touch, and, initially, I planned to write about
the agony and isolation endured by European families facing similar situations
to his own.
Then, in November, a source sent me a trove
of documents that included transcriptions of wire-tapped phone calls between
Belgian jihadis in Syria and their friends and families back home. I spent
Thanksgiving weekend translating these documents from Dutch, quickly learning
vocabulary words like ongelovigen (infidels) and onthoofding
(beheading). During these calls, which were dated before ISIS formally existed,
Belgian fighters illustrated their routine of kidnapping local civilians,
selling them back to their families, and murdering the ones whose families
could not pay. They also described jihadi training camps and details about
their shadowy leader, a Syrian named Amr al-Absi, who the State Department said
was later “in charge of kidnappings” for ISIS. With these documents in hand,
and a trip to Belgium in the works, The New Yorker showed interest and
the focus of my article began to shift away from the parents.
Dimitri’s son, Jejoen, had willingly joined
Absi’s group, but his comrades quickly turned on him. A few days after he
returned to Belgium, a medical examiner found evidence of torture all over his
body, and Jejoen began to cooperate with the police. In the ensuing months, he
underwent over two-hundred hours of interrogation by security services from
several western governments. His account offered extraordinary detail into the
radicalization process, as well as the foundations of the ISIS hostage crisis.
I met Jejoen several times this winter, and back then, I
had not seen transcripts of his police interrogations. He was always kind,
patient, and sincere with me, and agreed to be profiled, but I was surprised by
his continued adherence to extremist beliefs. He also refused to tell me much
about his time in Syria. But even if he had been more forthcoming, checking
some of his claims without access to the police file would have been
impossible. His official testimony, which I finally obtained in March, had been
used as evidence in Belgium’s largest ever terrorism trial, and the Belgian
authorities rigorously checked it against wire-tapped communications,
interrogations with other returned jihadis, and intelligence gathered by other
countries. A Belgian security official told me that out of everything Jejoen
told them, “We haven’t found one element that is not correct.” Jejoen’s account
was valuable in its own right, but placing his experience within the larger
mechanisms around him required sifting through a lot of other documents in the
police investigation, which totals forty-thousand pages.