Mélodie stares into her computer screen, admiring the strong man eighteen years her senior. She loves him, even if she’s only ever seen him on Skype.
“Do you really love me?” Mélodie murmurs, her voice childish and frail.
“I love you for the sake of Allah. You are my treasure, and the Islamic State is your home. Brick by brick, we’ll build a better world, a place where kafirs* won’t be allowed, and we’ll carve a name for ourselves in history. I’ve found a huge apartment for you! If you bring friends, I’ll find an even bigger one. You’ll take care of orphans and the wounded during the day, while I’m fighting. We’ll spend our evenings together . . . insha’Allah*.”
Mélodie feels loved. She feels useful. She’s been looking for purpose in her life: now she’s found it.
I was frustrated that Friday night as I left the editorial offices of a magazine where I do freelance work. The paper had received a letter from a lawyer forbidding me from publishing an article I’d written about a young female jihadist. I had just spent two days in Belgium with Samira, the girl’s mother. Her daughter ran away to Syria a year before to join Tarik, the man of her life and a fanatic devoted to the Islamic State’s cause. Naïve and blind with emotion, Leila* wanted to live with her great love. A bullet to the heart ended his twenty years and one spring. Samira was hopeful when she learned of the death of the man she’d been forced to consider her son-in-law. With Tarik dead, Samira saw no reason for her daughter to stay in the tragically war-torn country, but Leila was clear: she now belonged to that sacred land and wanted to do her part in the fight to create a religious state in the Middle East. With or without her husband. Tarik had been an emir,* which meant his widow was well taken care of. People respected her, and Leila asked her mother, “Why should I go back?”
Local news sources had picked up the story and begun comparing the eighteen-year-old jihadist to the black widow, a prominent figure in the world of international terrorism and the wife of the man who assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud.* Samira’s love for her daughter was great, and her response to the situation swift, but she was coming up against an immense challenge. Not only did she have to find a way to repatriate Leila to Belgium; she also had to prove to the authorities that her daughter was living in one of the most dangerous countries on earth for humanitarian reasons. Otherwise, Leila would be considered a threat to domestic security and sent to prison, before potentially being banned from setting foot in her own country.
That was when Samira’s and my paths crossed. Journalism can lead a person to many things, sometimes to the aid of a distressed mother. Samira was beside herself, and she’d turned to Dimitri Bontinck, a former member of the Belgian Special Forces who famously managed to repatriate his own son from Syria. Dimitri is a source of hope for all these European families who wake up one morning to the harsh realization that even those they’d least suspect, even their own teenagers, could be jihadists. After his personal experience, Dimitri became a tireless crusader, volunteering for virtual suicide missions to save other youths—or at least dig up concrete information to help their families. Aware of the risks that Leila faced for being branded the “new black widow,” he’d asked me to meet her mother. I’m a journalist, and though I’m keenly interested in geopolitics, I’m not an expert. However, I’ve always been drawn to erratic behavior, whatever the cause—religion, nationality, social milieu. I’m fascinated by what motivates people to make fatal decisions. Sometimes it’s drugs. Sometimes it’s crime or marginality. I’ve also done a lot of work on radical Islam. Back then, I’d been studying European jihadists in the Islamic State for about a year. There were many similarities between the successive cases, but I was interested in understanding what it was that made each individual decide to give up everything and brave death for this cause.
At the time, Dimitri and I were writing a book about the nine horrifying months he spent looking for his son. We spoke with many European families facing the same ordeal. I tried to interview as many people as I could. I saw the impact of digital propaganda on God’s newly minted soldiers, but I still didn’t understand what drove them. Why did they leave everything—their past, their families? Over the course of a few weeks, they threw away their lives, convinced they’d never look back. Ever. Walking through their bedrooms, often preserved by their parents, always gave me chills. I was peering into other people’s intimate spaces, which had become shrines to forgotten lives, as if their teenage relics were the last proof of their existences. Leila’s existence seemed frozen in time. Pictures of her “normal” life abounded. There she was in a tank top, wearing makeup, at friends’ houses, or in a café. These idealized images were a far cry from the new Leila with her burqa and her Kalashnikov.
After listening to Samira’s story, I continued my investigation, which confirmed some of what she’d told me, and I wrote the article. Yet another piece on a subject that had become increasingly ubiquitous over the past several months. But it wouldn’t be published. Leila was furious when her mother mentioned our interview, and threatened to burn all bridges. “If you talk about me to the press,” her panicked mother tearfully reported her words, “not only will I never come back, you’ll never hear from me again. You won’t know if I’m dead or alive.” After that, I couldn’t convince the mother to let me publish. In absolute terms, I didn’t need her permission to do it—the story was already public knowledge in Belgium. But what good would it do? Sadly, each week brimmed with new stories like this one. I was all-too familiar with the determination of these young people who believed they’d found faith. All day, they were bombarded with messages to forget their “depraved” families and open their arms to their new brothers. “Infidels,” even if called “mom” or “dad,” were seen as obstacles in their spiritual journey.
It wasn’t Leila’s fault. She honestly believed she was protecting her mother by telling her how to behave. Alone at home, I got worked up over the methods of propaganda used by Islamists. Searching for videos of Tarik alive, I came across an incalculable number of propaganda films on YouTube. I muted the sound whenever the language wasn’t French or English. The monotonous chants went to my head, deadening my mind. I couldn’t listen to them anymore. Still, the sounds were more tolerable than the images of torture and charred bodies laid out in the sun. Wandering through jihadist Francophone networks online, I was continually shocked by the contrast between sound and image. The juvenile laughter accompanying these horrific scenes made the videos all the more unbearable. I’d noticed an uptick in activity over the past year. Many teenage jihadists have a second Facebook account, registered under a fake identity. They act normal around their families, but once alone in their bedrooms, they travel to their virtual world, which they take for reality. Some call for murder, though without really understanding the impact or significance of their messages. Others encourage jihad. Girls share links about Gazan children, underscoring the suffering of the very young. The girls’ pseudonyms all begin with Umm, “mom” in Arabic.
Social networks contain precious information for those who know how to look. That is why, like many other journalists, I had a fictional account I’d created several years before. I used it to keep an eye on current events. I rarely posted on the account, and when I did it was very brief, and only directed at my list of approximately one hundred “friends” from around the world. My name on this account was Mélodie. My followers weren’t using their real identities, either. Avatars ensure anonymity, which allows users to express themselves more freely and accounts for the growing number of young people attracted to Islamist propaganda. New technologies have of course bred new forms of proselytism. I spent hours scanning users’ public descriptions of gruesome or simply outrageous plans. Happily, not all of the