Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Podcast

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Six Podcast One

Salafist Dystopia: Life in the State
 
“ISIS is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust.”  V. S. Naipaul, March 2015
 
Introduction
 
            Earlier chapters detailed the Caliphate’s geography, philosophy, origins, and support base. They surveyed tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the West and observed the lures of the Caliphate. This chapter returns to Mesopotamia and walks the besieged streets of Raqqa, Mosul, and other Caliphate towns to examine the lifestyles of those under the sway of the Islamic State.
Daily Life
“We are afraid to leave our house—they are degrading Islam.” Maisaa, Raqqa resident
“It looked so beautiful the sisters and I joked around and called it the New York City of Syria.
Umm Haritha, Raqqa resident
 
This is what daily life is like. You wake up in the morning and if you don’t hear the sound of shelling, or a jet breaking the sound barrier, you feel like it could be a good day.”   Abu Hadi, a resident of Raqqa, 2015
 
            Westerners who travel to Planet Caliphate find lifestyles very different from those they knew at home. With its bodies strewn in the streets, sex-slave auctions, public executions, random beatings, and deteriorated infrastructure, Raqqa is unlike anything most Europeans could imagine. Circumstances are often worse in rural areas because there are few public services. Like something out of the Black Death of medieval Europe, rotting corpses are a common sight, and there is a constant reek of the dead in the streets. Some of the conditions are so vile that Caliphate cadre leave, if only temporarily, the towns they conquered because of the stench of decaying corpses.
 
            The Caliphate is often very open about its killings. In the twentieth century, some states used the fog of war to hide their butcheries. Behind the doors of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison or the gates of German concentration camps, Nazis and Communists veiled some of their slaughters. Not so the Caliphate. Its leaders bask in their flamboyant cruelty, regularly filming beheadings, shootings, stonings, and other methods of murder, including throwing people off buildings and setting them on fire. From spring 2014 to spring 2016, the Caliphate executed over 4,000 people and often made little attempt to hide the acts.
 
            In some parts of the Caliphate, public killings have a circuslike atmosphere. Young boys, sometimes barely taller than the rifles they wield, shoot other boys at point-blank range to the applause of their Caliphate leaders. Smiling, handicapped men in wheelchairs fire into groups of young men accused of spying, in a disturbing promotion of the Caliphate’s value of “equal opportunity,” according to Human Rights Watch.
 
            Some infamous centers of brutality have developed their own sobriquets. Raqqa’s central square has become known as Hell Square, which is where the State publicly executes people.
 
There was a celebrity torturer, known as “the Bulldozer” or “the Monster,” who administered Caliphate justice until he was captured. He boasted a fan club of admiring boys and young men. A mammoth of a man, he was the dean of the Caliphate’s “Chopping Committee.” He amputated hands or feet, sometimes both, and even heads. In April 2016, he killed a man accused of being a magician. The Bulldozer was caught in June 2016, tossed half-naked into the back of a truck, and hauled away by Syrian forces.
 
            There was another pinup killer in the Caliphate, who, like the Bulldozer, enjoyed celebrity and had a short shelf life. The photogenic Caliphate killer known as the Desert Lion is profiled below.
 
Profile Eighteen: Abu Waheeb—The Lion of the Desert
            Shaker Wahib, also known as Abu Waheeb, was a heartless man, dead at thirty, who lived his short life in rage. Born in 1986, the former computer science student savored the brutality he inflicted as a Caliphate leader. He basked in the heroic image his den of Caliphate cubs held of him. He was a tough jihadist, and by his mid-twenties, he had been arrested by US authorities in Iraq. As part of al-Qaeda, he was captured by US forces in 2006. Later, he escaped from a high-security prison to become a leader in the Islamic State.
 
            He became a local celebrity in 2013 when he was photographed interrogating three Syrian lorry drivers by the side of the road. Seemingly spontaneously, he shot them in the back of the head, and viewers began to speculate as to why. Unlike other State soldiers, he often showed his face. He challenged Western fighters to kill him. This vanity, like Jihadi John’s, ultimately proved self-destructive.
 
            Waheeb was al-Baghdadi’s personal assistant, and both survived a U.S. drone attack in Nineveh. But in May 2016, his luck ran out. The Pentagon confirmed he had been killed. A U.S. Department of Defense spokesperson said, “On May 6, a coalition airstrike targeted Abu Waheeb. . . . It is dangerous to be an ISIL leader in Iraq and Syria nowadays.”
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Five Podcast Six

 
Cruelty Was Not in Their Nature
 
            A final reason Westerners want to come home is the realization that they are not emotionally suited for the cruelty of the State. Some Western Jihadis relish the brutality they inflict on their enemies. Sadists are comfortable in the Caliphate today. But many people cannot witness this cruelty without becoming traumatized. The reality of war is not what they expected.
 
            The State requires recruits to prove allegiance by hurting people. Some eagerly do so. One Caliphate supporter was prepared to kill humans by slitting the throats of rabbits. Later, he would stab to death a French police officer and his wife in Paris in the summer of 2016.
 
            Many recruits realize that killing people would be too difficult. In the words of one recruit, “They told us, ‘When you capture someone, you will behead them.’ But as for me, I have never even beheaded a chicken. It is not easy . . . I can’t do that.” A New Yorker who joined and then left the State in 2016 warned his fellow Americans to “avoid the worst decision” he ever made. “I did see severed heads placed on spiked poles . . . I just blocked them out.” Some beheadings are shown on the Caliphate-produced snuff films with names such as “Harvest of the Apostates.”
            Sadism has its own dark humor in the Islamic State. A deserter described a prank at a water well in a small town called Hute. State security personnel would take blindfolded prisoners and tell them that they were free to leave but not to remove the blindfold until they had been walking for a few minutes. When the prisoners took a few steps forward, they would fall into a deep well, to the laughing delight of Caliphate spectators. They would die quickly or slowly. “It smells horrible because of all the corpses inside the well. I know that over 300 people were thrown into that well.”
            For many Western recruits, there is first an initial shock, followed by the numbing effect created by constant carnage, and sometimes feelings of guilt.  One woman cannot escape the memory of the pained expressions on the faces of women whom she hurt. She is remorseful that she served in al-Khansaa, an all-women religious enforcement brigade, and that she harmed people in enforcing virtue. She flogged women, sometimes delivering sixty lashes, for failed escape attempts. Wearing inappropriate clothes brought forty hits. “What upset me most was lashing old women when they weren’t wearing the proper clothes.” She said, “We’d lash them and humiliate them.”
 
            Al-Khansaa militants disfigure women by pouring acid on their faces. There is also a dehumanization of girls and women that many Westerners have not experienced. Among the most horrific illustrations is the sexual slave market, which splits mothers from daughters. Girls are priced according to their attractiveness. Then they are raped and discarded.
 A Syrian woman, racked by guilt for her earlier support of the State, warned, “The Caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold, and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks.”
            Sometimes it is difficult to know the truth. Those who are arrested upon return have every incentive to downplay their militancy and emphasize their compassion. A twenty-five-year-old German joined the Caliphate and then slipped back into Germany, where he was betrayed to the police. He confessed his service for the State, but said that he never took the oath of loyalty and that he only fired a single round in combat, which was aimed at an empty building. German prosecutors could not prove that he had hurt anyone in the Middle East. Had he done so, it is not likely that he would have volunteered the information and risked a stiffer prison sentence.
 
            Some Westerners escape the Caliphate. One British escapee explained, from hiding in Turkey, that she feared for her life every day. She was convinced that the State is tracking her down as a traitor. “I am a young girl. I want to live my life. I want to travel, go to cafes, meet friends like any normal girl.” Another said, “This is not the 1001 Nights.”
 
Summary
            Psychological and social drivers will continue to attract and repel Westerners. Those who are sadistic or driven to kill non-Muslims will find ample opportunities to do so in the Caliphate. For women who want to perform the sexual Jihad, there will be men available in Syria and Iraq. But many Western women will find life in the Caliphate onerous. Shukee Begum, a thirty-three-year-old British mother and university graduate, warns of the “gangster kind of mentality among the single women there.” She explained that the Caliphate was not “my cup of tea.” By summer 2016, the State responded to the Western flight by burying defectors alive, burning them to death, shooting them, or being macabrely creative with their killing skills.
 
            But some Westerners are elated with their new lives in the Caliphate, finding the prestige, power, and camaraderie that eluded them in the West. In Raqqa, a young woman phoned her European mother, who was weeping at the other end of the line, and said that she had not traveled to Syria just to return to Europe. She was at home in the Caliphate and there to stay.
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Five Podcast Five

 
 
A Woman’s World within a Man’s World
 
“It’s not Sharia that men scream or talk to us in the street. It’s not. I feel increasingly sad here now. There is so little respect for us.” A foreign fighter
 
“I know it may be shirk [idolatry] but sometimes I do miss Starbucks. The coffee here is beyond wretched.” Western woman called GreenBirdofDabiq
 
            By their own accounts, many female foreign fighters travel to the Caliphate to escape unwanted attentions of men. But, according to many tweets, Western women do not find the sanctuary they expect. For example, in August 2015, a Swedish woman moaned, “Seriously, I am getting so tired of many men muhajirin [emigrants] now. I feel harassed so often now. Women can’t do this or that. What is the point?”
 
            British girls are urged to take lingerie with them as they travel to Syria to marry Islamic State fighters.  One blogger suggests that women should bring as much milk as possible, but that hair straighteners and deodorant are available. Many Western women never fully adjust to Jihadi living. They do not like to share their husbands with other women. Young women in search of benevolent and “caring” mother figures may be similarly lured. Sometimes they find them. But cowives are not always friends; they compete against each other for their husband’s affections and lovemaking and for prestige and place in the household. Some of the household chores have a morbid twist; for example, the more talented seamstresses are impressed into sewing suicide vests.
            Sometimes Western girls and women are trapped in the Caliphate. Two early Western Caliphate volunteers were Samra Kizinovic (sometimes spelled Kesinovic) and her friend Sabina Clemovic (sometimes spelled Selimovic). Samra was sixteen and Sabina fifteen when they left their homes in Vienna in April 2014. First, they wanted to find husbands. The girls were very pretty, particularly Samra, who was given the moniker “Caliphate’s queen of beauty.”
 
            The promised adventure soon turned sour. When they realized they had made a mistake, they contacted their parents and pled to go home. They never would return. According to Kurdish sources, Samra, the fair-haired, blue-eyed young beauty, was dead by summer 2015. Her friend would die, too. According to the source, they were beaten to death.
            One woman who did make it out had a similar experience. Convert Sophie Kasiki, whose French husband was an atheist, traveled to Syria to live in “paradise.” She took their four-year-old son to look for “ISIS Prince Charming.” What she found was a prison, from which she eventually escaped. “I will always feel bad about taking my son to this hellish nightmare.”
<B>Reason Two—Fear<\>
            A second reason for wanting to leave the Caliphate is fear. Some Western men and women live in constant fear and would like to escape the Caliphate. One young man wrote, “They want to send me to the front, but I don’t know how to fight.” Westerners discover, often too late, that fellow Jihadis are killed for trivial offenses. Those who ask to return home are sometimes forced into suicide operations The Islamic State kills anyone from their own cadre who tries to leave. It has executed at least one hundred of its own foreign fighters who tried to flee Raqqa. Some make it out of Syria, but some are stranded in Turkey, where they are hunted down by agents of the State. By summer 2016, they were killing relatives of escapees. As one man said, “They got stricter as they worried we’d rebel, burning people alive and cutting people’s throats.”
            Western fighters do not know whom to trust. One described the situation: “It [the Caliphate’s security and intelligence service(s)] is a highly organized body, with very strong discipline. Everybody spies on everybody else. ”There is cybersecurity. In the shadowy world, cybercafes are often the only way Westerners can communicate with their friends and family.
For this reason, the Caliphate’s security operatives have installed keystroke-logging software.
            In summer 2015, the Caliphate tightened surveillance over Raqqa, the Caliphate’s capital. One year later, Raqqa was under regular and armed guards, increased checkpoints, and tightened security. The Caliphate has counterintelligence capabilities and uses double agents to unmask those persons and groups it considers subversive or untrustworthy. They deploy cadre members in the streets and cybercafes to infiltrate underground networks that organize foreigners’ departures. They regularly use double-agent operations to trap would-be deserters. Without passports or the ability to speak Arabic, some Westerners are too scared to try to leave. Others just disappear.
 
            This was the case with Zora, a girl from the French suburbs who left for Syria after turning fourteen. She had been recruited by three other women and, as of late 2015, lived in a communal setting with about fifty other girls and young women, mostly from Europe. They were heavily guarded and rarely permitted to leave their restricted living quarters. She and other females were, according to Zora, forced to watch beheadings and were often awoken by bomb blasts. She hoped to return to France, and her father offered to pay for anything. He sent her a scanned copy of her birth certificate in case she escaped. But he stopped hearing from her. “I call every morning. I’m waiting for her to get back online.”
 
            Most escapees must reach Turkey, where consular offices can assist them. Defections began as a trickle and then poured by spring 2016. Defectors arrive in singles, doubles, or small groups, usually disheveled and desperate. As one would-be defector explained in June 2016, “We don’t know where to go. We want to go further away, but Europe is too expensive,” he said. “We know people are after us and want to kill us. We feel lost.”
 
            Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, a twenty-five-year-old former Brooklyn resident, is also certain that Caliphate gunmen are determined to kill him. From Syria, he emailed the FBI to “extract” him and bring him home. In high school, he wrote glowing term papers on World War II leaders of democracy, Churchill and Roosevelt. Subsequently, he converted to Islam and the Caliphate; today, he misses democracy.
 
 –
 

Jihad and the West - Chapter Five Podcast Four

Wanting to Come Home
 
“The Revolution is like Saturn. It devours its own Children.” Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, 1835
 
“My iPod is broken. I want to come back.” A young French Jihadist’s tweet to his parents in France
            The first three parts of this chapter discussed the broad groupings of reasons why Westerners travel to the Caliphate. The chapter will now turn to reasons why some of them want to leave the Caliphate and return to their former homes.
 
Three Reasons for Wanting to Leave the Caliphate
 
            Some Westerners who have traveled to the Caliphate are happy there and do not want to leave. They have built new lives and found important positions. Some Westerners have died, often in combat, and are buried in what became their homeland. But many have not found what they hoped to find in the Caliphate and want to return to the West after a grim life. The diehard British Jihadis fighting for the State call their homesick comrades “mummy-boys.” It is hard to gauge how many or what proportion of those Western émigrés want to leave the Caliphate. Those who try to break out are often killed or threatened. Some are caring for their children and would not escape without ensuring their safety. There are three reasons they want to come home: disappointment, fear, and the belief that cruelty was not in their nature.
 
Reason One—Disappointment and Discomfort
 
“Syrian woman backbiting us [me and my Australian sister] while we’re sitting in front of her, thinking that I don’t speak Arabic.” A British woman called Umm Rayyan
 
            For some Westerners, there is a gap between what they expected in the Caliphate and what they found. Many did not find the enchanting village they were promised. The roasting temperatures and inadequate air conditioning are enervating. An Australian woman, “mother of the seeker of martyrdom,” carped about the blazing summer sun: “The heat in Sham [Syria] is shocking. I’m thinking to change my kunya [name] to Umm [mother] Sweat. Over this heat.”
 
            The sweltering heat creates ideal conditions for exotic bugs and diseases, including neglected tropical diseases largely unknown in the West, to flourish. Many Europeans in Syria today do not understand the cause of their skin sores. For example, a deadly flesh-eating disease, leishmaniasis, is carried by a sand fly that feasts on the corpses strewn in the streets by the State’s fighters. After devouring the dead, the bugs bore into the living.
 
            The searing temperatures, boutique diseases, and sand flies are not advertised in the Caliphate’s recruitment brochures. Nor is the mundanity awaiting many Western recruits. Some have blogged that their assigned tasks are menial or unfulfilling. There are a few luxury goods or cars. Male fighters are offered beautiful, nubile brides as well as sex slaves, but many are not as eye-catching or sexually enthusiastic as promised. An Australian recruiter preparing to leave for Syria and join his comrades canceled his plans when he heard about the squalid conditions in which he would live. They slept on “spongy” mattresses and took showers with dirty buckets of water. They also had no toilet paper.
 
            Those who come dream of becoming warriors, but instead they launder clothes, cook, and clean up after others. One fighter complained about cleaning weapons and transporting dead bodies from the front. He said, “Winter’s arrived here. It’s begun to get really hard.” A South African returning from the Caliphate said, “Much of the Islamic State’s appeal to outsiders is built on half-truths and propaganda. It’s no surprise that reality did not live up to the illusion.”
 
            An American Jihadi escaped from Syria, in part, because he was forced to study Islam for eight hours each day. A Virginian, he had earned a degree at a community college and worked as a teller at a local bank, but he was not academically inclined. He hoped to fight for Islam in the State, but was forced to study the religion instead. He was captured by the Kurdish Peshmerga and confessed that he could not endure the daily Koranic memorization and regurgitation. It became maddening. He also missed smoking. “My message to the American people is that life in Mosul is really, really bad.”
 
Beyond the weather, diseases, and tedious lifestyle, many Westerners are also astonished by the hatred locals show them. Westerners expect to be welcomed as liberators but are seen as occupiers and thieves. They have heard comments such as “You are here to sabotage my country; you are coming to force something on us.” State leaders explain to new Western recruits that some Syrians are not delighted by their presence. A Caliphate-produced book, Culture Clash: Understanding the Syrian Race, aims to lessen the culture shock.
 
In addition to the brutality, some Westerners are repulsed by the manners of their compatriots. They find Middle Easterners, particularly Arabs, vulgar and inconsiderate. One Briton blogged about the initial shock and steady fatigue he experienced while grappling with boorish table manners, peevish behavior, and brazen theft of personal property.
 
Others who want to leave are killed by their fellow fighters. This likely happened to “Florent,” a Cameroonian who immigrated to Germany, where he was raised as a Christian. He converted to Islam at fourteen and left for Syria the following year. He died at seventeen, and his German hometown was unsure whether to hold a Christian or Islamic memorial service. His former Christian pastor decided to hold a Muslim service in his church to show “learning and respect among religions.”T

Black Flag over Babylon - Jihad and the West Chapter Five Podcast Three

Sometimes parents will brave the dangers of Raqqa to fetch their daughters back home. Nineteen-year-old Aicha fell hard for a charismatic Dutch Jihadi after seeing him on television. She converted to Islam and left with him for Raqqa but soon called her mother, Monique, to take her home. “Monique,” fully aware of what she would likely encounter, set out to Raqqa undercover and in a burka to bring her daughter home, at great risk to both of them. Monique said, “Sometimes you do what you have to do.” Monique rescued her daughter, but most stories do not have warm endings.
 
            In the United States, the parents of Shannon Maureen Conley had evidence that their girl was preparing to fight as a Jihadi. Only after they exhausted their pleas to their daughter did they contact the FBI, knowing she would be arrested. Her story and that of a Russian college student are presented below.
 
Profile Sixteen: An American and a Russian: Halima and Amina
Shannon/Halima
 
            Christian-raised Shannon Maureen Conley, a nineteen-year-old Denver suburbanite, planned to make herself useful to the Islamic State after she became a Muslim. Shannon changed her name to Halima, which is loosely translated as “mild-mannered” and “generous.” She announced to the world that she had become a “slave of Allah.”
 
            All this was a surprise to some of those who had known her as a girl, well before she became Halima. Her neighbors commented that Shannon had undergone a drastic transformation late in high school. A neighbor related, “I would see her in shorts and, then, all of a sudden, she started wearing those [Islamic] clothes.” She found a new identity in Islam as she entered adulthood.
 
            Halima did not keep her newfound faith to herself. At Faith Bible Chapel, near her home, she made her presence known. Wearing a hijab and a backpack, she drew the pastor’s attention by adopting a curious hostility. A volunteer at the church’s small café noticed that Conley ordered biscuits and gravy one morning. However, Shannon became angry when she learned that her meal contained meat, and she threw it away. She also made political comments that alarmed churchgoers. She was asked not to return.
 
            The FBI intervened, interviewed her and her parents, and advised her not to make statements that could easily be construed as threatening. But she told the FBI, “If they [churchgoers] think I’m a terrorist, I’ll give them something to think I am.” The FBI monitored Halima and spoke to her nine times. They understood that she intended to travel to Syria. They were right.
 
            There was an element of romance, of sorts, to Shannon’s road to Jihad. She fell hard for a man she had never met in person. On the internet, she spooned her affections to a man she believed to be a fellow traveler. Her paramour and coconspirator boasted that he was an active Caliphate fighter. In turn, she crowed that she had attended a US Army Explorers camp and would use that training to wage Jihad against nonbelievers. She was also certified in shooting skills by the National Rifle Association. They had much in common. He proposed marriage, and she accepted. They aspired to meet and marry in Syria and then to fight for the Caliphate. She would cook and nurse injured Jihadis; he would kill the enemies of the State. But before traveling to Syria, Conley needed to prepare.
 
            Shannon’s father discovered her plan and notified the FBI, which arrested her at the Denver airport. In her luggage, agents found several CDs and DVDs labeled “Anwar al-Awlaki,” a leading propagandist for Islamic violence. She also carried a list of contacts, one of whom was the man she planned to marry. Shannon did not make it to the Middle East or get married. She was sentenced to four years in federal prison. As for the reaction of those who knew her? The church volunteer who had served Shannon the biscuit she had thrown in the trash with scorn said of her, “I feel sorry for her. She needs a lot of prayer.”
Amina
 
            A young Russian woman followed a path similar to Shannon’s. With a soft smile and a broad Slavic face, the nineteen-year-old Varvara Karaulova looked more like a Russian coed than a Jihadi aspirant. She was both. Varvara was enrolled at one of Russia’s most respected universities, Moscow State University, where she studied Arabic and philosophy. She had already mastered French and English, and her intellectual curiosity led her to the Middle East. Her Facebook profile lists her as liking authors J. R. R. Tolkien and the leading Russian writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov. But in late May 2015, she would be arrested, along with other Russians, while trying to infiltrate Syria from Turkey.
 
            Her father, Pavel, said, “She’s always home studying... she’s so trustworthy. But somehow she got twisted into this.” Varvara’s friends observed that she began acting and dressing differently after she began taking Arabic classes at her university. She grew more distant from non-Muslims and began wearing the hijab. Then, a week before she left, Pavel noticed she wasn’t wearing her cross necklace. “She said the chain broke,” he said. She changed her name to Amina and left for Syria.
 
            Interpol detained her when she tried to cross the border from Turkey to Syria illegally. Varvara was deported back to Russia. Her father was relieved yet despaired. “I just had no idea. This should be a lesson for all of us.”
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Five Podcast Two

Sometimes parents can rescue their children. But even these initially joyous events can become tragic. A Tunisian military physician went to Turkey to retrieve his son, who had joined and then left the Caliphate. Earlier, the son had been a lighthearted medical student. “He used to spend time with my daughters, laughing and joking, but that stopped,” said a cousin. But he became withdrawn and hateful toward nonreligious Muslims. He joined the Caliphate and left for Iraq but soon changed his mind and asked his father, a general in the Tunisian military, to get him out. The father’s connections and persistence paid off, and the general went to Turkey to bring his son home. As the general was transiting the airport in Istanbul on June 28, 2016, he was killed in the Caliphate-directed terrorist attacks there. The general was buried with full military honors in his Tunisian home. The local newspaper noted, “ISIS attracts a son . . . and kills a father.”
 
            Siblings and friends of Western foreign fighters are surprised, too. They cannot explain the sadism they see in their sons, daughters, or former friends. Maxime Hauchard, twenty-two, from a village in Normandy in northern France, was filmed decapitating a Syrian prisoner. Those who knew him in France could not understand why he would hurt anyone. A former neighbor speculated that Maxime must have been drugged.
            In Australia, one couple agonized over their daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchild. Australians Karen and Peter Nettleton’s daughter converted to Islam and, with her husband, took their five children to the Caliphate. The Nettletons’ heartrending case is presented below.
 
Profile Fifteen: The Despair of Grandparents
 
 
 
“I accept that some will be critical of my daughter, who followed her heart and has paid an enormous price. Mr. Abbott, I beg you, please help bring my child and grandchildren home.”
Karen Nettleton to the then Prime Minister Abbott
 
            Australian grandmother Karen Nettleton struggles to make sense of what went wrong with her daughter, Tara. What caused it? How did it happen? A next-door neighbor described Tara as polite and attractive, not very different from other girls in the neighborhood. One day, the neighbor noticed Tara wearing Islamic attire. He told her, “You are too pretty to wear those things.” After that, Tara never spoke to him again.
 
            Tara met a Muslim while she was still a teenager and had his baby at seventeen. They were high school sweethearts. Her heartthrob was Khaled Sharrouf, a man with a troubled past, drifting in and out of petty crime and abusing drugs. He was mentally ill, first diagnosed with depression and later with schizophrenia. The son of Lebanese parents, raised in a dysfunctional family, Sharrouf served time for stockpiling weapons. Before his release, he was put on medication, and in early 2009, physicians noted his “remarkable recovery.” Later, both Tara and Khaled embraced fundamentalist Islam and left for the Caliphate to build a life. And they, along with their children, became famous.
 
“That’s My Boy!!!”
            Karen Nettleton still cannot comprehend her daughter’s descent into sadism or her delight in global publicity. Partnering with her husband, Tara enslaved, raped, and beat women. They made this a family affair. One of their sons, a seven-year-old, held a severed head for a photo. Bursting with pride, Khaled shouted, “That’s my boy!” That caught the world’s attention when it was posted on Facebook.
            At thirty-one, Tara succumbed to complications from appendicitis. Her husband, Khaled, may be dead or alive; Western authorities are not sure. The eldest daughter, Zaynab, who had a child of her own, was killed by a drone.
            According to reports, four of Tara and Khaled’s five children and one granddaughter are still alive, likely in Raqqa, and Karen is desperate to rescue them. She fears the girls will be forced into sex slavery or begging. “I am devastated because I wasn’t able to be at my daughter’s side. I’m not able to be there for my grandkids and great-grandchild, who are suffering traumatic events outside their control.”
 
Level Three—Family Were Active Dissuaders
 
“It’s better not to live than to be the mother of a terrorist. You realize what a monster you gave birth to.” Shakhla Bochkaryova
 
            The third level of family involvement is family members who intervened to stop radicalization. One mother, Shakhla Bochkaryova, chained her twenty-year-old daughter, Fatima, to the apartment’s radiator to keep her from fleeing to Siberia and becoming the fourth wife of a Jihadi. Like other similarly distraught mothers, Shakhla witnessed the irreversible transformation of a fashion-conscious, head-turning young woman into a Caliphate-bound, hate-spewing Jihadi, yet she was powerless to leash her daughter. The mother said plaintively, “I looked at her, and I could no longer see my child. She was simply a shell of my daughter, no soul, no thoughts, no heart.” From Raqqa, Fatima cursed her mother, calling her an infidel murderer and threatening to kill her when the Caliphate conquers Europe.
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Five Podcast One

Blue-Eyed Jihad: The Caliphate’s Foreign Legion, Part Two
“We have the unborn martyrs in our wombs.” A woman shouting at the Muslim Day Parade in New York City, 2015
 
            The previous chapter focused on the Islamic State’s foreign legion of Westerners. Chapter Five continues to discuss this cohort, with attention to parental involvement and disillusionment with the Caliphate’s cause and its comrades.
 
Level One—Family Are Primary Driver
 
“Oh Allah, I ask for a death in your path, and I ask for death in the country of your prophet . . . heaven, heaven, heaven . . . I swear, I can’t wait.” An Italian woman converted to Islam by her Tunisian husband in 2016
 
            Family involvement in the radicalization of their children varies widely. Some parents and other family members actively promote their children’s radicalization; some are unaware of the transformation, and some are aware and try to dissuade them from joining the Caliphate.
 
            On the first level, parents or family members are involved in radicalization and have actively encouraged and/or facilitated their kin’s participation in the State. As mentioned earlier, many Muslims feel segregated in Europe. At home and in school, children are “fed on a diet of Islam,” as revealed in British investigations. After the Second World War, Western European schools stressed assimilation and liberalism, but many European schools today foster segregation, and some promote Islamist supremacy. This isolation is encouraged by some Muslim families.
 
            Entire families leave Europe to fight in the Caliphate. Their neighbors notice that, one day, they simply vanish. Local children wonder why their playmates stopped coming to class and ask what happened to them. Rumors circulate, especially when the families seem very religious and aloof from non-Muslims. Some of the missing have appeared on social media, sharing stories and photographs of their new lives. For example, a British family of twelve issued a statement in July 2015 from Raqqa, saying they had escaped the “so-called freedom and democracy that was forced down our throats.” Safely ensconced in Raqqa, they asked their former British neighbors to join them there.
 
            Sometimes it is hard to discern parents’ agendas for their children. For example, the father of a “Jihadi bride” was unmasked when he was filmed marching in solidarity with Islamist radicals, including the killer of British soldier Lee Rigby. He also took his daughter with him on the march.
 
            Other times, secular-oriented parents become legally entangled in a sordid spectacle their children create. A case in point is the arrest of the parents of the white British Muslim convert Jack Letts, dubbed “Jihadi Jack.” Initially, the parents, John and Sally, middle-class Oxford residents, were shocked that their son had joined the State. The police warned them not to support their son, but John and Sally tried twice to send him 1,000 pounds. After the second attempt, they were arrested for “fundraising and arranging availability of money and property for use in terrorism.” Their son’s response? Jack said he hated them because they were nonbelievers. “I call them to Islam.”
 
            Other times, the children suffer. After a Caliphate-bound British mother was imprisoned in spring 2016, her three children were sent to live with relatives. In a family court at the Old Bailey, the judge told the mother, “You knew perfectly well of your husband’s dedication to terrorism.” The children were kept from the Islamic State, but their lives were changed forever.
 
Level Two—Family was unaware of Radicalization
 
“ISIS is stealing our children, draining our life force.” Veronique Roy, whose French son was killed in the Islamic State, 2016
 
            On the second level of family involvement, family members were unaware of the person’s plans to leave for the Caliphate. These family members are usually shocked and emotionally traumatized when they learn what has happened. Despite therapy, some do not fully recover and are unable to shake an overwhelming sense of betrayal and loss. Many blame themselves.
            An Australian man was distraught when his twenty-six-year-old ex-wife abandoned their children and left for Syria. Jasmina Milovanov, a convert to Islam, left her children with a sitter, promising she would return soon. She never came home. Her ex-husband said, “I can’t believe that she left these beautiful children.” Similarly, a British Muslim was blindsided when his wife took their children to the Middle East on Valentine’s Day, 2015. Desperately, he asked, “My question is why did she go there? She has two kids, she has a family, and this house is in her name. Why has she left everything?”
 
            Mario Sciannimanica was born in Italy and raised in Germany. His mother was shaken when he left for the State, where he recruited fellow Europeans through German and Italian publications. Desperate to hear from her son, she wrote to Germany’s leading Salafi website: “Please, I beg you, anybody who is close to him, let us know how he is and whether we can do anything for him. In the name of God.”
 
This concludes a reading  from Chapter Five of "Cauldron of Terror Gaza, Hamas, Israel, and the World," by Mark Silinsky, published by Pen and Sword. If you enjoyed them, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Also, Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.  sulting, thank you for listening.  
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Postcast Eight

Interspecies Predators—Psychopaths and Foreign Fighters
 
“I’m glad I’ve lived to see an enemy prepared to die for something other than their bank balance.” Ian Brady, infamous British Moors murderer, referring to the Caliphate, 2016
 
            Sometimes called “psychopaths,” sometimes “sociopaths,” and historically called “evil,” they are men and women without remorse. Though they are not necessarily mentally ill, they lack a conscience. Lacking empathy, they can harm, betray, or kill people, even family members. But there is no current expert consensus that Westerners who fight for the Caliphate are significantly more psychopathic than other cohorts.
 
            Nevertheless, many of the foreign fighters display several classic traits of the psychopath. They enjoy hurting people and lying about activities and conditions in the Islamic State. Some have poor behavioral skills and act impulsively. They were juvenile delinquents and indulgent in parasitic lifestyles in their Western homes. They have not shown remorse for their harm to others.
 
            There are also female sadists, some of whom capture headlines in European tabloids. Some display great pleasure in the suffering of non-Muslims, much like the Nazi concentration camp guards. These “emotional vampires” sometimes brag about killing non-Muslims and regale their online audience with the details of torture. It is difficult to explain this sadism exclusively in religious terms because they take ostentatious joy in torture. Nonetheless, they justify mass murder, rape, and enslavement with Koranic verses. As with their male counterparts, some of the women have fun chuckling about bloody beheadings, regretting only that they did not commit the murder themselves. The husband-and-wife San Bernardino couple who killed their coworkers and abandoned their young child relished the planning and execution of their killing spree.
 
            However, other Westerners who serve the Caliphate are not abnormally antisocial in the context of life in the Islamic State. They cooperate with their companions in the Caliphate. A psychopath would not likely risk death for a cause that did not directly benefit him or her. Psychopaths are driven only by advancing their personal interests. Further, many foreign fighters in the Caliphate are protective of their fellow soldiers. Some have exposed themselves to danger for the Islamic State. Some have been self-sacrificial. Many more have emotionally bonded with their comrades, and a psychopath would not. But there are some psychopaths in the Caliphate, and they are profiled below.
 
Profile Fourteen: Very Cruel Men
 
Mehdi Nemmouche
 
            If there was a club for sadists in the Caliphate, Mehdi Nemmouche would certainly be a prominent member. By his own account, he relished torture. Well known to French police authorities, Nemmouche had been in and out of prison much of his twenty-nine years. That is where he was radicalized. Some of his convictions were petty, such as driving without a license, but he was also sentenced for armed robbery, which landed him a five-year sentence. Sometime in early 2013, Nemmouche went to Syria to fight for the Jihad. He flourished there.
 
            He was more than a garden-variety thug-turned-Islamist. Nemmouche was particularly sadistic toward captives, even by the brutal standards of the Caliphate’s foreign legion. Nemmouche delighted in torturing European captives: “The torture went on all night, until prayers at dawn,” a French survivor wrote in Le Point magazine. “The howls of the prisoners alternated with shouts in French.” He is also supposed to have serenaded his captives with his own rendition of Charles Aznavour love songs.
 
            But at some point, Nemmouche fell from the favor of the Caliphate’s leaders. French criminologist Alain Bauer says, “ISIS did not like him at all.” Bauer compares him to Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes called “the twentieth hijacker” from the 9/11 plot, who was so crazy that al Qaeda leadership didn’t know what to do with him. In June 2014, French police in Marseilles arrested Mehdi Nemmouche for mass murder. He was the primary suspect in the Brussels Jewish Museum attack of May 2014, in which three Jews were shot dead. Today, Nemmouche sits in prison.
 
Mohammed Emwazi
“I’ve seen it before, you all squirm like animals, like pigs.”  Mohammed Emwazi referring to beheadings
 
            Like Nemmouche, Kuwaiti-born Mohammed Emwazi enjoyed hurting people. He certainly displayed the classic signs of psychopathy: lack of empathy, grandiosity, glibness, and a need for power. He was sadistic by any standard, and it was he who cut off the heads of Western captives for a global audience on YouTube.
 
            Emwazi’s family moved to Britain when he was six years old. He was smart enough to complete a college degree in computer science, and his primary- and secondary-school teachers remember him as quiet, lonely, and quick to take offense. In high school, Emwazi underwent anger management therapy after fighting with fellow students, and when he drank he had difficulty controlling his temper. He found Islam and became a leader in an Islamist sleeper cell, “The London Boys” and he raised money for the Jihadis.
 
            If he was uncomfortable in Britain, he appears to have been at ease in Syria. A released hostage related that the British John Cantlie and American Jim Foley were forced to compose a song titled “Welcome to the Lovely Hotel Osama.” They sang it to the mocking delight of the three British Jihadis who guarded them most of the time. These three were collectively known as “the Beatles.” Mohamed Emwazi was dubbed “Jihadi John” after John Lennon. Another Jihadi, dubbed “George,” was particularly fond of the song: “George shouted, ‘Anyone who doesn’t know the words, I’ll kick to death.’” Another torturer was Najim Laachraoui. He would leave the Middle East and travel to Europe, where he would die in the Brussells airport attack in 2016, which killed thirty-two people and injured more than 300.
 
            Jihadi John enjoyed torturing other captives. The group’s twenty-three hostages suffered constant beatings and degradations, and one survivor likened their condition to that of former presidential aspirant Senator John McCain at the hands of the Vietnamese communists. They called their digs the “ISIS Hilton.”
 
            Emwazi fathered a son in Syria, who is entitled to British citizenship. But the boy will never know his father, who was “vaporized” in an air strike in November 2015. “Vaporized” is current slang for killing people through drone-launched munitions. Emwazi knew he was being hunted by British and US Special Forces. He knew that modern technology and first-rate policing revealed his identity, despite his camouflage. But in his skyscraping vanity, he repeatedly gave away his positions. A New York baseball cap, his signature piece of apparel, may have identified him to targeteers, according to one British tabloid.
 
            Two MQ-9 Reaper drones locked in on him and flashed the “Beatle’s” image to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. As Emwazi got in a car at the Islamic courts, two Hellfire missiles exploded atop his car. Few were surprised when the twenty-seven-year-old former Londoner was “vaporized.” The State later eulogized him as an “honorable brother.” But a military spokesperson for the country that killed him had a different take: “This guy was a human animal, and killing him is probably making the world a better place.”
 
Summary
 
            Westerners will still be drawn to the Caliphate. There will always be a desire among the young to live in a perfect society—a utopia. However, the image of Raqqa as an Islamic utopia, or even a habitable environment, has been tarnished. Some will be driven by Jihad and will come to fight. Some, like Thundercat, will die in battle and, in the words of the Islamic State, be finally at peace with Allah.
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Postcast Six

The Caliphate as a New Beginning—Antisocials in a New Society
 
Bar girl to Johnny:        “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”   
            Johnny to bar girl: “Whaddya got?      From the film The Wild One, 1953
 
“If you’re scrambling for your identity, ISIS is the bright flame to follow.” Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, 2015
 
            Young Westerners with troubled pasts look to the Caliphate for a new beginning. Some seek to shed their past, embrace a new religion, adopt an Islamic name, join a new religious community, and move to a new land. Often, these young people were deeply troubled before their radicalization. Some drank excessively and abused and sold drugs. Later in life, many shed this lifestyle and image. Those who travel to Syria leave behind criminal records, dissolute lifestyles, toxic family associations, and weak employment prospects.
 
            A case in point is the Spaniard “Nabil,” who oscillated between legitimate and criminal behavior. His profile resembles that of some of the more antisocial and marginally functional characters who have joined the State. A small-time drug dealer in his youth, Nabil later joined the army, where he began trafficking in narcotics. Soon, he was investigated for “psychological-physical deficiencies” and, eventually, cashiered for stealing and dealing in medicine. He then shifted his criminal activities to support the Caliphate through smuggling and logistical support. He married a Muslim convert, and at age twenty-nine, he was arrested by Spanish authorities before he left for Syria. The troubled Nabil was the first Spanish soldier arrested for aiding the Caliphate.
 
            There have been many similar cases. Another young Westerner who left for Syria for a fresh start was Damian Boudreau, a Canadian. As a young man, he was haunted by hallucinations of demons and tried to kill himself by drinking antifreeze. He recovered and retreated to his bedroom, where he found Islam online. He told his mother he was leaving for Egypt to study Islam, then went to Syria to fight and was killed there. At first, Damian called and e-mailed his mother regularly, but the frequency and tone of his correspondence changed. He invited his half-brother to join him in battle. Damian wrote in stilted prose, “As for how you worry about me and love me, it is known to me. These are not new pieces of information.” His mother confided, “That’s when I realized that my son disappeared, that there was somebody new that’s in his body.” His mother, Christianne, described her pain: “It’s like being in a really black, dark movie and you can’t get out; it’s like some sort of prison. No questions ever answered.”
 
            Lukas Dam, a working-class boy from Copenhagen, followed a path similar to Damian’s. He suffered from both Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit disorder. He, like Boudreau, went to Syria to join the State, where he started a new life. Soon, his new life was over; he was killed in combat.
 
            Other forms of radicalization move quickly. According to the French minister of interior, the man who drove a truck through a crowd in Nice, killing eighty-four people, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, rediscovered his faith very quickly.
 
            As with men, young women try to reinvent themselves before heading to the Middle East. This is what happened to the rebellious, tattooed “Betsy.” At twenty-one, Betsy dreamed of becoming a hip-hop superstar: Holland’s Eminem. She enjoyed narcotics and the nightlife. Then Betsy found religion and began dressing in full Muslim robes. After a family fight, she left for Syria. Her mother said, “I don’t blame Islam. I blame the people who made her believe in a radical way of life.”
 
The Caliphate uses its Western-raised recruits to spot emotional vulnerabilities through social media. Its cells in the West draw lonely hearts to the Caliphate’s cause, but they also attract young men and women who appeared perfectly normal to most of those who knew them.
 
Profile Twelve: Sally—Krunch and Carnage
 
            Sally Jones, a former rocker in an all-girl band, would appear to be an unlikely candidate for Jihad. Born in Kent and white, Jones enjoyed some wild times in her youth. In a performance from the early 1990s posted on YouTube, Sally plays lead guitar, wearing a leather miniskirt, in a group called Krunch. She also dabbled in the black art of witchcraft. One neighbor described her as “scatty,” but others remember her as an animal lover with a particular affection for cats. Long-term employment proved difficult for her. She went on welfare and accepted relief from churches.
 
            Forty-something Sally took up with Junaid Hussain, a computer-savvy man originally from Birmingham and twenty years her junior. By summer 2014, Jones had become known worldwide as Umm Hussain al-Britani. She and her husband moved to Syria, where her bloodlust made her a headline in Britain’s tabloids. She tweeted, “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa . . . Come here I’ll do it for you!” There was more. Umm expressed her love for Osama bin Laden and contempt for Jews.
 
            When her cyber-hacking husband was killed by allied forces, she tweeted to the world that she had become a “black widow.” She would follow the path of the Chechen woman, Hawa Barayev, who blew herself up among Russian Special Forces, killing twenty-seven of them. As for her invitation for Christians to come and be beheaded, as of this writing, there have been no takers.
 
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast Seven

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter four and introduces the deadly Western women of the Caliphate.
 
Deadly Women
 
            Some women, like some men, are sadistic and power hungry, and the Islamic State provides them with opportunities. The British “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite married one of the perpetrators of the 2005 London bombings. She developed a sinister and legendary status as one of the world’s most wanted women. The London University dropout is credited with killing over 400 people in coordination with the terrorist group al Shabaab. A senior Somali official called her “an evil person, but a very clever operator.” She is not known to be currently associated with the Caliphate.
 
            The middle-aged Belgian Muriel Degauque blasted herself into history, if only in a footnote, as the first known European Muslim female suicide bomber.  American Colleen LaRose, known as “Jihad Jane,” was sent to prison for planning to kill Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks.
 
            These three women represent a cross-section of Western society. Intelligent Lewthwaite attended university; ordinary Degauque was from the industrial working class; and pathetic LaRose had a pitiable childhood. All turned to Islam to fill a spiritual void, as has happened with many other Western women.
 
Psychological and Social Drivers—Peace Symbols and Black Flags
 
The heart’s longings lead the mind, and the existential filler of ISIS nourishes the desperate and vulnerable soul, however much one is surrounded by material comfort.
 
Collective judgments of four psychiatrists referring to why Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate, 2015
 
            The draw of utopia and the compulsion of Jihad explain two of the broad lures of the Caliphate. The third group of motivators is grounded in psychology and social themes. Anger at perceived discrimination, alienation, fatalism, and a need to belong to a mass movement are psychosocial drivers for some Western Muslims. Today’s generation of Western Muslims is more attracted to Jihad than that of their parents or grandparents.
 
            Western youth joining the Caliphate are usually eager to make war. Among young men, there is a hypermasculine and virile ethos. The State’s recruiting themes cultivate the image of the heroic horseman who is master of his environment and admired by his fellow warriors. Elizabeth van der Heide, of the Dutch Center for Terrorism and Counterterrorism, said young males see the war as a video game: “Those are primarily young people who relocate to the war game in Syria and Iraq from a video game.”
 
            Another study observed that the most effective recruitment approach is to target a candidate’s sense of self-worth. The study cited the Florida killer Omar Mateen as “the perfect fit” for the Caliphate’s approach. Young men who felt neglected or weak as boys can become a part of something powerful and victorious. One young man who was not weak but still needed a purpose in life was Thundercat, profiled below.
 
Profile Eleven: Thundercat! “A Prince of a Man”
 
“[He was] a prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.”  A friend of Thundercat, 2015
 
            One Jihadi who fought for the State did not have an apparent need to validate his masculinity. He had repeatedly proven it in the ring as a two-time Thai boxing world champion from Germany. Valdet Gashi traveled to Syria with three other Thai boxers to fight with weapons, rather than fists.
 
            Gashi arrived in Germany from Albania as a six-year-old boy and was raised in a relatively secular home. As a young man, he shot up the kickboxing ranks, and the local boys described him as a “prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.” He fought 152 fights under the name Thundercat.  Some of his fights were posted on YouTube, and his speed and style are clearly devastating.
 
            Thundercat married his local sweetheart and then sired two daughters. But the fighter was drawn to the German Islamic Salafist program called Read, and he developed a moral obligation to leave his wife and daughters and join the Caliphate to fight for Islam. He said he would rather die for Allah than live as a coward.
 
            In an interview in May 2015, Thundercat declared his respect for the State, which, in his view, was deeply misunderstood in the West. As a Muslim, he could only be happy by “doing something good for Islam.” But many of his fans were disappointed, and some Muay Thai fans hoped to strip him of his championship titles. His father was fed up, too. Enver Gashi said, “Valdet’s place is with us—with his children, his wife, and his parents. . . . I want him to stop this nonsense, and I hope he’ll come back to us one day, because his place is here and nowhere else.” But Thundercat never came home.
 
            The champ tweeted from Syria that he was patrolling the Euphrates River to intercept smugglers. “If I die while doing good, I am sure I will be happy.” He did die, killed in a mission in July 2015. His brother eulogized him on social media and prayed that he rest in peace. Thundercat’s fights were over.
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World,” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.