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.