Daesh and the lonely young American

RECRUITERS SYMPATHETIC TO TERROR GROUP SEEK LONELY, ISOLATED PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY WESTERNERS, AND LURE THEM TO THEIR BRAND OF WAR

They sent her money and plied her with gifts of chocolate. They indulged her curiosity and calmed her apprehensions as they ushered her toward the hardline theological concepts that Daesh is built on

Alex, a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement the day she told her Twitter followers that she had embraced Islam.

For months, she had been growing closer to a new group of friends online — the most attentive she had ever had — who were teaching her what it meant to be a Muslim. Increasingly, they were telling her about Daesh and how the group was building a homeland in Syria and Iraq where the holy could live according to God’s law.

One in particular, Faisal, had become her nearly constant companion, spending hours each day with her on Twitter, Skype and email, painstakingly guiding her through the fundamentals of the faith.

But when she excitedly told him that she had found a mosque just 8km from the home she shared with her grandparents in rural Washington state, he suddenly became cold.

The only Muslims she knew were those she had met online, and he encouraged her to keep it that way, arguing that Muslims are persecuted in the United States. She could be labelled a terrorist, he warned, and for now it was best for her to keep her conversion secret, even from her family.

So on his guidance, Alex began leading a double life. She kept teaching at her church, but her truck’s radio was no longer tuned to the Christian hits station. Instead, she hummed along with the Daesh anthems blasting out of her turquoise iPhone, and began daydreaming about what life with the terrorists might be like.

Even though Daesh’s ideology is explicitly at odds with the West, the group is making a relentless effort to recruit Westerners, eager to exploit them for their outsize propaganda value.

Cadre of operators

The reach of Daesh’s recruiting effort has been multiplied by an enormous cadre of operators on social media. The terrorist group itself maintains a 24-hour online operation, and its effectiveness is vastly extended by larger rings of sympathetic volunteers and fans who pass on its messages and viewpoint, reeling in potential recruits, analysts say.

Alex’s online circle — involving several dozen accounts, some operated by people who directly identified themselves as members of Daesh or whom terrorism analysts believe to be directly linked to the group — collectively spent thousands of hours engaging her over more than six months. They sent her money and plied her with gifts of chocolate. They indulged her curiosity and calmed her apprehensions as they ushered her toward the hard-line theological concepts that Daesh is built on.

As a Christian, Alex presented the need for an extra step in the process. Yet she helped close the gap herself: Trying to explain the attraction, she said she had already been drawn to the idea of living a faith more fully.

Extensive interviews with Alex and her family, along with a review of the emails, Twitter posts, private messages and Skype chats she exchanged, which they agreed to share with The New York Times on the condition that their real names and hometown not be revealed, offered a glimpse into the intense effort to indoctrinate a young American woman, increasing her sense of isolation from her family and community.

“All of us have a natural firewall in our brain that keeps us from bad ideas,” said Nasser Weddady, a Middle East expert who is preparing a research paper on combating extremist propaganda. “They look for weaknesses in the wall, and then they attack.”

To get to Alex’s house from the nearest town, visitors turn off at a trailer park and drive for 1,6km past wide, irrigated fields of wheat and alfalfa.

“My grandparents enjoy living in the middle of nowhere. I enjoy community,” Alex said. “It gets lonely here.”

She has lived with her grandparents for almost all her life: When she was 11 months old, her mother, struggling with drug addiction, lost custody of her. Her therapist says that fetal alcohol syndrome, which has left Alex with tremors in her hands, has also contributed to a persistent lack of maturity and poor judgment.

That only partly explains what happened to her online, her family says.

After dropping out of college last year, she was earning $300 (Dh1,101) a month babysitting two days a week and teaching Sunday school for children at her church on weekends. At home, she spent hours streaming movies and updating her social media timelines.

“All the other kids spread their wings and flew,” says her 68-year-old grandmother, who has raised eight children and grandchildren in a modest but tidy home the size of a double-wide trailer. “She is like a lost child.”

Then on August 19, Alex’s phone vibrated with a CNN alert.

James Foley, a journalist she had never heard of, had been beheaded by Daesh, a group she knew nothing about. The searing image of the young man kneeling as the knife was lifted to his throat stayed with her.

Riveted by the killing, and struck by a horrified curiosity, she logged on to Twitter to see if she could learn more.

She found herself shocked again, this time by the fact that people who openly identified as belonging to Daesh took the time to politely answer her questions.

One of the first relationships she struck up was with a man who told her he was a Daesh fighter named Monzer Hamad, stationed near Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Soon they were chatting for hours every day, their interactions giddy, filled with smiley faces and exclamations of “LOL.”

Art of recruiting

What happened next tracks closely with the recommendations in a manual written by Al Qaida in Iraq, the group that became Daesh, titled A Course in the Art of Recruiting. A copy was recovered by US forces in Iraq in 2009.

The pamphlet advises spending as much time as possible with prospective recruits, keeping in regular touch. The recruiter should “listen to his conversation carefully” and “share his joys and sadness” in order to draw closer.

Then the recruiter should focus on instilling the basics of Islam, making sure not to mention jihad.

Later in October, Hamad asked Alex to reread the Bible and report back on how Christ described himself.

He guided her to verses like John 12:44: “And Jesus Christ cried out and said, ‘Whoever believes in me, believes not in me, but in He who sent me.’”

He explained to her that Christ was a man who deserved to be revered as a prophet. But he was not God.

The discussion unmoored Alex, who had chosen a quote by Jesus to illustrate her high school yearbook page.

The next time she attended service, Alex did not stand when the pastor invited the congregation to take communion.

Two days later, Alex wrote: “I can agree that [Prophet] Mohammad [PBUH] and Jesus are prophets not God.”

He responded: “so what are you waiting for to become a muslim?” Soon after, his Skype icon went grey. Day after day, she looked for him, but he was gone. She wondered whether he had died in battle.

By the last week of October, Alex was communicating with more than a dozen people who openly admired Daesh. Her life, which had mostly seemed like a blurred series of babysitting shifts and lonely weekends roaming the mall, was now filled with encouragement and tutorials from her online friends.

Gifts and cash

One of her new Muslim “sisters” sent Alex a $200 gift certificate to IslamicBookstore.com. She and others chose books for Alex and mailed them to her home. They included an English-language Quran and a basic study guide.

Among the people who picked up where Hamad left off was a Twitter user called Voyager, whose profile picture showed white stallions galloping through crashing waves.

In November, he asked for her email address and told her his name was Faisal Mustafa and that he lived in Stockport, near Manchester, England. He asked for her Skype ID, and soon they began chatting, cameras turned off in keeping with Muslim rules on modesty.

After dropping out of college, Alex worked for a year at a day care centre, only to resign after a disagreement with her manager. She quit a call-centre training programme after three weeks, she said, unable to handle angry calls from customers.

Her online conversations became a touchstone at a time when she was increasingly adrift. Much of it was innocuous banter. Other times, though, the talk focused on the details of an uncompromising Muslim life. By the time Christmas arrived, she felt she had crossed a line.

She asked Faisal what it would take to convert. He explained that all she needed to do was repeat the phrase “There is no God but Allah, and [Prophet] Mohammad [PBUH] is his messenger,” with complete belief and commitment, in the presence of two Muslims.

This presented an obstacle for Alex, who still knew no Muslims in person. Faisal argued that she could post her declaration of faith, known as the Shahada, on Twitter, and the first two people who read it would count as her witnesses.

The night of December 28, as her family watched television, Alex quietly closed the door. She sat on her bed, a crucifix on the bookshelf beside her. For a moment she thought she might throw up. Just after 9pm she logged on to Twitter.

Faisal acknowledged her declaration right away. So did another online friend, who went by the screen name Hallie Shaikh and whom Faisal had asked to serve as the second witness.

Within hours, Alex had doubled her Twitter following. “I actually have brothers and sisters,” she posted before going to bed. “I’m crying.”

“Your a nice person with a beautiful character,” Faisal wrote her. “In many ways ur much better than many so called born muslims.”

He added: “getting someone 2 marry is no problem Inshallah.”

A few more days passed before he elaborated: “I know someone who will marry you but hes not good looking, 45 bald but nice muslim.”

In their hourslong Skype sessions, Faisal emphasised that it is a sin for a Muslim to stay among nonbelievers, and their talk increasingly began revolving around her travelling to “a Muslim land.” Though he never mentioned Syria, Alex understood that was what he meant, she said.

On February 19, Faisal suggested she meet him in Austria so that he could introduce her to her future husband, she said. Alex would need to be accompanied by her “mahram,” or male relative. When she asked whether her 11-yearold brother could fulfil that role, Faisal said that would be acceptable.

Two days later, he began asking how and when Alex could get herself and her little brother to Austria.

Recruiter confronted

Alex’s grandmother often wakes up before dawn. That is how she noticed that her granddaughter was not sleeping much — seeing her face framed by the halo of her tablet computer in the dark. They began having regular fights, until March, when Alex’s family decided to confiscate her computer and phone at night.

Alex said she found ways to sneak messages to her online community, borrowing phones from friends.

On a sunny morning in late March, Alex’s grandmother decided to confront the man she believed was trying to recruit Alex to Daesh.

Alex’s grandmother typed out a long Skype message to him.

“You need to know she is very important to us,” she wrote. “Why would you EVER think that we would let her leave us under the circumstances you were asking?”

She continued: “What are you thinking? We have raised her 24 years to be a faithful Christian woman. Not to be brain washed by you.” After a few minutes, the family saw an ellipsis next to Faisal’s icon, indicating he was replying.

“I understand you may consider us being radical Muslims whatever that maybe? Well please don’t believe everything on fox news!!” he wrote, his message riddled with typos. “We don’t agree with terrorism AT ALL ... You have my word but also the word of her friends IN NO way will we ever try to make her harm others or do anything which is illegal.”

She typed: “Nothing you say explains the offer of a trip to Austria, the free ticket, the offer of a marriage deal with an old, bald man.”

He replied that the marriage offer was “a joke.”

Then he gave his word he would not contact Alex again.

After the online showdown with Faisal, Alex and her grandparents left for a much-needed vacation in their recreational vehicle, seeking to reconnect.

Alex found she could not stay away from her online friend for long, though. Even though she had come to feel she couldn’t trust him, she still missed his companionship.

Waiting until her grandparents were out clamming on a windy beach on the Washington coast, Alex logged into Skype, the one account her family had forgotten to shut down.

Faisal wrote her right away, and months later they are still exchanging messages.

“I told her I would not communicate with you,” he wrote. “But I lied.”