On The Nation: Tova O'Brien interviews Ben Taub

Lisa Owen: One of the biggest mysteries about terror groups like Islamic State is why so many teenagers from seemingly stable, well-off homes are rushing to join. American journalist Ben Taub has written about a young Belgian who fought in Syria, was tortured in an Islamic State prison and eventually escaped but only to attempt to return to the war zone months later. 3News political reporter Tova O’Brien sat down with Taub in New York and began by asking how he met the teen and ended up going to the front line.

Ben Taub: Right, so it actually—I came into the story by accident. I was on the Turkish-Syrian border during the summer of 2014, and I happened to meet his father. His father was guiding two other Belgian father into Islamic State territory to try to help them retrieve their jihadi sons. And I stayed in touch with the father after that, and shortly thereafter his son was going on trial and he was part of Belgium’s largest ever terrorism trial. And so I asked if I could speak with him, and he invited me to come to Belgium, and I ended up going with the intention of writing about parents, but then I got a lot of the court records, and the court records showed a little bit of a shocking amount of information about the rise of ISIS before it existed.

Tova O’Brien: A fascinating story, and your back story is fascinating as well. You used money from a reality TV show to fund your journalism, to fund this trip. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, well, so, I had been a contestant on The Voice in 2012. And, you know, I was not one of the important ones. I was kicked out relatively early, but—

You’re selling yourself short.

I ended up transitioning into journalism with that money.

All right, how common is it— I suppose let’s just talk a little bit about this teenager you met. How common is it that these teens are being recruited online and end up joining terrorist groups like IS?

Well, it seems to be happening with quite a bit of frequency. So far I believe the official estimates have put it at around 20,000 or 25,000 foreigners have travelled to Syria to participate in jihadi groups, most of them for Islamic State. That’s from all over the world. Most of them are actually coming from the Arab world, North Africa, Middle East, quite high numbers from Europe and lower numbers from America and Australia and a handful from New Zealand as well, I’ve heard. From the people that I’ve spoken to who have participated in this fight, in a lot of cases they go through some period of personal crisis, and that has nothing to do with socio-economic status or any other kind of thing. It’s very unpredictable. In one case, for instance, a young man was dumped by his girlfriend. And another one that I spoke to, he wanted to— he was sick of doing drugs and alcohol with his high school friends and Islam was a route of that. And for the first several months or maybe years, for a lot of these guys, it’s a very very healthy transition. They come very devout, and they’re under the guidance of perfectly normal, reasonable imams who are teaching them all the good aspects of a comprehensive religion.

And then what happens? How does that transformation…?

That’s the tricky part. So then what happened with Sharia4Belgium, a lot of the guys that were in my story, the recruiter was a guy named Fouad Belkacem, and he would pull them aside and say, ‘Look, the imam isn’t talking about the real Islam. Here is a list of questions you can go ask him that will prove that he won’t talk about these aspects of the religion.’ And so they would actually return to the imam and ask the imam, ‘What about this?’ And when the imam would say, ‘Look, that’s not looking good. You don’t want to be a part of this. This looks like Sharia4Belgium propaganda,’ in some cases, it only convinced them of the recruiter’s authenticity. And so then they leave the mosque, and once they’ve left the mosque, no one has any authority over them religiously, except for the recruiter. The parents lose legitimacy. Often it’s Muslim parents who can’t talk to their children about their religion; the children start telling their own Muslim parents, you know, ‘You’re an infidel.’ So at that point, it becomes very very dangerous.

I mean, a lot of teenagers get isolated, spend a lot of time on their computers. That can just be standard teenage behaviour. How do parents know if their kid is susceptible, I suppose?

I spoke to 12 parents of Belgian jihadis while I was reporting this story, and one thing that kept coming up in all of their stories was that their children would cut off communication, and they would notice— they didn't know necessarily what was going on, but they would notice that something was different. They weren't speaking to them. They would spend, you know— sometimes they'd disappear at night and not come home until the next morning, but they hadn't been out drinking. They were coming home sweaty from training, doing physical training to prepare for the war.

You've talked about European governments and the fact that they've been blindsided by a number of young people, the number of young people going to fight in Iraq and Syria. What is it that you think governments can actually do to fight back?

Short of an all-out ground offensive, I don't think this group is going to disappear. One of the things they've done most successfully and alarmingly is indoctrinate children. They are very very committed to taking children away from their parents. I'm talking about within their territory. They control a territory that has a huge number of people living inside, and, you know, the civilians, whether or not they want them to be there, they're unable to voice any dissent, and so when Isis will come into your home and take your child and take him to a school and suddenly your kid is enrolled in this school where they're essentially jihadi training camps from the age of 6 or 7 or 8 years old. It's hard to see how this won't be a problem for the next, you know, several generations.

Well, it's interesting you say, you know, short of an all-out ground offense. One of the ways that we've seen governments is fighting back is through air operations and limited troops on the ground, New Zealand included. From what you've seen, from what you know, is this the right approach?

The US is spending about $9M a day on offenses— defences against Islamic State, and that, you know, might keep them out of Kobani, but it doesn't keep them from slipping one guy through the borders to do a suicide bombing in Suruc five miles away and kill 32 Turks. At the same time as we're doing air strikes in one area, you'll send a couple of hundred guys who then defeat thousands of Iraqi army guys who just flee, and suddenly they've taken an entire city in Iraq.

In New Zealand, we've got a kind of terrorist watch list. Do we need spy agencies to be keeping an eye on these people to make sure that they're not becoming a risk of radicalisation?

That's a good question. I think, you know, naturally surveillance is important. It's the only way, in a lot of ways, to know exactly what's going on. That being said, these guys can skip around that. There's all kinds of ways of— A Belgian jihadi I spoke to, he throws away his cell phone, like, every couple of weeks and just buys a new one. And suddenly they don't know which number he's on because you don't need to register it. I think a more effective route for combating this is to look at the long term, and there are a couple of countries that have taken approaches, softer approaches, that are more focused on engaging people before they become radicalised. People whose parents phone up and say, 'We're not sure. Is my— He might be at risk.' And they essentially set them up with mentors. Denmark is doing this. The UK to some extent is doing this — maybe other countries too. And they have these sort of programmes where they'll spend an enormous amount of time and effort and resources preventing someone from engaging in terrorist activity by essentially slowly befriending them and talking them out of it, and sometimes it works.

The end of your story's really intriguing — the young man that you're writing about. Jejoen, he has travelled to Syria. He's been captured by Islamic State. He's been tortured. He's escaped. He's gone back to Belgium, where he's undergone hundreds of hours of police interrogation and then trial, and then when you sit down with him at the end of all of this, he sounds like he wants to go back, why?

That shocked me. Basically what happened was, a few days after our interview, he phoned me up asking if he could use my credit card to fly to Southern Turkey on a holiday, he said. I don't know. I couldn't possibly speak for his intentions, but what I could say is that he was very cooperative with the Belgian authorities. He gave them extraordinary testimony, and all of it was correct. From his sketches of key locations, they were able to identify a villa belonging to a guy named Amr al-Absi, who the US State Department has said was in charge of kidnappings for ISIS. This is the level of detail and cooperation he gave, and at the end of that, he was thrown into trial with all the rest, and we not, sort of, offered any amnesties or a new identity or these things that he kind of hoped for to get his life back on track, and I think he may have felt used. So it's important to treat people as people. When someone is desperately and honestly giving cooperative help to the government that then turns around and convicts them without offering anything in return, it sounds like a sort of cry to become de-radicalised, and then no one's at the other end of that line. So, policies, governments — for whatever the hysteria around ISIS, people need to recognise that every individual member of ISIS is a person whose wants and needs change over time.

And those next steps are so important when someone comes home.

Yeah. There's no better resource for understanding the problem and for preventing new people from joining this cause than to harness the knowledge and power of these guys who return. And many of them return because there were very strong reasons why they were not comfortable there, and who better to talk to a group of potential young radicals than someone who can say, 'Look, I was there, and it was terrible and they're lying to you.'

That's a good place to leave it. Thank you so much for your time, Ben.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

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