I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  I wondered where all his anger came from as a child.

  “Do you know how it felt to grow up as the only dark-skinned child in my neighborhood and school? I grew up with racism.”

  I didn’t respond.

  He paused and asked if I wanted a tea or coffee. I wondered if he was trying to change the subject. I pressed him.

  “What was it like for you to grow up here?”

  “It was very difficult,” he said. Some teachers called him “Negro,” and treated him and his Muslim friends badly.

  It reminded me of my own experiences in kindergarten, with the teacher who always pointed out that the bad characters in the fairy tales “were all dark-haired, like you,” and of the other children in Klettenbergstrasse who weren’t allowed to play with us because we were children of guest workers and not really up to their “standards,” or because my oldest sister was handicapped.

  I could feel the pain in his voice when he talked, the sense of how difficult it was to be the outsider. Cuspert told me that he became increasingly interested in politics and what was happening in the world, an impulse to which I could also relate. “Maybe because of my own experience growing up here, I always felt I should support those who are weak, the underdogs,” he said. I’ve often heard this argument from members of terrorist organizations. The problem is that if it’s taken too far, “supporting underdogs” can easily turn into oppressing others.

  That was why he took to the streets against what he called “unfair” American foreign policy around the time of the First Gulf War in the early 1990s. He grew up in a largely Muslim immigrant neighborhood in Berlin, where support for the Palestinian struggle mixed with general left-wing sentiments. Many of his neighbors saw America as the great evil. As a teenager, he told me, he’d even burned an American flag.

  He said that from an early age, he’d trained himself in Thai boxing, tae kwon do, and Brazilian jujitsu. Social workers in Germany later sent him to a working farm in Namibia that aimed to put juvenile delinquents on a better path. The point of the place was to shock him and others out of their aggression and show them how good they had it back home. It was like going into the army, Cuspert said. They had to wake up at dawn to work on the farm, which grew vegetables and fruit and raised animals. It was a structured environment with strict discipline, but for Cuspert it was also the first time he lived in a mainly black community. He enjoyed the few weeks he spent there, but his behavior and worldview didn’t change much.

  In the 1990s, he found a new outlet for his anger when he started rapping under the name Deso Dogg, “Deso” being short for “Devil’s Son.” Cuspert felt that through music he would be able to reach hundreds or thousands of young people, air his political grievances, and speak frankly about social issues. He rapped about a stint in juvenile detention, racism, war, and occasionally religion. In 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, Cuspert and his stepfather engaged in endless political arguments.

  “Were you doing all this to piss your stepfather off,” I asked, “or because you really believed Saddam Hussein was innocent?”

  He paused for a few seconds. “I think I wanted to piss my stepfather off, but I also was against this U.S. imperialism. They always think they can decide what should happen in other countries, and I didn’t like it.”

  “But if I remember right, the Gulf states supported the U.S. intervention in 2003, because Saddam’s army had entered Kuwait in 1990. Or at least they didn’t object to the invasion.”

  He smiled. “Yes indeed, you are right. But those rulers are all in the pockets of America. They are all traitors, and so, God willing, soon they will all disappear.”

  His music career soared. In 2006, he toured with the American hip-hop artist DMX. Cuspert’s most famous song, which begins, “Welcome to my world, full of hatred and blood,” was featured in the 2010 German film Civil Courage. The video shows Cuspert engaged in the ritual washing that Muslims practice before prayers.

  As his reputation grew, he gained fans. If he’d kept at it, he might have become as famous as Bushido, a half-German, half-Tunisian rapper who rose to prominence at about the same time and went on to fill stadiums and make millions. But after a bad car accident in 2010, Cuspert said that he began to feel that he’d been wasting his life in the pursuit of fame and recognition. He grew restless and started digging into his background. His biological father had been Muslim, but Cuspert had not been raised in the faith. Now he began to learn more about Islam, and in time he grew convinced that Allah had allowed him to survive the car accident so he could find a new path in life.

  He stopped rapping. He now saw such music as haram: forbidden. Instead, he began singing the Islamic songs known as nasheeds, which often serve as sound tracks to videos issued by ISIS and other jihadi groups, and he turned his attention to fighting the United States and the West. He told me he’d reached out to a Taliban contact and sworn his allegiance to Mullah Omar, and that he began to follow the teachings of preachers such as Anwar al-Awlaki, the charismatic American-born inspiration to a generation of young jihadists, who would be killed in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011 after joining Al Qaeda in Yemen. He also listened to the speeches of Osama bin Laden, whom he saw not as a terrorist but as a Robin Hood type who’d left a comfortable life to help those less fortunate. When bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in May 2011, Cuspert would tell me he was happy the Al Qaeda leader had died a martyr.

  I sensed that Cuspert was looking for answers, but I also knew that most imams, at least in Germany, wouldn’t provide them. If he went to their mosques, started talking about politics, and asked what the religion would say about these matters, they’d have been inclined to turn him away out of concern that the intelligence services might shut them down. So instead of discussing his concerns, he began connecting with like-minded people online and grew even more radical.

  While many in the West viewed the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere across the region as harbingers of democratic change, Cuspert saw them as an opportunity for anti-Western Islamists to gain power and operate more freely.

  “What democracy?” he asked me. “This is not compatible with Islam, and all the people want Islam.”

  I asked where he had gotten the idea that Islam wasn’t compatible with democracy. He smiled and answered that he had heard the sermon of a sheikh online—he refused to tell me the man’s name—and then chatted with him about it. Cuspert seemed troubled about his own life, as well as what he saw as Western hegemony. His disaffection made him easy prey for jihadist recruiters, who knew exactly what to say to people like him. While three of the four September 11 pilots had been recruited and influenced by jihadi veterans or preachers, we were now dealing with a new, European-born generation of radicals, such as the Austrian Mohamed Mahmoud, whom Cuspert had also mentioned as an inspirational figure. Mahmoud not only spoke fluent German but also understood the language of youth, which made him even more compelling to Cuspert, who didn’t speak Arabic at the time.

  “But that’s not what most of the people are marching for,” I told him. I hadn’t seen anyone demonstrating in favor of Sharia law.

  He smiled again. “Don’t think about what you see. The world will worry about what can’t be seen now.”

  He told me he had been in touch with “brothers” in Tunisia who had been imprisoned because they were preaching about Islam. “Can you imagine?” he said. “They were jailed and tortured by people who also call themselves Muslims, but God gave them patience and they are free now, thanks to Allah.”

  And thanks to the Arab Spring, I thought. I asked Cuspert if he planned to go and fight.

  “God willing, when my time comes, I will,” he answered, adding only that he would do battle “in a country where they speak the language of the holy Koran.”

  This was the first of several conversations I had with Cuspert that spring. The more we spoke, the more I wondered if there was some kind of underground network of jihadists that wa
s taking advantage of the Arab Spring. I wasn’t sure how seriously to take what he was telling me, so I asked around.

  “This guy is just a bigmouth. We don’t think he matters,” one security official told me. “You’re wasting your time with him.”

  But I remained intrigued, especially by Cuspert’s certainty.

  These don’t sound like radical ideas now, but at the time this wasn’t the story that international news networks and major Western newspapers and magazines were telling. Instead, they carried report after report about the end of Islamism and the outbreak of democracy, as if a giant lightbulb had been switched on across the Middle East and North Africa. And while many liberals and young people in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere wanted more rights and craved more progressive governments, journalists focused on these groups at the expense of other, more sinister forces. Readers and viewers were told that if they looked at Tahrir Square, they would understand what Egypt wanted. But Tahrir Square was not Egypt. Meanwhile, we ignored or failed to see people such as Cuspert and his friends—or we didn’t want to see them because they didn’t fit into the happy narrative of democratic progress.

  Where were Al Qaeda and the Taliban in all this? Would some of those disenfranchised people who had once gravitated to Al Qaeda see the Arab Spring as a better opportunity? I began to reach out to some of my militant sources in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and I bought a new unregistered SIM card and a cheap phone to call the Taliban commander I’d had dinner with in Pakistan.

  “I heard what happened to you in Egypt,” he said. “Did they do anything to you? Torture or…” He stopped. “You know what I mean. Have they touched your honor?”

  I told him that no such thing happened, then asked how he’d found out.

  He began to laugh. “Do you think we don’t read the news?”

  I asked if he was worried about losing his followers in the Arab Spring countries. He was not. Instead, he praised the opposition forces for rising against “corrupt leaders.” He added, “It’s good that people will have the power, because they will choose the right way, like we had under the rule of the Taliban.”

  But that wasn’t what I had seen on the banners the protesters carried. Instead, people were asking for more rights, better living standards.

  “That’s not what the majority want,” the commander told me. “People want Sharia. They want no more Western interference and no puppets in power.” He knew this, he said, because some Taliban fighters came from those countries. “Now they are back and make dawah and offer their help to people there.”

  In Islamic practice, dawah means preaching and teaching. The men the Taliban commander talked about were essentially jihadi recruiters. “You will see,” he told me. “Brothers from all over the world will travel to those places and teach what was banned before, the right Islam.”

  I began to wonder if I should head to the Middle East to learn more. Then a young Muslim man shot and killed two American airmen in Frankfurt, wounding two others. The police said they had arrested the killer, Arid Uka. I dove into reporting the story.

  Uka was an ethnic Albanian who had been born in Kosovo and raised in Frankfurt; his family and friends described him as a shy, calm twenty-one-year-old who, along with his classmates, had won a government prize in middle school for a project on how to prevent violence in society. His parents were moderate Muslims, and they and his brothers told me they didn’t understand why he’d killed the Americans. But his older brother, Hastrid, mentioned that Arid spent lots of time on the computer, “playing games, reading posts on Facebook, or watching movies on YouTube. Actually, recently he was listening also to nasheeds with some political messages in German.”

  I asked if he knew whose chants they were. He thought for a couple of seconds, and I could see he was trying to remember a name.

  “It’s this former rapper, something with like, ‘Dog.’”

  When I tried to call Cuspert, a message said his number was no longer in use. I reached out to the imam who had put us in touch and asked if he had the ex-rapper’s new number.

  “Sorry, I don’t,” he said. “Things have changed a lot, Souad. Abu Maleeq no longer comes to me. In fact, he called me a traitor because I told him his views were extreme and far from Islamic teachings.”

  He was hanging out with a different group now, the imam said. “He doesn’t want to hear what the truth is. He just wants to hear what his truth is.”

  Since I didn’t know how to reach Cuspert, I decided to dig into what he’d told me. I traveled to London to meet with three older militants originally from Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Two of them had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and had witnessed the beginning of the era of global jihad; all had been members of domestic Islamist movements that had called for overthrowing the government and implementing a system based purely on Sharia law. As a result of their unpopular views, some of these men had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom, though they knew they were closely watched by British intelligence.

  We met in a coffee shop in Knightsbridge, an area popular with rich Gulf Arabs. Although the men I met weren’t wealthy, they told me they felt safer there because their ethnicity was less likely to draw attention. I had known the Egyptian and Tunisian men for some time, but was just meeting the Libyan. All three seemed happy with the developments in their native countries.

  “The people have finally shown the world that they are fed up with the corrupt regimes,” the Libyan said. He was very soft-spoken, and his dark brown eyes looked kind. “When people in Libya have the free choice, they will choose Sharia.”

  “What if they don’t?” I asked.

  “Everybody will chose the right way if they finally have the chance to see what the right way is,” the Tunisian said. “And nothing can be better or more right than the law of Allah.”

  What would this mean for women in Tunisia? I asked. The country had long been very liberal and had granted women equal rights. Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, was seen as perhaps the most progressive leader in the Arab World in this regard. In the 1960s he introduced a series of reforms that included a ban on polygamy and guaranteed the rights of women to freely choose their husbands, to divorce while retaining primary custody of their children, and to obtain legal abortions. Bourguiba ultimately banned the veil, which he called an “odious rag.” His approach came to be called le féminisme bourguibien.

  To some Bourguiba was a hero for pushing these reforms through, while others, such as the man I was sitting with, called him a “dictator.”

  “This was by force,” the Tunisian told me angrily. “Women had no choice. They were forced to give up Islam because of him and other traitors. We will liberate the Tunisian women.”

  “What about women who don’t want to wear a head scarf?”

  “Any woman who is really Muslim will be happy to cover her hair and face.”

  “The face too?” I blurted out.

  If his wife and daughters, who had been born in the United Kingdom, wore the face-covering niqab, he told me, then surely a Muslim woman in an Arab country would do the same.

  “But wearing hijab or niqab isn’t what people are demanding in this Arab Spring,” I answered.

  “This is not an Arab Spring,” the Egyptian interrupted. “This is a spring for Islam and Muslims.”

  He told me that many of his friends who had been freed from prison in Egypt were actively doing dawah. “This is a very good time for all the Muslim ummah,” he said, referring to the Muslim people collectively. “We can now bring the right teaching of Islam into our countries, and soon the ummah all over the region will be stronger.”

  When we finished our tea and coffee, the Tunisian urged me to travel to the Tunisian-Libyan border region. “You will find some of my brothers there, helping refugees, masha’Allah. They have all been in prison for years.” He gave me his wife’s number in case I needed to be in touch.

  As I walked back to my hotel, I passe
d groups of people who spoke the dialects of the Gulf region. Some carried Hermès purses and giant shopping bags from Harrods; others sped past in Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, and Maseratis. It struck me that they didn’t seem concerned about—or even very aware of—the turmoil on the streets in some Arab countries. In that way and many others, they couldn’t have been more different from the men I’d just met. I recalled something the Tunisian had said: “Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Syria won’t be the only places. This is the beginning of an unstoppable wave. This will make things easier for the soldiers of Allah.”

  It sounded as if the Arab uprisings were about to become a new magnet for militants from all over the world, as Afghanistan and Pakistan had been in the fight against the Soviets. But I knew I’d have to visit some of those countries to find out for sure.

  In August I flew to Tunisia, where the Ben Ali regime had given way to a Muslim Brotherhood–supported government. The head of the party, Rachid Ghannouchi, was viewed as a moderate Islamist and had spent more than twenty years in exile in the United Kingdom before returning to Tunisia in 2011. In Tunis, people seemed proud and euphoric. The Tunisians I spoke with were overwhelmingly optimistic, including Ahmad, the stringer I worked with there. Under Ben Ali, the country had been a police state. Intellectuals weren’t allowed to write or say what they wanted. Now, Ahmad told me proudly, Tunisia would turn into a real democracy, with freedom of speech. Though that hadn’t entirely happened yet, he felt that the new leadership was a step in the right direction in terms of fighting corruption and liberalizing the government.

  At the Tunisian-Libyan border post at Ra’s Ajdir, I found representatives from the Red Crescent, the United Nations, and other international aid organizations helping people who’d fled the fighting in Libya, including many Africans who had worked in that country. The United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and other nations had sent support as well. Some countries had set up camps for families and provided food, while Morocco had established a field hospital.