AARHUS, Denmark — FROM his earliest years, Ahmad Walid Rashidi says he harbored a seething hatred against the Taliban, the extremist Sunni group that dominated Afghanistan before 2001 and the United States invasion.
In
1997, when he was 5, he says he lost his leg, and almost his life, in a
bomb explosion; a doctor initially pronounced him dead and covered him
with a shroud. While he recovered from his injury, he says the Taliban killed his father, a Communist, and an older brother, leaving his mother to take care of him and his six remaining siblings.
As
much as he hated the Taliban, he says he never got an opportunity to
exact revenge. His mother, a university lecturer in Kabul, moved the
family to Tehran and, when he was 10, to Denmark.
It was not until last year that Mr. Rashidi, by now a medical student in Denmark,
had his first chance, but it came in the form of another group of
brutal Sunni militants. A British-Danish family was seeking help in
bringing back to Europe twin 17-year-old daughters who had traveled to Syria to become jihadist brides of fighters for the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Mr.
Rashidi, a Sunni, agreed to try, but as he tells the story, once there
he found himself in uncharted waters, the certainties he had known back
in the West overturned. He found the girls, but they were already
married and wanted to stay. Then he was arrested by the Islamic State
and accused of being a Western spy. He was jailed, tortured and hauled
in front of a Shariah court, he says, which threatened to behead him.
But, strangely enough, he found himself being drawn to the Islamic State.
“They
are like, what do you call them? Mermaids,” he said recently, sitting
in a restaurant here in Aarhus, where he lives. “They just sing, day to
day, and I listen, you know.”
As
with most accounts from inside Islamic State-controlled territory, the
particulars of Mr. Rashidi’s ordeal cannot be fully verified. The girls’
family could not be reached for comment, but friends in Manchester,
England, confirmed the effort to rescue them.
Mr. Rashidi’s experience in Syria
is central to a book being written by two Danish journalists, Stig
Matthiesen and Lasse Ellegaard, who say they are confident that he is
reliable. Mr. Rashidi was seen at the Syrian border with Turkey in the
company of the girls’ parents by another journalist, who asked not to be
named because he is reporting on the story and did not want to harm his
relationship with the family.
Mr.
Rashidi also provided a copy of a document from the Islamic State
providing him and the girls’ mother, Khadra Jama, “safe passage” to
Turkey.
NOW,
back in Denmark, he condemns the militant group and all forms of
terrorism. But he says his experiences help illuminate how the group’s
calls for righting historical injustices in the Middle East, including
the humiliation suffered by Muslims under Western colonialism, strike a
chord with young Muslims, as does its narrative that Muslims are the
victims of discrimination in Western society.
It
is an appeal that resonates not only among the angry and disaffected,
but also among straight-A students, the deeply religious and demure
young women — even among people like Mr. Rashidi, who started as a
staunch opponent.
He says he can understand the motivations of Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein,
the 22-year-old suspect behind the terrorist attacks in Copenhagen in
February, who was shot and killed by the police. “Only one guy needed to
kill two people to shock the whole of Denmark,” said Mr. Rashidi, 23.
“Try to imagine that in Afghanistan.”
Atrocities
committed by the Islamic State, he said, are aimed at “making the West
get a taste of their own medicine,” which part of him thinks the West
deserves.
People
like him and Mr. Hussein are “ticking bombs,” he said, after some
thought. “Bombs which are huge and which will one day explode. But it’s a
normal reaction for people like us.”
Mr.
Rashidi’s childhood mirrors the experiences of millions of young
European Muslims, many of whom come from families who have been
displaced or who have been raised in Islamic pockets in urban areas,
isolated and alienated from the mainstream.
The
bombing that took his leg is still seared in his memory. “I saw
something green and metal, then everything turned black,” he said. “I
was then on the ground, in our garden, my face was on the earth, and
there was huge smoke and glass was all around. I saw fire in the stone. I
told myself stones can’t be on fire.”
Later,
he said, “They put a white sheet on my body, and a voice said, ‘He’s
dead.’ I heard my mother and grandmother yelling, ‘No, no, no!’ ”
He
was grateful for the prosthetic leg he received in Germany soon after
the bombing. He was treated there for more than seven months, thanks to a
nonprofit organization and a German foster mother who took care of him.
But
when his family moved to Denmark, he felt frustrated by what he saw as a
lack of understanding among Westerners about the wars being fought in
Afghanistan and the Middle East.
At
school, when he compared victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to
civilian deaths in Afghanistan, his teacher replied that they did not
matter because in his country “buildings aren’t high.”
“How
could I defend myself against that?” Mr. Rashidi asked. “It built up
resentment. People here in the West gather around a dinner table to
discuss the death of a pet, but no one asked me what happened to my leg.
I was full of hate.”
He
became increasingly troubled, fighting with classmates, even hitting
teachers. “I was fighting everyone,” he said. “I was basically a
criminal.”
IT
was not until last year that he found what he thought was a worthwhile
enemy to fight. A classmate from medical school was trying to find a way
to bring back her twin sisters who had joined the Islamic State, and
turned to Mr. Rashidi for help.
The
mission involved persuading Zahra and Salma Halane to return to
Britain. The girls, top students from a Somali family, had slipped away
during the summer.
“I
was not afraid of death,” Mr. Rashidi said. As a child, he believed
that death happened only to good people, those deemed worthy enough by
God to be rescued from a living hell, like his father and brother. “I
had nothing to lose.”
He
said he entered Syria from Turkey on several occasions in July, at
first in areas under the control of the Free Syrian Army, the
loose-knit, Western-backed rebel umbrella group. He discovered that the
girls were in Manbij, a Syrian city between Raqqa and Al Bab, which is
said to be popular among European fighters of the Islamic State.
He
returned to Syria with the girls’ mother, Ms. Jama, pretending that she
was his mother-in-law. They were arrested and charged with spying, he
said, and detained in separate jails.
Ms.
Jama was released first, after 36 days, because she is a mother, Mr.
Rashidi said, and she returned home to Britain. Mr. Rashidi said he was
tortured, and moved to three different locations, a common strategy used
by the Islamic State to disorient prisoners.
Over
time, he said, he won his captors’ trust, even writing a letter telling
his family that he had joined the Islamic State. He was eventually
taken to the local Islamic State commander, a 28-year-old Briton whom
Mr. Rashidi declined to name for self-protection.
“We
had a good connection,” Mr. Rashidi said. “We were like high school
classmates; joking, talking,” he said, adding, “We were testosterone
bombs.”
Mr. Rashidi said the commander helped secure his release when he was brought in front of the Shariah court. Mr. Rashidi had lied to him, telling him his mother was sick in a hospital and awaiting his return.
He
says now that he often thinks back on his experience with the Islamic
State, and knows the price he would have to pay if he were to return:
certain torture. But he says the prospect does not frighten him, if it
means reuniting with the commander and the people he bonded with.
“I
betrayed him,” Mr. Rashidi said, tearing up. “Let me ask you, how can I
fight these guys when I’ve left half my heart in Syria?”
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