I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad

By Souad Mekhennet

9 min read

Why does it matter? Because the war on terror keeps producing the next generation of terrorists — and the journalist who saw it happening was being used as bait by her own side.

Most terrorism correspondents report on radicalization from the outside. Souad Mekhennet can't. She is Moroccan and Turkish, raised Muslim in Germany, fluent in the dialects that open doors in Hamburg basements and Syrian border towns — and that same profile makes her a recruitment target for ISIS commanders, a surveillance asset for Western intelligence agencies, and a suspect to editors who wonder how she keeps getting access. Her sources want to convert her. Western intelligence services are willing to use her as bait. The two worlds she moves between — the Europe she calls home and the jihadist networks she reports on — are not opposites. They are a feedback loop, each one producing the conditions the other needs to survive. This book is what it looks like when the journalist covering that loop is also caught inside it.

The ISIS Commander Had a Dutch Passport, an Engineering Degree, and an Argument She Couldn't Fully Dismiss

The man in the back seat of a white Honda on the Turkish-Syrian border at 11:30 at night looked like he'd walked off a European university campus — polo shirt, cargo pants, baseball cap, three burner Nokias on the seat beside him. Souad Mekhennet had come alone, without ID, phone, or recorder, to interview a senior Islamic State commander. She would learn afterward that the man she called Abu Yusaf ran ISIS's hostage program, supervised the British-accented guards whose prisoners had given them a collective nickname, and had personally participated in waterboarding captives. That night, she just thought he might be carrying a gun.

Abu Yusaf was Moroccan-born, Dutch-raised since his teens, trained as an engineer, fluent in Arabic, French, and Dutch. When Mekhennet switched from formal Arabic to Moroccan dialect midway through the conversation, he followed without hesitation. By any reasonable measure, he was a European professional who had chosen to become one of the world's most wanted men — and the argument he made for that choice was not the one she expected.

The Iraq invasion had produced no weapons of mass destruction, he said. American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib and faced no accountability. "Then they're pointing at us and saying how barbaric we are." His generation had been radicalized by Iraq the same way the prior generation was radicalized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Not by ideology in isolation, but by a specific sequence of betrayals Western governments refused to account for.

Then he turned it personal. He'd read her work, he said. She'd interviewed senior Al Qaeda figures, won prestigious fellowships, been published across major American and German newspapers. So why, he asked, didn't she have a television show in Germany?

She didn't have a clean answer. She understood what he meant: to advance as a Muslim migrant in Germany, you couldn't afford to be too critical, too visible, too fully yourself. She rejected his conclusion entirely. But the premise was accurate, and she said so.

Her counter was blunt: staying in Europe and building a career under those conditions would have been the harder version of the same fight. Joining ISIS was the easy way out. He went quiet.

She Told an ISIS Commander He Took the Easy Way Out — Because She Knew Exactly What the Hard Way Cost

That line to Abu Yusaf wasn't rhetorical confidence — it was autobiography from 1993, when the easy way out was the only thing a fifteen-year-old Mekhennet wanted.

That summer, she and her seven-year-old brother Hicham were walking home from ice cream near Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt when a car of shaved-head men pulled alongside them and threatened to take them to the gas chambers. She scooped up her brother and ran, ducking down a one-way street until other drivers blocked the car. Back home, both children were sobbing. For weeks she begged her parents to leave Germany. She read everything she could find about the Third Reich, kept thinking about her disabled sister Fatma — what the Nazis had done to people deemed inconvenient. Fatma was still in Frankfurt. So was she.

Michel Friedman, a German Jewish leader whose parents had survived the Holocaust, had publicly mourned the Turkish families recently burned alive in arson attacks. On the radio, he said leaving was the easy option, and leaving would mean the right-wing groups had won. She stopped asking her parents to pack.

That decision is what she named twenty years later, in the back of Abu Yusaf's Honda. He wasn't entirely wrong about the conditions: she'd faced the same European discrimination, the same questions about belonging, the same institutional ceilings. But he'd concluded those conditions justified mass murder. She'd concluded the opposite. The difference wasn't ideology or circumstance. It was what each person chose to do with the same anger. She'd been making that choice since she was fifteen.

A Man Was Rendered to a CIA Black Site Because 'Tire' Sounds Like 'Plane' in North African Arabic

In a basement CIA black site near Kabul, Laid Saidi's interrogators played him a phone recording and told him he'd been talking about planes. Saidi said he had no idea what they meant. He'd been talking about tires — the English loanword that North African Arabic speakers commonly use — and whoever had transcribed the call had read it as tayyara, Arabic for plane. He had been there for weeks already: stripped, photographed, chained to a ceiling, beaten.

Saidi was Algerian, working for an Islamic charity in Tanzania, and had been rendered through Malawi — blindfolded, stripped of his clothes — to that basement near Kabul. Among his fellow prisoners was Khaled el-Masri: a German-Lebanese used car salesman seized from a tourist bus in Macedonia, held five months on a different error. The CIA had apparently confused him with another "al-Masri" who had recruited two of the September 11 hijackers. The two men passed their phone numbers through the prison walls in case one got out first.

Three CIA attorneys received oral admonitions.

Mekhennet had broken both stories for the New York Times: months of pay phones and unregistered Nokias, notebooks hidden outside her apartment. She expected institutions to follow the evidence. Instead, by 2015, el-Masri had been through an arson conviction and homelessness; a €60,000 European court settlement had arrived years late. When she found him in Vienna, he told her: "People in the West are the last ones in the world that should talk about human rights." Abu Yusaf had made the same argument from the back of a Honda on the Turkish-Syrian border. The difference: el-Masri hadn't chosen violence — he'd survived what was done to him and arrived at the same verdict. That made it harder to answer.

The Threat That Got Her American Colleague Out of Algeria Was Fabricated — She Was the Bait

Who, exactly, was Mekhennet supposed to be afraid of in Algeria?

The obvious answer — AQIM militants who had bombed Algiers and killed 41 people — turned out to be the less complete one. She and New York Times colleague Michael Moss had traveled in May 2008 to get inside the organization. She'd been communicating with a deputy of AQIM commander Abdelmalek Droukdal through a shared German email account where both parties left messages in the drafts folder, never sending, only writing. She left questions there; Droukdal answered with voice recording, video timestamp, and AQIM letterhead. The journalism succeeded.

Then, midway through the trip, an FBI agent visited the Times office and warned of a specific threat against Moss's life, not Mekhennet's. Moss was strongly advised to leave. She was not. They left together.

Two weeks after the story ran, a European intelligence contact asked to meet her urgently. Across a restaurant table, he told her she'd been followed throughout the assignment by a hit team: CIA, NSA. The threat against Moss had been fabricated to extract the American from the field. With him gone, she would continue working and they could follow her to Droukdal. "They were thinking you would finish the job," he said. When she asked whether her own life had been in danger: "Well, I don't know if they would have gone that far. But they were all over you in Algeria."

The thing she couldn't stop weighing: her jihadi sources had always argued that in the West's arithmetic, Muslim lives counted for less. She'd always pushed back. Now she had something real to weigh it against. Her Muslim identity, the immigrant background that led Western intelligence to view her as a possible sympathizer, were also exactly what had given her access to Droukdal's network.

Moss, pulled from the jihadist beat, won the Pulitzer in 2010 for food safety reporting. She was still covering the same networks, still calculating the same risks, when he called. "Look how often you and I risked our lives to bring those stories home, and we didn't win even one award," he said. "I won the Pulitzer for stories about peanuts and meat."

The Ideology Outlives Every Organization That Carries It — Because We Keep Restocking the Fuel

Al Qaeda in Iraq died when Zarqawi was killed by a Delta Force team near Baqubah, a city northeast of Baghdad, in June 2006. Analysts predicted his network would dissolve. It didn't. Shaker al-Abssi, a Palestinian militant who'd shared a death sentence with Zarqawi for the assassination of a USAID administrator in Amman, simply raised a black flag over a refugee camp in Lebanon and began recruiting.

Mekhennet's starkest evidence that none of this dies with any one leader isn't a commander or a recruit. It's a five-year-old boy.

After two meetings with Abssi inside the Nahr al-Bared camp (a handgun aimed at her throughout the first, note-takers logging every word she spoke), she was being escorted out when a group of small children ran toward the fighters at the gate. One boy sprinted to the man who had silently documented both conversations and announced, beaming, that he'd "killed the kuffar" (unbelievers) with a plastic pistol. The man scooped him up, kissed his forehead, and said he was proud.

The hard part, the part she couldn't shake, is that Abssi's interview had laid out the chain of events feeding all of this. An invasion premised on weapons that didn't exist. Photographs from Abu Ghraib that produced no prosecutions. Shia militia atrocities that Western governments went quiet about. She could verify every grievance and reject his conclusion. That gap — between the facts and what the facts were used to justify — is where the ideology lives, and where every fresh failure of accountability adds more kindling.

The Text That Named Jihadi John Came Through a Burner Phone in a Winter Park

January, a park near her apartment in Germany. Mekhennet is wearing sneakers she doesn't normally wear, carrying a burner Nokia, walking slow circles in the cold. She'd left her smartphones at home. She's waiting for a senior ISIS official to call — a man who had warned her through intermediaries never to contact him again unless it was an emergency.

She'd decided this was an emergency.

The call comes. She asks about "Mohammed from Kuwait, the man in black." The silence on the other end tells her something. He confirms she's on the right track, says British intelligence had been closing doors on this man, then hangs up. A text arrives: Emwazi. Ask CAGE. Delete this and throw away the SIM now. She notes the name, destroys the SIM, and flies to London.

The path to that text had taken fifteen years to build. The ISIS official called because she'd cultivated him long before he held any position, access that existed only because of her identity, the same identity Western agencies had simultaneously exploited and treated as suspect. Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE, a UK civil liberties organization focused on counterterrorism policy, reconstructed Emwazi's history: British citizen, family from Kuwait denied full citizenship under British colonial rule, arrested in Tanzania in 2009, interrogated by MI5 in Amsterdam, then blocked from flying home. His email to CAGE read like someone watching a door close: "A person imprisoned and controlled by security service men."

When the story ran, she kept her byline deliberately. Those same agencies had tracked her across multiple countries and used her as bait in Algeria. She published anyway, under her own name, because she wanted it on record that a Muslim woman had unmasked him.

The Woman Who Fingered the Paris Mastermind Was Muslim — and That Was Supposed to Stay Hidden

The story the French government didn't want told was the one that mattered most: the person who located the Paris attacks' mastermind was a Muslim woman, acting alone, under death threats.

Sonia — forty-two, Algerian-French, secular — had spent three years informally raising Hasna Aitboulahcen, a young woman who'd grown up in foster care, drifted through addiction, and been drawn into the orbit of her cousin Abdelhamid Abaaoud, ringleader of the November 13 attacks that killed 130 people. Three days after the massacre, Aitboulahcen recruited Sonia to drive her to meet "a cousin from Syria." Abaaoud stepped out of the shadows into a dim streetlight. Sonia recognized him — she'd seen him on video dragging corpses behind a truck. When she pressed him on why he'd been willing to kill so many people, he said the Paris attacks were "nothing compared to what was going to happen for the holidays."

The next morning, she called French counterterrorism police, who took over three hours to call back. She gave them a detailed account, went home, and told Aitboulahcen she'd been to dinner and a movie. Days later, she handed them the address where Abaaoud was hiding. Police killed him there. Until Mekhennet published the story in the Washington Post in April 2016, five months after the attacks, the public had no idea. The government had forbidden Sonia to speak to anyone, and initially claimed Aitboulahcen had detonated a suicide bomb; they later abandoned that story partly because Sonia threatened to go public.

"What really gets on my nerves," Sonia told Mekhennet, "is how people now speak badly about Muslims, though it was me, a Muslim woman, who helped the authorities to find Abaaoud."

Sonia got shot at from both directions. The French state worked to erase her from the record.

The Two Boys Who Made the Argument — and the Gunman Who Destroyed It

Can Leyla was fourteen. His best friend Selçuk Kiliç, who lived next door and had grown up like a brother to him (one Shia, one Sunni), was fifteen. They were shot together in Munich on July 22, 2016, by a German-Iranian man with a manifesto about racial purity who had nothing to do with ISIS. When Mekhennet dressed Can's body in a Fenerbahçe jersey, her hands fighting cold, stiff limbs, she thought of every parent she'd ever interviewed, every body counted. The killer came from the other direction entirely. It didn't matter.

This was never a clash of civilizations. It's between people who insist on complexity and those who find certainty more useful. Mekhennet has spent fifteen years watching the bridge-builders get shot at — by people, on every side, who need those lines to stay absolute. She is still counting.