Michael Delefortrie grew up in a secular Christian household in Antwerp, Belgium, but secretly converted to Islam in 2006, when he was seventeen. One day, he came home from the mosque to discover that his father had dug up his Koran and prayer rug, and placed them on the table as props for the heated dispute to come. “I was a little bit angry that he touched the book,” Delefortrie told me, “because I know it’s a sacred book,” and now it was sullied by his father’s touch. His father was angry too. Delefortrie told me he issued a cruel ultimatum: “If you want to be a Muslim, go.” The teen-ager, who had A.D.H.D. and was trying to stop using alcohol and drugs, moved into an apartment above the mosque. He lived there for the next two years.
Elsewhere in Antwerp, a petty criminal named Fouad Belkacem began to gain notoriety for delivering fiery homophobic rants in public squares, and for demanding that Belgium become an Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. He quickly established a following of young men, named the group Sharia4Belgium, and plugged into an international network of jihadis striving to dismantle liberal European values and institutions. (I wrote about one Sharia4Belgium member, Jejoen Bontinck, for the magazine.) Delefortrie became one of Belkacem’s enthusiastic devotees. In December, 2011, he was arrested for trying to sell a Kalashnikov online. After being temporarily shunned by the group for having drawn too much negative attention, he created a splinter organization called Sharia4Flanders, but never managed to secure the interest of a second member. The following summer, the first Sharia4Belgium member left for Syria. Several dozen others had followed before Delefortrie left home.
In December, 2013, Delefortrie boarded a bus from Antwerp to Cologne, Germany, then took a taxi to Dusseldorf. From there, he flew to Istanbul, Turkey, then south to Adana, near the Syrian border. He paid a smuggler, hopped an unguarded patch of wire fence, and, now in Syria, met up with a Belgian friend, who drove him to an ISIS base in Aleppo. After being questioned about his reasons for coming to Syria, Delefortrie was transported to a large, walled villa housing foreign ISIS recruits. He lived there, among Tunisian, French, Belgian, and Dutch fighters, for five weeks, occasionally updating his Facebook account with pictures of himself dressed in camouflage and gripping a Kalashnikov, until moderate Syrian rebels attacked the villa. He and the other ISIS fighters fled. While the Syrian rebels pilfered their money and belongings, his group took refuge for a couple of days in an abandoned Carrefour shopping mall. Then, “We attacked them,” he told me in a dimly lit bar in Antwerp, this winter, before quickly revising his story: “_They”—his comrades—“_attacked them,” he emphasized this time.
Shortly after the battle, Delefortrie came back to Belgium, where, a few weeks later, he found himself in an interrogation room, seated opposite federal police. He told them repeatedly that he had never participated in the armed struggle, insisting that he only left for Syria to seek a “better life” and to provide “ideological support.” He dismissed the online pictures of himself carrying guns as “pictures to brag,” and denied any knowledge of a video posted to his Facebook account, titled “ISIS mujahid gives some advice,” claiming, “I don’t know what this movie is about.” Six other Sharia4Belgium members also returned from Syria, some of them offering even flimsier excuses. One claimed to work for the U.N.H.C.R., the U.N. refugee agency, but, when asked to give the full name of the organization, he told police that the first letter “probably stands for United, but I don’t remember the rest.” Another said he had been an ambulance driver, but could not name a single aid organization operating in northern Syria. A third, who confessed to joining a jihadi group that kidnapped, ransomed, and murdered local civilians, swore he only carried out menial tasks, telling police, “I just assumed if a bomb fell on the house while I was doing the dishes, I was also a martyr.” Mark Eeckhaut, a Belgian crime reporter, joked over beers in Antwerp, this winter, “If you believe the guys who are in this trial, nobody is fighting in Syria. Everybody’s cooking.”
The federal police knew far more about the group’s activities in Syria than Delefortrie and the others understood. Months before the first Sharia4Belgium member took off for Syria, in August, 2012, the police had opened an investigation into the group. At that time, they were concerned about a possible attack on Belgian soil. They intercepted thousands of phone calls, text messages, and e-mails, and continued to gather evidence as members travelled to Syria, seeking martyrdom and blood-fuelled conquest. Several Belgians in Syria made frequent calls to friends and family members back home, in which they described the dynamics, training, and activities of the jihadi group most of them joined, the Mujahideen Shura Council, which was eventually absorbed into ISIS. In January, 2013, police officers listened to Hakim Elouassaki, a Sharia4Belgium member, tell his girlfriend that he had murdered a kidnapped Syrian civilian that morning. The Syrian man’s family had paid Elouassaki a ransom of thirty thousand euros, but he had asked for seventy thousand. “As I shot him, he put up his hand,” he said, “so the bullet went through his hand and his head.” When some Sharia4Belgium members returned home, there was sufficient evidence to arrest them, and, after the first or second uncoöperative interrogation, some began to give exhaustive descriptions of what they had seen. One made such detailed sketches that the Belgian police were able to pinpoint the location of an extravagant palace belonging to Amr al-Absi, whom the U.S. State Department said was “in charge of kidnappings” for ISIS.
Having amassed tens of thousands of pages of evidence, the Belgian government charged Sharia4Belgium members collectively as a terrorist group, with Belkacem as its leader, and prosecuted members individually for various other crimes. Most members were still in Syria, and some were dead, but Delefortrie and the six other returnees diligently attended court last fall. (Only Belkacem had never gone to Syria). It was the largest terrorism trial in Belgian history. On some days, desperate parents, whose children were still in Syria, shouted accusations at Belkacem from the audience. Though European prisons are known hotbeds of radicalization, the authorities saw no room for a soft approach in dealing with Sharia4Belgium members. “Once you know, like we know, that people are part of killing civilians in Syria, it’s not a question,” a Belgian federal-police official told me. “If you have that information, you have to go for the repression.”
In the last few years, more than four thousand Europeans have abandoned their home countries for the jihadi battlefields of Syria and Iraq, and close to a thousand have quietly returned. Many are questioned by police and intelligence services, but the number of prosecutions among the European Union’s twenty-eight member states remains shockingly low. A memo penned by Gilles de Kerchove, the E.U. Counterterrorism Coördinator, says that, as of December, there had been “around ten convictions” of foreign fighters with European citizenship or residency. “The judicial response,” he noted dryly, “does not reflect the scale of the problem.”
In Europe, Denmark is second only to Belgium in jihadi fighters per capita, but the two countries’ approaches to returnees have diverged sharply. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service has estimated that at least one hundred and fifteen Danes have fought in Syria, most of them with ISIS. Some have died, but roughly half are now back home in Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. It is a crime, in Denmark, as in Belgium, to join or train with any terrorist organization, whether or not the government can prove a violent act was committed in a distant war zone. Still, charges have not been publicly filed against a single Danish returnee.
Most returned European fighters never see the inside of a courtroom for one frightening reason: nobody really knows what they did abroad. Some jihadis are obsessively discreet, even halting communication with their parents. Others, like Delefortrie, broadcast their exploits online, but that may not always provide enough evidence for a courtroom. Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and the current director of the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defence College, told me the bar for what qualifies as “intelligence” is, “for good reason, lower than the bar you have to pass when you prosecute in a court of law.” “Is it sufficient” evidence for a courtroom, Dalgaard-Nielsen asked, “that someone is posting on social media, in camo fatigues and with weapons, claiming that he joined a terrorist group?”
Dalgaard-Nielsen posited that this was not sufficient, particularly since the stakes for Denmark’s first case against an alleged jihadi returning from Syria will be very high. A successful prosecution could deter others from leaving for ISIS territory, while a failed prosecution could give would-be fighters a sense of impunity. “That’s the kind of calculation you have to make,” she said. “How likely you are to succeed, and what kind of signals would that send if you fail.” In June, Denmark appointed a new Minister of Justice, Søren Pind. He promptly announced the creation of a new task force to “optimize the possibilities of prosecuting” returned fighters, calling the current pattern “offensive.” No doubt many Syrian and Iraqi civilians would agree.
The city of Aarhus recently adapted an existing crime-prevention program to fit jihadi fighters, both returned and aspiring. It had been designed nearly a decade ago to quell a local problem with soccer hooliganism, but has now grown sufficiently famous that, this winter, President Obama invited the mayor of Aarhus to the White House for a summit on countering extremism. So far, only six Danish returnees—identified by the head of the Aarhus program as “Syria volunteers”—have opted to undergo the deradicalization process. None have completed it. They are paired with mentors, who only share information with the security services if they are concerned about a future attack. Allan Aarslev, the police commissioner overseeing the program, told me that some returnees regret that they went to Syria at all. “We know for a fact that some of these people have been fighting for illegal groups,” he said. “Of course, as a policeman, I would like to prosecute some of these people if we could prove that they had committed crimes,” he continued. But, lacking the requisite evidence, “it’s better to help them when they get back than it is to leave them alone.”
Most European jihadis returning from Syria and Iraq have no further violent aspirations, even if they continue to believe ISIS has accomplished their dream of a caliphate. To date, there has been only one major attack by a European returnee, at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, though a number of violent plots have been thwarted across the continent. Many young people who left Europe in 2012 and 2013 to fight against oppression—but not necessarily for freedom—in Syria, grew disenchanted as rifts between Sunni rebel groups caused them to begin killing one another. “I recognize that I have made bad decisions,” one returned Sharia4Belgium member told police. “I want to take my life back and provide for my family. I want to go back to study and look for work. This is the only thing that interests me now.”
This new class of repentant jihadis may have great potential for influencing would-be fighters. “One thing they have in common is that, whatever happened to radicalize them, they had this idea: I’m going to get up and do something,” Richard Barrett, now at the Soufan Group and formerly the director of counterterrorism operations for the British Secret Intelligence Service, told me. “They’re probably still quite highly motivated to do something when they come back disillusioned,” he said, “so they are potentially exploitable for a better purpose,” like helping to dissuade others from leaving for Syria. “Returnees are the best resource we have for building our understanding of this whole phenomenon.”
ISIS seems to have recognized this, too, hence widespread reports of suspected spies and potential deserters being murdered en masse in the sands of Syria. But among some returnees the addiction to attention that once fueled gun-toting selfies is manifesting itself in new ways. Shortly after I wrote about the Sharia4Belgium trial, I received a long voicemail from Michael Delefortrie. We hadn’t spoken in months—not since he had shown me that his phone background was from an ISIS beheading video. In the interim, the judge in the Sharia4Belgium trial issued a guilty verdict, but Delefortrie did not receive a prison sentence. (By contrast, two Mississippi teens who never left the U.S but are suspected of planning to join ISIS, may face prison sentences of up to twenty years.) With a jihadi song playing in the background, Delefortrie asked me to help him find an American publisher for his autobiography. It will be “very detailed,” he said, and will cover everything from his conversion up to the weeks he lived in an ISIS villa. “The whole thing.”
