the first place or shooting people in the face? i have to ask them. i am not responsible for what they did. he deflects criticism of isis brutality by pointing to way american soldiers photograph themselves, urinating on dead taliban fighters in afghanistan. it s also bragging. yeah, but we condem that. we say that s wrong. we condem that in front of our god. after two months in syria he returned home to see his wif and children, an isis soldier back on the streets of belgium. and i m doing whatever i can to spread out the word of islam. that s my goal. nonviolenty, he says. not every muslim with an
pages. he posed an a line of jihad posting that are popular to isis supporters. in just over a week 223 total strangers wanted to be friends. the majority from belgium and france. in their profile pictures we found a sea of flags. several invited us to chat further on telegram, an encrypted app used by isis. when we asked one are you in syria he told us no, unfortunately, but i want to go. the youngest of all of those clowns and the most innocent girl in those circles can be the next suicide bomber in a european street.
the attacks? he saw them as payback for france s role in the bombing campaign against isis. it is a normal reaction. if you re attacking people, some times somebody will attack you back. if you spit in the air some times the spit will fall back in your own face. his sympathy is not with the victims but the attackers. i ask allah to protect them and give them what they ask for. that s everything that i can do. so in a sense you see them as heros? in a sense it is allah decides who is right and who is wrong. four months after the paris attacks, march 2016, this time it was belgium. bombs in the subway and suicide
awaiting trial younnes spent two months behind bars with other radicals. every jail has now one or two people with what they call extremist thoughts or terrorism file. did you have a way of communicating? we did cards in the evenings, football outside. it was no punishment, to be honest. more than 100 young men like younnes were coming home, some disillusioned about isis and its horrific violence and others deswrenzatized and trained to murder. if you are already past the stage of ideas into the stage of fighting for an organization, you went there, trained, acquired the skills, you have to have a very suspicious attitude. we shouldn t be naive. belgium had been slow to
they were clear in what they were trying to accomplish. isis s unbridled brutality yielded huge gains on the battlefield. the group would soon declare it had carved out a caliphate, the size of michigan according to u.s. authorities ruled under its version of sharia law. unez denies committing atrocities in syria. you didn t commit any crimes while you were there? no. it s hard to fathom how anyone can endure tactics so ruthless that even al qaeda