INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR

Shirin Lotfi: How did you come to write this book?

Michael Weiss: I’ve been covering the Syria conflict since its inception. I started with a report on the Sunni opposition in June 2011 and got sucked in. I stayed with it as the crisis went from a peaceful protest movement to an armed insurgency to a mostly Jihadi-driven conflagration. My interest in ISIS derived from my reporting in Aleppo in summer 2012. I spent the night in a town called Al-Bab with a bunch of activists, Free Syrian Army (FSA) guys; Al-Bab had just been liberated from the regime. I got there days after they booted out the Assad forces. The following morning we drove to Aleppo city, to an area called the Bab al-Hadid district which had just been taken by the FSA from the regime. I’m not a war correspondent and this was my first report into a war-zone. I interviewed people on the ground, the hosts who kept me in the safe house in Al-Bab and we became friendly and stayed in touch.

Well, not six months later, Al-Bab was seized by ISIS, almost completely quietly, without much violence. The family at whose house I stayed overnight had been driven out of the town; their home occupied by the jihadists. So there is a personal stake in this book for me. And of course there is a much greater one so for Hassan, my co-author, who is from eastern Syria, from Abu-Kamal, in fact — a border town through which jihadists have been pouring back and forth for the better part of a decade – first sent there by the Syrian Mukhaberat to blow up British and American forces, although now the traffic goes in both directions.

Because Hassan comes from a tribal area, he has great contacts within the Jazira and through him we managed to get all these interviews with the relatives of ISIS fighters and ISIS fighters themselves – a lot of them whom have been killed since we wrote our book. We opened the book with a typical foreign fighter, Abdelaziz, a Syrian by heritage who grew up in Bahrain. He wasn’t even particularly religious, but he went to Syria in 2011, worked his way through various rebel brigades, became disillusioned, then went back to Bahrain, connected with ISIS on Skype or social media, was radicalised, and went back to Syria to join ISIS.

Read the interview in full at Fathom.