From Minnesota to Melbourne, Islamic State draws motley crew

Between 16,000 and 17,000 people, according to one independent Western estimate, from 90 countries or more have streamed to Syria and Iraq to wage Muslim holy war for the Islamic State.

Each of them has a personal saga that led them to leave home and join one of the most ruthless terror groups the world has seen.

Here are some of their stories.

Facing child support, Minneapolis man joins the jihad

MINNEAPOLIS — Abdifatah Ahmed struggled for years to make ends meet.

After losing his $15-an-hour job fueling airliners in Minneapolis, the Somali-American father of nine survived on low-wage jobs and public assistance. He complained about working hard, but never having enough money. His circumstances worsened when he was ordered to pay more than $700 a month to support three of his children — including one less than a year old.

Months later, he surfaced in Syria, where he went to fight for the Islamic State.

“I think since he lost his job, he was maybe never normal after that,” sister Muna Ahmed told the AP last fall.

“It’s unbelievable,” his friend, Farhan Hussein, said recently. “Where did this disease come from?”

Hussein said his friend seemed confused about life, and sometimes felt stressed out by the women with whom he had children: Minnesota court papers show at times he was paying child support to two ex-wives for five of his kids, as well as support for a sixth whose mother is not identified. He wasn’t the type to go to mosque or pray every day — instead, he went clubbing and even drank alcohol, Hussein said.

When he felt troubled, Ahmed might turn to his religion for a week or so at a time. But once the blues passed, he would be back to his old self — flirting with women, dressing sharply, listening to rap music, shooting hoops and lifting weights at a local gym, Hussein said.

He dipped sporadically into political discussions, speaking about the Palestinians, the civil war in Libya and conditions in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia where many Somalis live. But the continued atrocities against Syrian civilians committed by the Assad regime apparently made a deeper impression.

On Dec. 3, 2013, a post on his Facebook account showed pictures of mutilated kids: “Look what is happening in syria. Where is the UN when u need them. This is worse than libya you get it?”

A month later, it appears, Ahmed was in Syria himself.

“A muslim has to stand up for was right. … I give up this worldly life for allah and to save the ummah (community of believers) if that makes terrorist am happy with it,” he wrote in a Jan. 3, 2014 post.

Another post that same day contains a photo of him holding a rifle in one hand, and a book that may be the Quran in the other.

Alarmed, Hussein messaged Ahmed, urging him to come home. After ignoring his friend for months, Ahmed replied that “we’ve got to fight” for the caliphate.

Ahmed’s last Facebook posts, including one that says “having fun in jihad,” are dated last July 25.

The next month, a member of Ahmed’s family received a picture that appeared to show him dead, with a gunshot wound to the head. The State Department is working to verify reports of Ahmed’s death, but Hussein identified the person in the photo as his friend, who would have been 34 according to court records.

Family and friends interviewed by the AP said they don’t know what motivated Ahmed to go to Syria. Hussein said he may have been trying to escape financial troubles and the stress of being pulled in different directions by the women in his life.

“That’s the only thing I could think of that would (mess) his life up, and make him lose his hope,” Hussein said.

He added: “He was looking for paradise.”

Embittered, Moroccan leaves family for Islamic State

RABAT, Morocco — Journalists and activists in Morocco during the heady days of the Arab Spring knew Anas Haloui, a slight, serious, wispy-bearded man in his 30s who would bombard them with emails about the plight of jailed Islamists.

Unlike many Salafis, as followers of his ultraconservative strand of Islam are known, he was eager to engage with people who didn’t share his beliefs.

“He was a very nice guy, someone who was really open and trying to reach out to other people,” recalled Brahim Ansari, Human Rights Watch’s Morocco representative.

But one day in December 2013, Haloui left behind his wife and children and quit Morocco to join a group linked to the Islamic State.

“I love my country with my last breath, but I was a victim of injustice, they put me in their cells and I don’t need to remind you about the torture I went through,” he said in a letter of farewell in which he condemned his treatment by the Moroccan government.

His older brother, Yusuf, remembers a different Anas — one who enjoyed singing. He recalls a cheerful boy in a family of eight kids growing up in the town of Tissa, just north of Fez in the foothills of the Rif mountains.

Anas majored in Islamic studies at Fez University in 1999, at a time of great intellectual ferment when Moroccan student life was dominated by Islamist groups. His brother says he never joined but took part in their activities, writing poetry for one group.

Everything changed after the 2003 Casablanca suicide bombings by young Islamic radicals that claimed 45 lives. Some 2,300 people were arrested, and Haloui was repeatedly questioned. He dropped out of school and returned home.

His efforts to distance himself from his student activism were in vain. He was arrested and convicted of forming an extremist group and spent three years in prison, during which he told his brother he was tortured by police and interrogated by American investigators.

In prison, he grew out his hair and beard and began wearing the traditional clothes associated with the Salafis, his brother said. When he got out in 2007, he was a changed man.

“He stopped singing after prison,” said Yusuf. “It was like he was imprisoned by this Salafi idea.”

But the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrations in the region inspired him. In Morocco, the February 20 Movement took to the streets to demand an end to corruption and abuse of power. Haloui joined the protests with secular activists. With other Salafis, who normally avoid all forms of activism or politics, he started an organization dedicated to freeing Islamist prisoners who he believed were being held unfairly.

Morocco got a new constitution promising greater freedoms. But the police soon returned to their old habits. One day men in plainclothes picked up Haloui’s fiancee, slapped her around and warned her against marrying him.

“After this his personality changed,” said his brother. “His dreams were shattered.”

Haloui’s attention turned to the bloodshed in Syria, and the daily stories of civilians killed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“We know it is a war of extermination and that the only way to stop them from harming the innocents is through arms, God may one day ask us where we were during the Syrian events,” he said in his goodbye letter, in which he expressed anguish over leaving behind his new wife and children.

From Syria, Haloui wrote that he was helping doctors treat the wounded. Four months later, in April 2013, his family learned through Facebook that he had died on a Syrian battlefield.

From middle-class Australian to Islamic State bride

CANBERRA, Australia — Quietly — almost secretly — Zehra Duman morphed from private school student to Islamic State bride and online recruiter for the movement. Her family did not see it coming.

So when the 21-year-old Turkish-Australian gave up her middle-class life in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, for faraway Raqqa, the Islamic State movement’s center in war-ravaged Syria, the people who knew her were astonished.

“We did not notice any extremist tendencies in her behavior,” Saniye Coskundag, acting principal of Sirius College’s Keysborough campus, told The Associated Press.

“She’s been brainwashed, she wasn’t like this three or four months ago,” her father Davut Duman told Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper in an article published Dec. 28.

By then, Duman was wed to Islamic State soldier Mahmoud Abdullatif, 23, who reportedly left his own Melbourne home last year. The couple announced their wedding online on Dec. 11, with a photograph of her dowry that included an assault rifle.

Now calling herself Zehra Abdullatif or Umm (“Mother”) Abdullatif, the Muslim fighter’s wife told her online followers her parents had no clue she would elope to Islamic State.

“They were shocked, as I never have been public with my jihadi views. But also heartbroken, as my mum was very close to me … and she knows she will never see me again,” she said on her now suspended Ask.fm page, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

She has answered questions on social media for “wannabe jihadi brides,” and urged both men and women sympathizers who do not come to the Middle East to wage war at home.

“Kill Kuffar (non-believers) in alleyways, stab them and poison them. Poison your teachers. Go to haram (prohibited) restaurants and poison the food in large quantities,” she wrote on her Twitter account, which also has been suspended. The March 31 tweet was recorded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank.

Australian security agencies have noticed an uptick in Australian women leaving for the Middle East to marry Islamic State fighters. Melanie Smith, a joint research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and ICSR who tracks more than 100 female migrants to Islamic State online, says they are prized additions to the self-styled caliphate.

“You cannot build a state without women, because there are no children,” said Smith. Though Islamic State doesn’t allow women a combat role, they are assured they will be honored as spouses of fighters and mothers of “cubs,” the next generation of Muslim combatants.

It is not clear how or when Duman first met her husband, who she said died five weeks after their wedding. She said online she entered Syria alone in late November and was given a “wali,” or guardian. She advised potential IS brides who follow her to travel with a “mahram,” a male chaperone such as a father or brother.

Her father told the Herald Sun that he had not given up hope: “We’re trying desperately, trying to bring our daughter home,” he said.

But when asked on Twitter what she missed about Australia, Duman’s reply on April 4 was simple and numeric: “0”

For one Dutchman, life morphed from discos to jihad

LEIDEN, Netherlands — The father says he did not raise his son as a Muslim — and he regrets his decision now.

Maybe if Reda Nidalha, born and bred in the historic Dutch university city of Leiden, had learned about moderate Islam, it would have been harder for extremists to “brainwash” him and help him travel to Syria, his father says.

Mohamed Nidalha sent his son to Belgium to stay with his uncle after Reda fell in with a bad set of friends in Leiden.

But Reda soon came into online contact with a Belgian in Syria who linked him up with a notorious terror recruiting network, Sharia4Belgium.

The 20-year-old who grew up liking girls and going to discos suddenly changed, thanks to a toxic cocktail of online propaganda and covert contact with extremists in Belgium, one of Europe’s hotspots for Islamic radicals.

“He went to the mosque, grew a beard and went to readings somewhere in a secret place — not in a mosque, but in a house somewhere,” says Nidalha, a 49-year-old immigrant from Morocco who works in a concrete factory. “There, he was brainwashed, and prepared. Inside two months he was made totally crazy.”

Reda is emblematic for hundreds of disaffected Muslim youngsters from the largely secular countries of Belgium and the Netherlands who have turned their backs on their liberal Western societies and been sucked into the sectarian maelstrom of Syria’s brutal civil war.

“It is 100 percent that he is with ISIS. It’s something everybody can see — he is on Facebook, he doesn’t cover his face,” Nidalha says, referring to the Islamic State militant group. “I’ve asked him: ‘Reda, why do you do that?’ and he says, ‘Papa, you don’t have to worry about me. That is my life. I want to live it that way.'”

Nidalha is at a loss to explain why exactly his son turned to violent extremism while trying to make a fresh start in Belgium.

But he suspects the jihadi recruiters saw in his son an easy mark — a kid from a broken home struggling with life and looking for a new direction.

“Those people are professional,” Nidalha said. “They pick on the easiest prey they can easily brainwash.”

He is angry at the Dutch government for not doing more to prevent his son from reaching Syria, saying they could have issued an international arrest warrant for him while he was in Turkey waiting to cross the border. Mohamed says his son told him he was detained twice by Turkish authorities before he got to Syria.

A Dutch intelligence agency estimates that around 180 Dutch citizens left the country to fight in 2014 alone.

Reda has been gone for almost a year now. His mother, Nidalha’s ex-wife, still can’t come to terms with what feels increasingly like an irreversible loss.

Nidalha is certain he won’t see his boy alive again, but worries what he would be like if he did manage to return home.

“Imagine my son comes back. What kind of son do I get back? I don’t get the same son as before,” he said. “Because my son has now learned things there in Syria. My son might be able to make bombs now, maybe he can shoot.”

Lonely man finds a home in Islam, and then in jihad

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Before he left New Zealand, spoke with a local television network. “I’ve been lonely all my life,” he said. “Been rejected by people. Used by people. Abused by people.”

He said that by converting to Islam, he felt he’d become part of a community.

“Because the good thing about being Muslim is you can walk into virtually any mosque and pray,” he told TV3 News, “and people would welcome you.”

When Taylor, 42, began visiting a mosque in the city of Hamilton about four years ago, worshippers there saw him as lonely, a little lost and possessing a childlike view of the world. They didn’t see any anger or radicalism in the security guard who said he was a former Army soldier.

And so they were not only appalled but also worried for him when he resurfaced last year in Syria, describing himself as an adventurer and posting social media messages under the Twitter handle “Kiwi Jihadi.”

Authorities estimate only half-a-dozen New Zealanders have traveled to Syria to fight with Islamic State. It’s unclear how they’ve become radicalized, although Taylor’s case might provide a clue: He’s acknowledged listening to the sermons of the late US-born al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.

When Taylor, who also goes by the names Muhammad Daniel and Abu Abdul-Rahman, arrived in Hamilton, mosque elder Mustafa Farouk said he and others tried to help. Farouk said they allowed Taylor to park the old truck he lived in near the mosque and offered to find him accommodation and mental-health services. But he said Taylor wanted to remain independent and declined their offers.

If Taylor had radical thoughts, Farouk said, he kept them to himself.

“The only thing he ever talked about was wanting to get married,” Farouk said. “He didn’t seem like he could pose any danger to anyone at all. More that he might need someone to look after him, really.”

How Taylor managed to leave New Zealand — despite being closely monitored — has raised questions about the effectiveness of the country’s intelligence and immigration agencies.

He had been arrested in 2009 in proximity to al-Qaeda militants in the Pakistani region of Waziristan. He told authorities he was there looking for a bride, and was later released.

Diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks show Australian authorities recommended in 2010 that Taylor be placed on a watch list because of his “demonstrated connections” with al-Awlaki. In 2011, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said a number of unspecified restrictions had been placed on Taylor.

But Farouk said he managed to leave a couple of years ago for Indonesia, where he lived and worked before traveling to Syria.

New Zealand authorities, citing privacy concerns, declined to answer questions from the AP about how Taylor managed to depart, or to say whether he had served as a soldier.

His Twitter profile says he is “in Dawlah Islam, Islamic state,” though his current status is unclear. In April, he posted a video calling on Islamic State supporters in New Zealand and Australia who have had their passports confiscated to commit terrorist acts at home, “even if it means you have to stab a few police officers or soldiers.”

A Georgian region is fertile ground for Islamic State

BIRKIANI, Georgia — In the summer of 2012, a former Georgian Army corporal who had served prison time for illegal possession of ammunition burned his photo albums and quit his native village.

Tarkhan Batirashvili had wanted to become a policeman, but couldn’t get hired. Now, this offspring of a Christian father and a Muslim mother was about to start a new chapter in his military career — one in which he would be credited with some of Islamic State’s most stunning battlefield victories and rise to senior rank.

Last September, the US Treasury Department placed Batirashvili — who now calls himself Omar al Shishani and is believed by some to be Islamic State’s chief of military operations — on its list of “specially designated global terrorists.” But to some in the Pankisi, the mountainous region of northeastern Georgia where he was born in 1986, the ginger-bearded commander is a hero and a role model.

To follow the path he blazed, as many as 200 of his young countrymen have left their villages.

Batirashvili’s father Temur is aghast.

“It’s monstrous what’s going on in the valley, that they are deceiving these kids and they’re leaving to fight in a foreign land,” the 72-year-old man told visitors to his one-story stone house in the hamlet of Birkiani. “My son should not be in Syria.”

The Pankisi is home to an estimated 5,000-7,000 descendants of Muslim Chechens who settled here in the 19th century. In the village of Omalo, locals say, a green-tile roofed building is used by preachers from the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam to enlist volunteers for jihad.

Residents say the recruiters promise money and provide ground transportation to Tbilisi airport more than 120 miles (200 km) away, as well as prepaid plane tickets to Turkey.

“They are selling our children,” said Shariat Tsintsalashvili. “They earn dollars from it, drive around in expensive four-wheel drive vehicles. It’s a total mafia.”

On April 2, her 16-year-old grandson Muslim Kushtanashvili and schoolmate Ramzan Bagakashvili, 18, joined the valley’s recruits to Islamic State. That Thursday, the teens left as usual for their school in Omalo, next door to the building used by the Wahhabis. They never came home.

Muslim called friends later to say he was in Turkey. Then word came back the 10th grader had crossed into Syria.

A legal minor, Muslim also had no passport, so his family can’t understand why Georgian border guards let him fly out of the country. Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri has vowed an investigation and punishment for those responsible, but Muslim’s family suspect authorities are protecting the recruiters.

Bagakashvili’s mother agrees.

“Here they are stirring up things, recruiting youths,” Tina Alkhanashvili said. “You can’t get authorities to watch them.”

Within weeks, Georgian officials reported three more boys from the valley had disappeared.

Written by Amy Forliti, Paul Schemm, Rod McGuirk, Mike Corder, Nick Perry, Misha Dzhindzhikashvili

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press.