Home, Land, Security

The Lost Boy

Under a November sky, damp and gray as a dirty dishrag, I traveled from my home in Brighton up to Birmingham, in the British Midlands, to meet Nicola Benyahia, the mother of a young man who d fought for ISIS in Syria. I was nervous. In the days leading up to the meeting, Nicola s image had grown to mythic proportions in my mind. As the militant group intent on establishing a caliphate had gained land and followers, I d been drip-­fed horrors about hardened warriors who had put a Jordanian pilot in a cage and set him alight, who had made Yazidi women into sex slaves, who had tossed men off buildings for being gay. What kind of woman could have raised one of these fighters?

As the train rattled through the English countryside, I steadied my cappuccino and tried to concentrate on the reading in front of me: a short tract by a British law professor on the need for new ways to talk about terrorism, both in the courts and in public life. Formulating laws on terrorism, wrote Newcastle University s Ian Ward, required an ethics that properly understands the vitality of human emotions. Ideally, we needed an alternative jurisprudence, one that owes at least as much to feeling and compassion as it does to reason and the pretense of certitude, Ward wrote. We have far less need of a law of terrorism than we do a better developed sensitivity to the tragedies that it engenders.

I underlined the quote, scrawling a messy star beside it. If law is the only lens through which we view terrorists, we are training our eyes on a barren landscape, stripped of any clues as to what made people into terrorists in the first place.

Motherhood seemed to me the most direct route into an emotional understanding of the terrorist threat. It was the only thing I imagined I d share with this woman, and I figured it might be a way toward some sort of humanization, perhaps even understanding, of people who d been dehumanized and misunderstood. One generally doesn t think

Carla Power is the author of If the Oceans Were Ink, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was raised in St. Louis, with years in Iran, India, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Time, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. She lives with her family in East Sussex, England.

Why do people become radicalized, and can militant radicals be rehabilitated? In this provocative and deeply reported look into the emerging field of deradicalization, Power investigates these questions, providing a compassionate look at the myriad forces driving young people into the arms of radical belief systems. . . . In these riveting, character-driven pages, Power encourages us to resist moral binaries of good and evil as we work toward countering terrorist groups and the loved ones held in their sway. Esquire (Best Books of Fall 2021)

Deeply reported and ultimately optimistic . . . astounding . . . Power humanizes militant jihadists and offers insights into the forces that push people toward extremism. . . . Interweaving intimate character profiles and in-depth research, this is a nuanced look at a critical yet overlooked front in the fight against extremism. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Power s exceptionally wide-ranging research persuaded her that Americans need to stop thinking about former militants in absolutist terms like good and evil and to take a more nuanced approach to fostering their deradicalization and preventing the backsliding that may occur during long imprisonments. . . . This book is full of valuable insights into violent extremism . . . A provocative exploration of the appeal of terrorist groups and how to counter it effectively. Kirkus Reviews