In Sharia4Belgium, most members, who were known as brothers, addressed one another by their kunyas. Belkacem ran an intensive twenty-four-week program of ideological training. He began by declaring that the world was divided into two groups: Muslims and non-Muslims. In mainstream mosques, nuance and interpretive religious scholarship are encouraged.
Belkacem taught the brothers that most imams ignore discussions of jihad and martyrdom because they want to keep state funding. Jejoen began spending most of his free time at the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium. One of the brothers regularly led martial-arts classes there, which some members supplemented with kickboxing training at a nearby gym. Choudary, who is identified in police files as a financial supporter of Sharia4Belgium, lectured remotely, through a video-chat Web site called Paltalk.
Members were discouraged from sharing information about the group with their parents.
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Jejoen routinely came home late and struggled to get up in the mornings. Some of the brothers dropped out of school. Then a brother named Michael Delefortrie—who had named his two sons for founding members of Al Qaeda—was arrested for trying to sell a Kalashnikov online. Belkacem held a press conference that was covered by an evening-news show. Dimitri was watching television at home that evening when he spotted Jejoen next to Belkacem on the screen.
Dimitri told the police that Jejoen was a minor, and asked them to extract him from the group, but he says that a judge told him that there was nothing they could do. Dimitri started visiting the Sharia4Belgium headquarters, hoping to find evidence of illegal activity. Dimitri and Rose invited Belkacem to their house, but he was adept at deflecting their inquiries, and Dimitri never saw any extremist materials inside the headquarters.
As part of the indoctrination program, the brothers often watched archived lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who was killed in a U. They also watched footage of battles in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and other jihadi conflict zones, and came to think of the mujahideen in the videos as selfless heroes defending Islam against corrupt crusaders. One day, they watched a video of a beheading. Months later, Jejoen got in worse trouble for proselytizing on his own. Other Sharia4Belgium members said that Jejoen was using the activity as an excuse to meet girls.
Belkacem dedicated the last four weeks of the course to teaching the importance of loyalty toward Muslims, and disavowal of non-Muslims. The prospect of excommunication kept most members obedient; one brother, who was in his late teens, was required to undergo circumcision. One student, whose exam was found in the police raid, scored eighty-four per cent. Today, he is believed to be a member of the religious police in Raqqa.
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By February, , Belgian police were wiretapping phone calls within the group. They buy a cheap cell phone, and they throw it away. Belkacem never explicitly instructed his followers to fight in Syria. At the time, the Syrian revolution was not known for its foreign jihadi element. Kasmi returned to Belgium a few months later, but, in March, , he came back to Lebanon.
At the same time, other Sharia4Belgium members travelled to Yemen, where they were detained and subsequently deported, under suspicion of trying to join Al Qaeda. Then, in May, Kasmi crossed into Syria. The following month, Belkacem was arrested and imprisoned for instigating hate. One of his wives, Stephanie Djato, had refused to comply with a Belgian law that bans full-face coverings in public. Though polygamy is illegal in Belgium, Belkacem has married at least two women in religious ceremonies. Riots ensued in Brussels, and two police officers were stabbed by a man carrying Sharia4-Belgium literature.
With Belkacem in jail, Sharia4Belgium was rudderless. The members continued their video sessions with Choudary, who invited them to protest the Olympics, which were held in London that July. Kasmi returned to Belgium for a short period. Then, on August 20, , he left for Syria again; the next day, five other members followed.
By October, the group had dissolved, and in the next eighteen months about fifty Belgians directly affiliated with Sharia4Belgium made their way to Syria. Only Belkacem stayed behind. In a long open letter, written from jail, Belkacem insisted that he was only a provocateur, comparing himself to Pussy Riot and Femen. It was Azeddine. Jejoen asked him who else was in Syria.
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Jejoen left home on February 21, , without knowing the name of the group that he would join. He had forgotten his passport, too, but his Belgian identity card sufficed. He had been instructed to meet two other aspiring jihadis in Istanbul, but he ended up at the wrong airport. Together, they took a bus to Antakya, a city near the Syrian border. A smuggler met them there and drove them to a village in the mountains, where they waited with other jihadis for the signal to cross.
Once in Syria, Jejoen and his companions texted other Sharia4Belgium members and asked to be picked up. By nightfall on February 22nd, Jejoen was in a car, reunited with his friends from Belgium.
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Around seventy pairs of shoes, belonging to Belgian, Dutch, and French jihadis, were arrayed on racks outside the front door. Inside, Jejoen met Amr al-Absi, the Syrian emir in charge of the Mujahideen Shura Council, a group of international jihadis whose goal was to transform the northern part of the country into an Islamic state. Absi had been severely injured in battle, and had several broken ribs and a large open wound on his left leg.
Dimitri Bontinck found a YouTube video showing several Belgian jihadis in a field with yellow flowers. One of them looked like Jejoen. His older brother, a dentist named Firas, trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In , Amr al-Absi was arrested in Syria, and held in the Al Qaeda wing of Sednaya prison, with hundreds of other extremists.
Four years later, in June, , Assad released them. It was a turning point in the Syrian war. Assad had stated that the opposition was full of terrorists, a claim that the mysterious amnesty then fulfilled. It seemed like a calculated move to poison the nascent Syrian revolution. Absi took up the leadership of a jihadi brigade near the Syrian city of Homs. His brother Firas had recently founded a group called the Shura Council of the Islamic State, which gained notoriety after raising the Al Qaeda flag at the border gates near Bab al-Hawa, a major crossing point between Turkey and Syria, in July, It was the first mention of an Islamic state in the Syrian civil war.
Moderate Syrian rebels rescued and released the journalists a week later. In Kafr Hamra, Absi divided his fighters according to origin. Most of the Europeans, including the Sharia4Belgium members, lived in a walled villa, with an indoor swimming pool and a fountain. It had a fuelling station, an orchard the size of a football field, and a rooftop pool.
Absi designated Houssien Elouassaki, a twenty-one-year-old Sharia4Belgium member, as the leader of the European group. They called him Sheikh, or Emir, or by his kunya , Abu Asir. Afterward, the Army base, which stretched over five hundred acres, became a jihadi training camp. Training lasted twenty days. Each morning began with a ninety-minute run led by a former Egyptian special-forces officer, followed by two hours of tactical lessons with unloaded weapons and simulated attacks, a short break for lunch and prayers, and lectures by Islamist scholars.
Lessons were given in Arabic and translated by bilingual jihadis into Dutch. In the evenings, the Europeans took turns on sentry duty. By late December, the Europeans of the Mujahideen Shura Council were setting up roadblocks on the main road through Kafr Hamra and stopping buses. He explained the routine in phone calls to his girlfriend in Belgium, captured by a wiretap. Hakim stole a gold ring from a Kurd and a laptop from a Christian.
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At the roadblocks, the Belgians held Syrian civilians for ransom. Hakim released an Armenian Christian after his family paid thirty thousand euros, but, when the brother of a captured Shiite civilian delivered the same amount of money, Hakim killed him. That evening, Hakim called his girlfriend.