“Hopefully this is the last one, but I won’t know for sure,” says Sinan Can. For nine years he made documentaries about the Islamist terrorist movement IS and its victims. He traveled again and again to the former Caliphate, the IS region in Syria and Iraq, to document the horrors. For Inside Caliphate (NPO2), he spoke for the first time with two Dutch IS fighters who are imprisoned in Rojava, the Kurdish area in northern Syria. This should be the final part of the IS series.
The two men he speaks to there, Yasin from Zoetermeer and Abdullah from The Hague, say that they led a “reasonably calm” life in the Netherlands, with a wife, children and a job. “Just Dutch boys.” According to them, the fact that they traveled to Syria to fight in the civil war has “nothing to do with the Netherlands.” They were not dissatisfied with their existence, they say, but they were eager to help their Muslim brothers. They ended up with IS more or less by chance and they say they have not seen any violence themselves. “Believe me, I’m not dangerous.” Abdullah had an “administrative position” at IS. Yasin was in “telecommunications”. They say. When Sinan Can confronts them with photos of them holding a weapon, they say it is a “posing photo.” When asked, they say they are sorry. “I did my best,” they also say. And: “people simply make mistakes.”
What do you do with such interviews? Conversations with Dutch IS fighters are rare. And it’s always fascinating to look criminals in the eye. Moreover, they are eyewitnesses to an unprecedented reign of terror – an important piece of contemporary history. But it doesn’t make you much wiser. Not least because the two are probably not telling the truth. In any case, it is very implausible that they did not see any horrors and did not commit violence themselves. Can explains what the two men do not reveal themselves: how they met with other jihadists in a basement on the Meppelweg in The Hague under the leadership of ’emir’ Abou Moussa and how they were prepared there for the trip to Syria.
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It is clear why Abdullah and Yasin were interviewed for Dutch TV: they would like to get out of the Kurdish prison and return to the Netherlands. Just like the thirteen other Dutch IS fighters who are still imprisoned. Not good, you think. Dangerous men would be better off staying locked up far away. Significantly, Can refers to the Belgian terrorist Oussama Atar, who was taken from an Iraqi prison at the insistence of Belgian politicians and released in Belgium. He then planned the major attacks in Paris and Brussels.
The interesting thing about this documentary is that Sinan Can investigates with some success why it is a good idea to bring the men to the Netherlands. First of all, they have the right to a fair trial and the Kurdish government is unable to provide that. The Kurds cannot handle the thousands of IS prisoners and would like to get rid of them. Second: IS is not gone. Last year the group carried out a major attack on a Kurdish prison and freed dozens of prisoners. There were also Dutch people in that prison. They could come back on their own, for attacks. Third, prisons where many IS fighters are held together are hotbeds of new violence. Can points out that IS was born in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, the infamous US prisons in Iraq. They were called “the college of Jihad.”
To retrieve or not? “State security and the rule of law are at odds with each other here,” Can concludes. In any case, the work is done for him. He says.