From his earliest years, Ahmad Walid Rashidi says he harboured a seething hatred against the Taliban, the extremist Sunni group that dominated Afghanistan before 2001 and the United States invasion.
In 1997, when he was 5, he says he lost his leg, and almost his life, in a bomb explosion; a doctor initially pronounced him dead and covered him with a shroud. While he recovered from his injury, he says the Taliban killed his father, a Communist, and an older brother, leaving his mother to take care of him and his six remaining siblings.
As much as he hated the Taliban, he says he never got an opportunity to exact revenge. His mother, a university lecturer in Kabul, moved the family to Tehran and, when he was 10, to Denmark.
It was not until last year that Rashidi, by now a medical student in Denmark, had his first chance, but it came in the form of another group of brutal Sunni militants. A British-Danish family was seeking help in bringing back to Europe twin 17-year-old daughters who had travelled to Syria to become jihadist brides of fighters for the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Rashidi, a Sunni, agreed to try, but as he tells the story, once there he found himself in uncharted waters, the certainties he had known back in the West overturned. He found the girls, but they were already married and wanted to stay. Then he was arrested by the Islamic State and accused of being a Western spy. He was jailed, tortured and hauled in front of a Shariah court, he says, which threatened to behead him.
But, strangely enough, he found himself being drawn to the Islamic State. "They are like, what do you call them? Mermaids," he said recently, sitting in a restaurant here in Aarhus, where he lives. "They just sing, day to day, and I listen, you know." As with most accounts from inside Islamic State-controlled territory, the particulars of Rashidi's ordeal cannot be fully verified. The girls' family could not be reached for comment, but friends in Manchester, England, confirmed the effort to rescue them.
Rashidi's experience in Syria is central to a book being written by two Danish journalists, Stig Matthiesen and Lasse Ellegaard, who say they are confident that he is reliable. Rashidi was seen at the Syrian border with Turkey in the company of the girls' parents by another journalist, who asked not to be named because he is reporting on the story and did not want to harm his relationship with the family. Rashidi also provided a copy of a document from the Islamic State providing him and the girls' mother, Khadra Jama, "safe passage" to Turkey.
Now, back in Denmark, he condemns the militant group and all forms of terrorism. But he says his experiences help illuminate how the group's calls for righting historical injustices in West Asia, including the humiliation suffered by Muslims under Western colonialism, strike a chord with young Muslims, as does its narrative that Muslims are the victims of discrimination in Western society. It is an appeal that resonates not only among the angry and disaffected, but also among straight-A students, the deeply religious and demure young women - even among people like Rashidi, who started as a staunch opponent.
He says he can understand the motivations of Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein, the 22-year-old suspect behind the terrorist attacks in Copenhagen in February, who was shot and killed by the police. "Only one guy needed to kill two people to shock the whole of Denmark," said Rashidi, 23. "Try to imagine that in Afghanistan." Atrocities committed by the Islamic State, he said, are aimed at "making the West get a taste of their own medicine," which part of him thinks the West deserves. People like him and Hussein are "ticking bombs," he said, after some thought. "Bombs which are huge and which will one day explode. But it's a normal reaction for people like us."
Rashidi's childhood mirrors the experiences of millions of young European Muslims, many of whom come from families who have been displaced or who have been raised in Islamic pockets in urban areas, isolated and alienated from the mainstream.
The bombing that took his leg is still seared in his memory. "I saw something green and metal, then everything turned black," he said. "I was then on the ground, in our garden, my face was on the earth, and there was huge smoke and glass was all around. I saw fire in the stone. I told myself stones can't be on fire."
Later, he said, "They put a white sheet on my body, and a voice said, 'He's dead.' I heard my mother and grandmother yelling, 'No, no, no!'"
He was grateful for the prosthetic leg he received in Germany soon after the bombing. He was treated there for more than seven months, owing to a nonprofit organisation and a German foster mother who took care of him. But when his family moved to Denmark, he felt frustrated by what he saw as a lack of understanding among Westerners about the wars being fought in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
At school, when he compared victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks to civilian deaths in Afghanistan, his teacher replied that they did not matter because in his country "buildings aren't high."
"How could I defend myself against that?" Rashidi asked. "It built up resentment. People here in the West gather around a dinner table to discuss the death of a pet, but no one asked me what happened to my leg. I was full of hate."
It was not until last year that he found what he thought was a worthwhile enemy to fight.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
