In Minneapolis, one judge is hoping that homegrown ISIS recruits can be reformed into normal young Americans. Inside a controversial new program that aims to reverse radical indoctrination.
LIKE MOST HIGH SCHOOL seniors, Abdullahi Yusuf tried to avoid hugging his father in view of other teens. But on the morning of May 28, 2014, as he was being dropped off in front of Heritage Academy in southeast Minneapolis, the rail-thin 18-year-old, who went by the nickname Bones, startled his dad with a tender good-bye embrace. Unbeknownst to his father, Yusuf believed he’d never see any member of his family again.
Yusuf snuck out of school after first period and walked two blocks to Dar al-Farooq Como, a plain brick mosque on 17th Avenue. A friend picked him up in a Volkswagen Jetta and took him to a light-rail station. There Yusuf caught a train to the airport: He was set to depart for Turkey that afternoon, with layovers in New York and Moscow. Once he touched down in Istanbul, he planned to head to the city’s famed Blue Mosque and use his iPhone’s MagicJack app to call a phone number that he’d been given by another friend, Abdirahman Daud. Yusuf didn’t know who would answer, but Daud had assured him this person would guide him into Syria and help him become a soldier for the so-called Islamic State, better known in the West as ISIS.
Yusuf was moments away from boarding his flight when he was pulled aside by FBI special agent John Thomas. The agent was part of a surveillance team that had been watching Yusuf for a month, ever since the teen had shown up at the Federal Building in downtown Minneapolis to apply for an expedited passport. During his interview with the passport examiner, Yusuf hadn’t been able to name the hotel where he’d supposedly booked a room or the Istanbul tourist attractions he wished to visit beyond the Blue Mosque. The examiner had reported this fishy behavior to his boss, who had in turn alerted the FBI.
This story is from the February 2017 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the February 2017 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.