The Terror Connection

Does a plot to bomb Times Square reveal the next front in the war against ISIS?

- Saul Elbein

At first glance, Abdulrahman el-Bahnasawy, a Muslim kid from the suburbs of Toronto, seemed an unlikely jihadi. A soft-spoken 18-year-old with delicate features and thick curly hair, he had rejected Islam at 15, announcing to his parents, conservative Egyptian immigrants, that he was now an agnostic. This, he would write later, was just one of the many troubles he caused his family: After he discovered weed at 14, his terrified parents moved with him and his older sister to Kuwait. There, lonely and bullied in school, he began to take every drug he could get his hands on. He attempted suicide several times. Foreshadowing the bipolar disorder and schizophrenia he would later be diagnosed with, he would sit on the toilet in his parents’ house for hours, hu ng butane and hallucinating, conversing with “Hamtaramo,” an imaginary pilot who spoke to him through the radio. “He was,” Bahnasawy wrote later, “like a friend.”

Back in Toronto, after he did a stint in rehab, his family put him in an Islamic school where he soon turned to the Koran with the same ravenous enthusiasm he had previously reserved for drugs. At his parents’ house, he haunted jihadi chat rooms that served as de facto recruitment centers for disaffected young Muslims yearning for something different and purer than their lives in the West. “I realized Islam would fix all the problems in society or the world in general,” he wrote later, “and that its lifestyle would have prevented the life I lived.”