What’s it like to be in the heart of a jihadist? He called her his “baby.” Each morning she awoke to a string of missed Skype calls asking where she was. They talked for hours each night. “He” was Abu Bilel, the French right-hand man of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and she was an undercover reporter he had unwittingly fallen for. In the Skin of a Jihadist tells the story of how a young French journalist found herself being digitally courted by a high-level ISIS commander. Having written about many of the teenaged girls who ran away to ISIS-controlled territory after conversing with fighters online, Anna Erelle found herself in the center of the story—being wooed herself.
As part of her work covering the stories of young people who fled France for North Africa, Erelle had established a digital alter ego. Somehow, out of all of those Facebook pages, Bilel found hers: “Mélodie,” a woman 10 years younger and living in Toulouse, hundreds of miles from Erelle’s home in Paris. He wanted to talk and Erelle wanted the sort of insight about ISIS only a behind-the-scenes look could provide. But merely exchanging text messages wasn’t enough: He wanted to see his new love. Couldn’t they Skype?
It was the beginning of a series of Skype conversations between journalist and jihadist that lasted over a month and, in the end, inspired “Mélodie” to run as far as Turkey in hopes of catching a glimpse of the series of couriers who spirited these young girls away. She answered his flirtatious lines with coy words of her own; she spoke with him regularly on Skype while heavily veiled; she gently pressed him for information on what ISIS was doing, information she then used in her own stories.
The lines she parroted to Bilel echoed the voices of the girls she’d spoken to over the years. In answering his question about how she hid her newfound faith from her imaginary mother, she could only repeat the methods others had related to her: “ISIS offers [lost young people] a way to fill the void in their lives”—a sense of purpose and a future in which their lives have meaning. “Mélodie,” after all, had gone from nothing to promises of true love, marriage, and a future in a mere 48 hours.
In this sense, Anna Erelle’s mission was as much a way of getting into the minds of the girls who left France as a means of understanding the members of ISIS. Throughout, she recounts struggling to repress her revulsion at Bilel’s words. One day he told her that jihadists preferred converts for brides because:
When he followed by asking if she likes lingerie, Erelle hung up on him—then forced herself to call back.
For Abu Bilel, jihad was a job. In one of his conversations with “Mélodie,” he described his role as “supervising operations” before adding that someone else decided what to do with the bodies afterwards. Nonchalantly discussing death, his conversations would shift to asking what Mélodie wore beneath her burka. This disconnect from responsibility Erelle found most chilling. Both lecherous and cruel, Bilel leered at her on the computer screen yet offered a sense of self-worth she acknowledged would be attractive to a young woman who felt that France held no future for her. When she resisted, he questioned her courage, citing the many girls arriving in Syria each week.
Surely “Mélodie,” his lioness, was as brave as they were?
One trouble with Erelle’s account is its treatment of the detailed backstory she gave for “Mélodie.” Several chapters open with details of her difficulties in school and with friends, even her marijuana use. But of course, “Mélodie” isn’t real but a mélange of details and stories of other girls who had run to Syria that Erelle had learned from their families. These details, which fill several chapters, are a composite presented as fact—an exercise in empathy, perhaps: What would prompt a young woman to flee the 21st century for the 13th?
This is a compelling story, filled with the sorts of false histories, fake names, and secret encounters found in a spy novel. For Anna Erelle’s safety, her identity, even the text of the original article she published in France about her experiences, remains hidden. The final irony is that, in the end, Western readers may only see Anna Erelle as Abu Bilel did—hidden behind a veil.
Erin Mundahl is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
