American ISIS: “I Knew the Likely End of Our Relationship Would be His Death”

In the new podcast “American ISIS,” Trevor Aaronson, a 2020 ASU Future Security Fellow with New America, recounts his six months of correspondence with Russell Dennison, an American who joined ISIS. The podcast traces Dennison’s path from the United States to Syria and his life in Syria. David Sterman, a Senior Policy Analyst with New America’s International Security program, interviewed Aaronson about the podcast and its lessons. Listen to this podcast on Audible. The following is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.

Can you briefly introduce our readers to your new podcast?

American ISIS is a documentary podcast that is about my roughly six months of secretly communicating with Russell Dennison, an American who joined ISIS in Syria. During the period that I communicated with Russell, he was in Deir Ezzor following the fall of Raqqa, ISIS’ de facto capital. It was the beginning of ISIS’ collapse as a group that had any kind of territorial control.

How did you come to the subject?

My history with Russell goes back to roughly 2014. I was researching this FBI sting operation in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. It involved a young man named Sami Osmakac. Members of Sami’s family told me I needed to look at this guy named Russell Dennison. They believed he had radicalized Sami. They also suspected that Russell was an FBI informant.

I emailed Russell in late 2014, and I never heard back. About four years later I get this anonymous email saying to contact a WhatsApp number. That’s what I did, and the first question that comes was “do you remember Sami Osmakac?” I knew that it was Russell. Over the course of the next six months I heard from him almost daily as he was describing his life, his journey to ISIS, and the day to day that he was living through as ISIS was slowly collapsing.

At first blush, the story seems like it could be told in a linear fashion as a simple story of “radicalization,” where he embraces stricter versions of Islam, interacts with an online hub of the English language jihadist movement, is on the outskirts of a couple of terrorism investigations, and then ends up with ISIS. Yet the podcast suggests there is a lot of contingency to the story. How did you think about where a linear approach might make sense and how to avoid a deterministic version of the events?

I deliberately disclose in the first episode that Russell has been killed. I felt it was necessary for the listener to understand that he was dead in the beginning because much of my telling of his story was contingent on my agreement that I would not make his story public before his death.

That was important even though it created this deterministic outlook because in the end I didn’t think this was just Russell’s story. I also viewed it as my story in trying to verify, authenticate, and interrogate his story.

From there, the story is mostly told chronologically. There are a few diversions, but this was a really in depth explanation from Russell’s viewpoint of how he became an ISIS fighter. I think there are a lot of times where NGOs and government agencies try to come up with this formula about radicalization. I have heard FBI agents talk about how what they look for is these people who are sympathizers, right on the line of becoming operators and they want to catch them just as they are stepping over that line.

He was looking for this kind of naïve idea of this perfect Islamic state: this place where he could be the Muslim he wanted to be.

I think there is this idea that radicalization or the drift towards extremism happens pretty quickly. What is really interesting to me in Russell’s story is that he is initially attracted to kind of hardline Muslim ideology, he converts to Islam just before going to prison in Pennsylvania. He’s taught Islam by the Black Muslims in prison. Then he moves to Florida where his family lives, and he doesn’t really know any Muslims there. By happenstance he sees a guy wearing a thobe and approaches him. It turns out that guy is a Salafi and Russell becomes increasingly interested in Salafi Islam and starts reading about Salafi Jihadism. But even then he wasn’t specifically advocating any sort of Islamist ideology.

What happens in the time period between his conversion and when he ends up in ISIS?

You’re talking about a process that is eight or nine years. In Russell’s telling, it was not that he read about these things and watched videos that inspired him to fight. It was learning about Islam and feeling like the Islam he wanted to practice was not what was available to him in the United States. At the same time because of his videos, he is attracting attention from the FBI, and in his mind, this is an example of the U.S. government’s war against Islam.

So Russell goes to Egypt not for fighting but because he wants to live in a Muslim country. Instead of finding the Islamic paradise he expects, he finds what Egypt is: a developing country with its own host of problems. He is detained by Egyptian secret police. He returns to the United States and his friend Sami Osmakac is arrested. He goes to see a friend in Michigan, and the FBI shows up. Russell felt like he was being pushed out. That’s when he leaves the country for the second and last time.

He goes to Iraq. He was looking for this kind of naïve idea of this perfect Islamic state: this place where he could be the Muslim he wanted to be and all the people around him could be the Muslims that he is. He didn’t find it in Iraq. He goes back to Egypt and gets locked up again. He goes to Jordan, gets locked up and then finally goes to Lebanon. He feels he just can’t find the Islamic paradise. Then he goes up to Tripoli in Lebanon and realizes there’s a war in Syria that is spilling over. His feeling was maybe that’s where I’ll find what I’m looking for.

But in Russell’s telling it’s not like he went there because he wanted to get a Kalashnikov and fight. He was looking for this Islamic paradise. It’s a complicated story we tell over several episodes in the podcast, but there were so many points where Russell’s trajectory to ISIS could have changed.

Some key moments in how Russell tells his story do not happen in the United States, which raises a question: To what extent is this a story of homegrown radicalization and American society and to what extent is this a story of the various other societies that he traverses?

This is not a story of someone who fully radicalized in the United States and leaves. It is important to understand that one of the things that Russell was consistent in was saying I did not come to Syria to fight the United States. Russell had an enormous amount of affection for his family in the United States and he did not hate the United States. In many ways, he was quite antagonistic towards United States actors like the FBI, but Russell did not consider himself anti-American. He leaves America not because he hates America but because he felt he could not be the Muslim he wanted to be here and he felt the Muslim world would be more suitable for him.

Along the line, he is consistently rejected. So I think the turning points for Russell were not exclusively in the United States. The beginnings of that turn happen in the United States in that he embraces Salafism and that he felt like the U.S. government was after him. That’s why he left, but he didn’t leave to join ISIS.

Russell tells you that the parts of ISIS that were organizing external attacks in the West approached him. He says he told that group he was not interested in what he refers to as “real” terrorist attacks. What does phrase this tell us about how Russell thought about terrorism and his relationship to his home country?

Russell was very much against attacks in Western Europe, America, and elsewhere. He was also against the killing of American journalists and other civilians. In Russell’s theology, which was consistent with ISIS’s larger theology, there was this idea that if you were an American and if America is at war with Islam, that you are a fair target. Russell felt theologically that was correct. But in Russell’s view, what he was doing in Syria, and what he believed ISIS was doing, was building a place where Muslims could live in this Islamic caliphate and in turn free the Syrians and Iraqis from their anti-Islamic governments. There really wasn’t any specific purpose in his mind for perpetrating attacks in the West and harming American journalists. I also think that Russell – and he would not say this as explicitly – would have considered American civilians as not being part of the enemy.

In Russell’s mind what was happening in Syria wasn’t terrorism. He didn’t want to participate in what he called “real” acts of terror because that would be attacks on civilians in the West in Europe and America and he didn’t agree with that.

It is strange to be communicating with someone you know is going to die and also realizing you’re the person this person is essentially confessing to.

A lot of the Western media coverage of ISIS suggested it was a monolithic organization – that everyone involved in ISIS totally agreed with the brutality its propaganda videos showed and the decisions that the organization would make. What Russell’s story shows was that it wasn’t so monolithic. That was part of what made me want to do this as a longform podcast. I was wary of being a vehicle for someone to glamorize and make excuses for what ISIS did. But because Russell not only offered this first-hand view into ISIS, but also offered this first-hand criticism of ISIS, I thought it was really valuable. I think it helped provide a nuanced look at what ISIS was.

Your earlier reporting on terrorism prosecutions focuses on a critical look at the use of informants and sting operations. Did covering this case, where someone actually joined a terrorist group, change your thoughts on how to cover the use of informants?

It has not made me question my criticism. I very much hold the critical reporting I have done as important and true. But it opened my eyes in two ways. One is that Russell’s story helped me understand better how the FBI is using people unwittingly. The term we use in the podcast is “buglight.” Anyone who got in contact with Russell got the FBI’s attention. Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, a man in Seattle, communicated with Russell one time, and within weeks the FBI was surveilling him and ultimately wrapped him up in a sting operation.

The second part reinforces a lot of what I have been reporting: the FBI is really very good at finding the people who are not likely to become terrorists. They end up arresting Russell’s friend Sami Osmakac. Sami couldn’t find his way into any areas that were in conflict outside the United States and was really a pretty inept terrorist, as it were – didn’t have any money, didn’t have any bombs. The FBI is very good at finding them, and not so good at finding someone like Russell. Russell was pretty savvy about it. He told Sami, “Look, it’s weird the circumstances you’re under and the FBI, they want to get Muslims and they’ll come after you.”

So to me Russell’s case showed two things: one, it showed that people who can actually make it to ISIS are not the ones necessarily falling into the FBI’s traps. The other is to what degree do the FBI’s aggressive operations in Muslim communities reinforce this narrative that the U.S. government is at war with Islam. And if that narrative is reinforced, how much does it push people who are sympathizers into operators?

There’s no way to know this 100 percent obviously, but I am not convinced that had the FBI not so aggressively pursued Russell that he would have necessarily left the country, and if he doesn’t leave the country, he ultimately doesn’t join ISIS.

In covering this story, you were placed in a tough position. If information came out about your contact it would put Russell in danger of being killed either by ISIS or by the United States. At the same time, you were in contact with someone associated with an organization committed to conducting violence. How did you think through these pressures?

I was saved from having to grapple with some of the more serious ethical situations because at the time I communicated with Russell he was very much in a defensive position. Raqqa had fallen, and ISIS was degraded, and the remaining ISIS fighters with him were huddled in a string of villages along the Euphrates. So I was never put in a position where Russell would have provided me with information about innocent people potentially being harmed or killed. And that would be a very difficult position to be in given that I also agreed to protect Russell’s identity. If anyone was at harm as this was happening it was mostly Russell because Russell was living through this bombing campaign that ultimately cost him his life.

That said, there were obviously ethical considerations in that as a journalist I was giving my commitment to someone who had willfully joined ISIS, a group that had killed other journalists, committed all sorts of atrocities. I was willing to do that because I felt that Russell’s first-hand account was uniquely noteworthy and almost like a historical record, and there really was no other way to get that.

It was also in some ways a personally challenging position. This is a person I got to know over six months and while getting to know him, I knew the likely end of our relationship would be his death. That’s a strange place to be. Much as I put up that wall like, “I’m the journalist and he’s the subject,” it is strange to be communicating with someone you know is going to die and also realizing you’re the person this person is essentially confessing to. For all his faults, he did place his trust in me that I was not going to betray him and that I was not going to put the lives of his wife and children in danger.

There is so much in this podcast we haven’t talked about: Russell’s rare provision of a window into life under an American air campaign, the experience of his relatives here, the fate of his family in Syria, and the role of the U.S. in developing the larger system of violence that made this story possible. What can those considering listening to the podcast look forward to?

We break some news about ISIS’s capacity. Russell was involved in a unit in Deir Ezzor that was intercepting the communications of Americans as well as Syrian, Iraqi, and Turkish forces, which is not something we previously associated with the capacities of terrorist organizations.

Russell was unique. Here was this American who goes to Syria and not just joins ISIS but gets involved in fairly high levels of ISIS. We hear a lot about these Americans or British guys who joined ISIS and were there for a few months or a year and they were just kind of frontline fighters. He was with ISIS since the very start in Syria, depending on when you start the ISIS clock, all the way down to the final loss of territory. I think he’s able to pull back the curtain on what ISIS was like.

The Western reporting on ISIS at times was not very good. Reporters were probably influenced in a way ISIS wanted by the ghoulishly violent and horrific propaganda videos. We had this exaggerated view of ISIS and its capabilities in the West - that it was this horribly dangerous thing for the United States. And in one of Russell’s final recordings to me as ISIS is falling, his ultimate takeaway is: we were no threat to the West, we were no threat to the United States. You guys came and destroyed us, but we were never a threat. I thought that was interesting. I’m not saying ISIS wasn’t a malignant force or that it did not commit atrocities. They were and they did. But what Russell’s story shows is that the story was much more complicated and even someone from the inside is saying “you guys totally overestimated us.” I thought that was fascinating.

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