MIDDLE EAST Confessions of an Islamic State fighter Fitim Lladrovci travelled to Syria to fight a holy war. Now back in Kosovo, he continues to call for jihad. Alexander Clapp is granted a rare interview ALEXANDER CLAPP he journey that led Fitim Lladrovci to become one of the most notorious men in the Balkans began T in October 2013, when he was 23 years old. He pocketed his life savings of $350, said goodbye to his wife and left Obilic, a grimy town in central Kosovo. In Pristina, the capital, he boarded a plane to Istanbul and then took a second flight to Hatay, a province in south-east Turkey. He was met at the airport by a large Arab man in a black tracksuit and sunglasses who drove him to a single- storey house stacked with bunk-beds, where Lladrovci was surprised to find six other ethnic Albanians. Two were men; two were women whose husbands had crossed into Syria months earlier; two were children, a boy of two and a girl of six months who cried continually. The next day the Albanians were driven to the border and told to proceed on foot for several miles until they reached a line of buses. They boarded a white minibus, and were joined by a band of men from the Caucasus whose wild red beards made them appear, said Lladrovci, “like lions”. They bounced across a sandy, lunar landscape, driving deep into Syria. “The countryside seemed beautiful to me,” said Lladrovci. “But I was shaking the entire time. What stressed me most was the idea of falling into the hands of Assad.” Lladrovci travelled hundreds of miles to fight Bashar al- Assad, the Syrian president who, in the early days of the Arab spring in 2011, had suppressed street protests. Later Assad began to kill his opponents. Lladrovci had never completed school or managed to hold down a job. His sense of justice had been forged at a young age when, in the 1990s, ethnic Albanians had risen up against the Serbs and, with help from America, fought for an independent state. Kosovo, the country they built, was overwhelmingly Muslim. Lladrovci believed that his role in Syria was akin to that of the Americans in Kosovo: saving an oppressed people. He spits out Assad’s name, dismissing him as “a man who doesn’t know a thing about Islam”. The new recruit spent his first three nights in Syria in a factory on the outskirts of Aleppo, a city that was then divided between government and rebel forces. After days of travelling Lladrovci was relieved to find the floors carpeted with sponge mattresses. He lay down in a corner near the only people whose language he could understand. In Europe, Albanians are scattered across Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Greece and Albania itself. In a war-ravaged city in Syria, they found themselves wedged head to toe. “The Arabs arranged us like sardines,” he said. Lladrovci planned to join the al-Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaeda established in 2012, which operated in a loose alliance with a number of other militias, both Islamist and non-Islamist. Like all recruits, he handed over his life savings. In return, he was promised a salary of $115 a month, a respectable wage in Kosovo. A convoy of trucks brought the enlisted men to a training camp in Aleppo. From the bed of a white pick-up, Lladrovci saw a large expanse of dirt encircled by a chain-link fence. Inside was an obstacle course of tyres and monkey bars, and a shooting range. The men slept in a large brick house and ate chicken and rice three times a day. Two Turks took on the task of knocking them into shape. Some Chechens had military experience but most volunteers were simply green young men. The men were given a choice of spending three months training to become a sniper or member of the tank division, or doing a three-week course then joining a strike team of foot-soldiers who would cross Syria to occupy territory. Lladrovci chose the latter option. He wanted to see action as quickly as possible. He spent his mornings at the shooting range, rattling off live bullets from his Kalashnikov, sprinting and shooting again. The rest of the day was taken up with prayers and lectures on religion. Barren lives The picturesque town of Obilic Lladrovci says he went to Syria to save innocent civilians from slaughter. But he soon found himself caught up in a larger struggle about the future of Islam. Theological questions were contested on the battlefield. Was it acceptable to kill fellow believers in the name of Allah? Can one build a state from the blueprint of the Koran? Lladrovci grew convinced that only one organisation had the right answers: along with most of the Albanian recruits, he denounced al-Nusra and swore allegiance to Islamic State (IS) instead. Lladrovci couldn’t understand Arabic and had only a frail grasp of the theological niceties that divided Sunni from Shia. But he found the ambition and fervour of IS simple and attractive: if you were not with IS, there was a target on your back. The group had perfected a made-for-screen ruthlessness – prisoners in cages, captives set on fire, death to anyone who stood in its way. Initially Lladrovci blenched at it. But, in the turmoil of uncertain alliances and in-fighting, he found IS’s clarity appealing. Civilians who were slaughtered by IS “got what was coming to them”. Lladrovci spent a year on the battlefield in Syria before returning to Kosovo. He was imprisoned for three years – technically for hate speech, not for his activities with IS – then went back to Obilic. His only regret, he says, is having left Syria in the first place. “I would return tomorrow if I could,” he says. A higher share of Kosovo’s population has travelled to Syria to join IS than that of any other country. Between 2014 and 2016, more than 300 made the journey to Syria from one of Europe’s poorest states, according to the New York Times. Today, IS does not exist as a geographical entity. But in Kosovo, the country that Lladrovci openly derides, he still proclaims his fidelity to the caliphate. He is just one among tens of thousands of people who left their homes to join Islamic State. These individuals represent a particularly intractable and rapidly growing problem for governments across the world. What should be done with the fighters who return? n October 2018, a few months after Lladrovci was released from prison, I went to Obilic, a smoggy I town of 6,000 people downwind of a hulking coal plant. When I asked my taxi driver about locals who left to wage jihad, he cursed Lladrovci as a “diseased dog”. “I lost half my family in the war against the Serbs,” he said. “You can’t find anyone in this country who didn’t lose someone. But you didn’t see us going to Syria to cut off heads.” Lladrovci lives at the end of a muddy lane a few hundred yards from the power plant, in a cobbled-together structure of bricks and tarpaulin. A brood of chickens stalks the weed-strewn plot outside. I found Lladrovci bent over a wheelbarrow. When he learned why I was there, he told me never to visit him there again. He didn’t want to attract the attention of his neighbours. Lladrovci is tall and sinewy. His skin has a grey tint. His long nose droops towards a thin goatee on his chin. He was unremittingly monosyllabic. Only his eyes showed any emotion, two dark orbs that flitted testily about their sockets and rarely met my own. He was neither intimidating nor imposing. Rather, he seemed haunted by his experiences. Over the course of half a year, I met Lladrovci four times and talked to him for nearly ten hours. Sometimes his anger came on in sudden fits: “I feel a need to knife you,” he once said. At other times, his rage dispersed. He showed interest in my fixer’s sick mother, asking each time we met how she was feeling. But he remained mistrustful and evasive. When I asked to meet his wife, he curtly refused. Whenever our conversation strayed onto potentially shocking topics, he would pause and let off a sickly chuckle. “How many people did you kill?” Chuckle. “Do you currently possess a weapon?” Chuckle. He spends most of the day at home and works at night as a security guard in the emergency ward of a hospital in Pristina, 10km to the south. The government has banned Lladrovci from attending the local mosque. On my first visit, other residents of Obilic, caught between contempt and fear, did their best to uphold the fiction that Lladrovci never came back (the taxi driver was an exception). Lladrovci saw himself as an outcast long before he left for Syria. In 1998, at the beginning of the Kosovo war, his hometown of Drenica, in the centre of the country, was a hotbed of Albanian separatism. One of his earliest memories is of the bark of Serb paramilitaries who invaded the town, rounded up the adult men and shot dozens of them outside his elementary school. His elder brother Mentor tried to hide. But when the Serbs searched their home, they seized Mentor and bayoneted him in the head. They hung his unconscious body from the front door and pummelled it with rifle butts as Lladrovci watched.