Jejoen’s testimony to the police contributed to the prosecutor’s case against forty-six members of Sharia4Belgium, including himself. The group was collectively prosecuted as a terrorist organization; members were individually charged with numerous other crimes, ranging from threatening to kill Belgian politicians to abducting and torturing Jejoen. Jejoen was charged with being a member of ISIS for the number of days that he had not spent as its prisoner, and for being a member of Sharia4Belgium before that. Only eight of the forty-six Sharia4Belgium members appeared in court. The rest are in Syria—most still fighting, and some already dead.

The trial began last September, almost a year after Jejoen’s return, in Antwerp’s Palace of Justice, a glass-and-steel complex. Armed security forces lined the perimeter of the courtroom, monitoring the visitors’ gallery. On December 10th, the last day of hearings, two police officers brought Belkacem—dressed in an olive jumpsuit, handcuffed, and restrained with a thick belt—into the courtroom.

Twenty minutes into the proceedings, the magistrate invited Belkacem to make his plea. He spoke so quietly that people in the courtroom stood up and leaned toward him, straining to hear. “I am a Muslim, not a terrorist,” he said.

“Liar!” Ozana Rodrigues, the mother of Brian De Mulder, who is now fighting in Raqqa, shouted. Belkacem calmly asked whether it was “a crime to promote your faith.”

The verdict and the sentencing for Belkacem, Jejoen, and the others were set for January 14, 2015. I visited Antwerp for six weeks this winter, while the judges were deliberating. “My life is totally destroyed,” Dimitri told me. He hasn’t held a job in two years. When we arranged our first meeting, he asked me to bring either red wine or whiskey. As his ex-wife remarked, “He doesn’t drink water anymore.”

In 2014, against the advice of his lawyers and the Belgian government, Dimitri started taking other parents of jihadis to Syria, for a small fee, to search for their children. Last summer, when I met him in Kilis, he was guiding two Belgian fathers into Islamic State territory. One of them, Pol Van Hessche, later told me that he had taken a car into northern Syria and stopped at the front gate of a jihadi villa near Manbij. It was a holding place for young fighters waiting to go to an Islamic State training camp. His son, Lucas, came out of the building, and Pol pleaded with him to come home. Lucas refused.

Other parents of jihadis told me that Dimitri offered the only hope that one day they might reunite with their children. One evening, in Antwerp, Dimitri assured Ozana Rodrigues that he could guide her into Raqqa to find her son, who had recently fathered a child with a Dutch jihadi bride. But later, drinking whiskey in his apartment, he insisted that he was finished with Syria. “I cannot continue my life like this,” he said. Then the phone rang, and after he hung up he announced that he had a new mission: “You think I’m going to say no when a mother is crying in my face?” He continued, “I wake up with Syria, and I go to sleep with Syria.”

Dimitri’s efforts to gain publicity for his son, and for parents facing a similar situation to his own, have been perhaps too successful. He has taken to speaking in sound bites, calling himself Mother Teresa, for his attempts to help parents of other jihadis, and describing Jejoen as being “just like Edward Snowden,” for leaking jihadi secrets. Outside the courtroom, Dimitri shouted at TV cameras, in English, “Bin Laden is laughing from hell, Belkacem is laughing from the cell.” This month, Dimitri received an eight-month prison sentence for a 2013 incident in which he hit a former girlfriend, the daughter of a judge, and held her hostage in a hotel room. (He has since appealed.) After the judgment, he compared his plight to that of Nelson Mandela.

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On New Year’s Eve, two weeks before the sentencing, Jejoen and I ate at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Antwerp. He had grown out his hair and his beard since returning to Belgium. As we shared a large bony fish, Jejoen told me that he still believes in the caliphate, and sees it as “something which you can’t stop or hold back.” It irks him that his father believes he is “no longer radical,” though he attributes this, in part, to his own minor deceptions. When Dimitri is around, Jejoen wears trousers, but “when he doesn’t see it” he wears a qamis, a traditional Muslim garment.

I asked Jejoen about the execution of James Foley, and he said that it was a question “for scholars” of Islam, adding, “I can’t say anything about it, because I’m not at that level.” He told me that there is “no difference” between his views and those of his “spiritual leader,” Belkacem. With the prospect of prison looming, Jejoen seemed to have recast in his mind his experience in Syria. He declared that his only regret about his time there was that he returned to Belgium. Living in Raqqa, he said, “might be cool.” He had been home for more than a year, and was frequently recognized and harassed on the streets of Antwerp. In recent months, Jejoen had sat in court next to other Sharia4Belgium defendants, some of whom had repeatedly lied to the authorities; his coöperation seemed to have carried no benefit. He hadn’t been offered a plea deal or witness protection, because, the Belgian security official said, “that’s just the system in Belgium.”

Although he had divulged jihadi secrets in his police interrogations, Jejoen believed that he could return to Syria unscathed. “People think I can’t go there, because I’ll get killed,” he told me. But he compared his coöperation with the authorities—which other Sharia4Belgium members liken to treason—to committing a minor sin, such as drinking alcohol while in Belgium. “You cannot be punished for that” in the caliphate, he said, “because it didn’t take place there.”

We left the restaurant, and Jejoen headed back to his mother’s apartment. A few nights later, he called me from an unfamiliar phone number and asked for “urgent” help. “I would like to go to Turkey,” he said. He told me that it would be just for a holiday in a seaside resort in Antalya—where the temperature was barely above freezing. He faced no restrictions on his travel, and said he would return to Antwerp for the sentencing. He planned to travel with his girlfriend, a Belgian of Algerian descent, whom his father described as “extremist.” He asked to use my credit card, and promised to give me eight hundred euros immediately. The flight left in nine hours. I said no.

Later that night, Dimitri stood in the freezing alley outside his front door, smoking a cigarette. “One of my Syrian connections said that my son called to them, three weeks ago,” he told me. Jejoen later denied it, telling his father, “If I want to go back in, I know how to go.” Dimitri believed that if Jejoen went to Syria the Islamic State would kill him. “You will see him in a video,” he said. Nonetheless, Dimitri gave his son the money for the trip to Antalya.

Before sunrise the next day, Jejoen was arrested at Brussels Airport. His journey violated a restraining order filed by his girlfriend, after a fight nearly two months before. (They had since resolved their issues and she had asked for the order to be cancelled.) He remained in prison until the sentencing, which was delayed a month, after the Charlie Hebdo murders.

On February 11th, the court concluded that Sharia4Belgium was a terrorist organization. Jejoen was given a forty-month suspended sentence.

Belkacem received twelve years in prison. (He has since appealed his sentence.) “Do you know how much potential there is in prison?” Belkacem once joked with his followers at the Sharia4-Belgium headquarters. “Everyone in prison is against the system,” he said. “Infidels and Muslims alike. There is work to be done. It will be awesome.” ♦