Initially, Mikro moved in with a Christian family, where “I was forced into believing in God.” After a year, he was placed with a Muslim family from Turkey and expected to follow the Islamic faith. He recalls being made to fast during Ramadan. “I used to walk to school instead of taking the bus and used the money to buy food because I was so fucking hungry.” He said he tried being a Muslim: “I actually found the Muslim belief much more calming than the Christian.” But now, he concluded, “Religion isn’t for me.”

Mikro’s placement with the Muslim family didn’t last long anyway. After he was caught using drugs, he was transferred to “a house in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of troubled teenagers.” It was there that Mikro’s life changed forever. “I remember it really clearly because it has haunted me in every court I have been in.” The quarrel was over a girl who had been assaulted by one of the boys in the house. Mikro said he and two friends tried to confront the boy but were stopped by a group of care workers before they could exact revenge. “One of them … I’m not proud of it, because he was a really nice guy and he was just trying to make us think logically, when I look back at it. We dragged him to the ground and kicked him several times. He cracked, like, six ribs. He didn’t break it, but he did serious damage to his spine. He stopped working with youths after that. The doctor said that if we’d kicked him one more time in the chest, he’d be dead.”

For this crime, as well as resisting arrest after the incident, Mikro was sent to a high-security adult prison, where he spent six months. He was the youngest inmate there, just 16. Once out, “They put me in an apartment. I had nothing to do. I like drugs. And it was just going downhill from there. I was selling weed—and other heavy drugs.”

As I listened to Mikro tell his story, it dawned on me that his biography, with its multiple personal grievances and setbacks and trials, mirrors that of the aggrieved and alienated jihadist. I shared this observation with him, and he readily agreed. “I come from the same shit,” he said.

* * *

The U.S. Department of State has made its own efforts to beat ISIS at the Twitter game. Earlier this year, I interviewed Alberto Fernandez, then in his final week as the head of the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC). Fernandez spoke with disarming honesty and acuity about the myriad difficulties of derailing ISIS’s narrative and blunting its appeal among disaffected and marginalized Sunni Muslims. At the time, the CSCC was under fire for its “Think Again Turn Away” campaign, which the terrorism analyst Rita Katz had harshly denounced as inept and “embarrassing” in an article in Time. “We don’t have a counter-narrative,” Fernandez acknowledged. “We have half a message: ‘Don’t do this.’ But we lack the ‘Do this instead.’”

CtrlSec’s approach is far more straightforward. It is not about countering or repudiating a “narrative.” It is not about engaging with the undecided—the so-called “fence-sitters”—about the legitimacy of jihadist violence. It is not about winning hearts or changing minds. Rather, it is about shutting down the message at its source. And unlike the CSCC, CtrlSec has a clear metric for success: suspended Twitter accounts.