The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Trinis who had gone to Syria since the outbreak of the civil war included an entire community of Muslims from Diego Martin, a small town north of Port of Spain. “An entire community,” he repeated. He also claimed that some leavers had received military training in Trinidad before they left. “There is mujahideen training, or there has been mujahideen training going on in T&T, since about 2007. I was made aware of that in 2009.” He received this information, he said, from a trusted confidant from within the Muslim community, and added that it wasn’t the Muslimeen, but a more radical faction of Salafis that had splintered from them. I had heard this rumor many times when I was in Trinidad, but this was the first time I’d heard it from a source within the security services. Mark Bassant, an investigative TV journalist in Trinidad, also suspects that some of those who have gone to Syria have undergone weapons training in Trinidad.

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When, in the summer of 1498, Christopher Columbus approached the shores of Trinidad, he would have been struck by the richness of the island, with its tropical climate, flowering vegetation, flashing birds, rivers and waterfalls. For more recent visitors, who reach the island by air, it is the richness of Trini culture, vividly exemplified in its annual carnival in February. To outsiders, Trinidad can look like a paradise. But for those many Trinis who are blighted by its high crime rate, rising unemployment, pockets of abject poverty and endemic corruption this proposition is routinely put to the test. This may explain why Islam, with its call to end corruption and oppression and to return to a simpler, more just society, appeals to so many of those from whom Trinidad’s myriad blessings are withheld. But this doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why so many Trinis have been captivated by the brutal and hallucinatory Islam of ISIS.

A more immediate question, and one that’s easier to answer, is how so many were able to leave Trinidad to join ISIS. The answer to this is that they were allowed to. Nobody was stopping them. In fact, this was state policy. It was state policy when the conflict first started in Syria, in 2011, and it is still state policy in late 2016. As Roodal Moonilal flatly explained to me, over a drink in the Hyatt in downtown Port of Spain, “ISIS is not proscribed in T&T, meaning that you can go and train with ISIS for 2-3 years and come back here with all the rights and privileges of a citizen of T&T.”

Gary Griffith, who served as Minister of National Security between September 2013 and February 2015, told me, when we met earlier this year, that his “concern as Minster of National Security was not them [fighters from T&T] going across—they were free to go across, if they wanted—my concern was to ensure that they do not come back.” Griffith is particularly critical of his successor and political opponent Edmund Dillon, for what he sees as Dillon’s evasiveness in dealing with the issue of returnees from Syria. Griffith, by contrast, is emphatic: “They should not be allowed re-entry. … If they know that it’s a one-way ticket to hell, that is the ultimate deterrent.” He also expressed indignation that his own proposal to create “a counter-terrorism intelligence unit” for monitoring terrorist threats, launched when he was minister, was blocked by the current government. Dillon, he said, has “a good heart and means well.” But “he’s burying his head in the sand. He thinks God is a Trini.” Dillon did not respond to my numerous requests for comment.