policy into diatribes that won him a devoted following on YouTube - and unwanted attention from the FBI. war in Iraq.ĭennison was imprisoned in his early 20s for selling a small amount of marijuana and later radicalized amid the beaches and strip malls of the Tampa Bay area, where he poured his frustration with U.S. Nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks prompted the United States to launch its global “war on terror,” Dennison’s story also serves as a travelogue through a dark and treacherous period when the threat of Islamist terrorism was used to justify a crackdown on American Muslims and ISIS rose from the chaos and violence of the U.S. Dennison’s recordings offer a firsthand view of life in ISIS-controlled territory and reveal new details about how the terrorist group functioned, from its arrival in Syria as an insurgent force to its establishment of a quasi-state governing lands the size of Kentucky. Today, The Intercept and Topic Studios are releasing American ISIS, an eight-episode Audible Original documentary podcast that provides the most detailed and critical account yet of an American who lived and died inside the ISIS caliphate. As our conversation deepened, his recordings took on a confessional quality. Speaking mainly at night, with the rumble of coalition airstrikes in the background, he described his conversion to Islam in Pennsylvania, his drift to extremism in Florida, and his journey through the Middle East and across the Lebanese-Syrian border to join the world’s most notorious and feared terrorist group. In the months that followed, he sent me more than 30 hours of audio recordings through WhatsApp. Then in August 2018 - after fleeing Raqqa as U.S.-led coalition forces approached ISIS’s de facto capital - Dennison emailed me. I had initially tried to contact him in 2014, after hearing rumors that he’d left the United States to fight in the Syrian civil war.
I learned of his death months later, after a witness told Dennison’s Syrian wife, and she told me.Ī red-bearded American who was raised Catholic in the Pennsylvania suburbs, Dennison was among the first Americans to join the Islamic State, or ISIS. That bomb found him in the spring of 2019 in Baghuz, a small village in eastern Syria near the border with Iraq. He believed the time and place of his death were predetermined, that if a bomb were meant for him, it would kill him, regardless of anything he might do to avoid it.
For example, Uslan Khan’s attack at the London Bridge last month specifically targeted a group that works with radicalized prisoners.I’d been communicating with Russell Dennison almost daily for more than six months when his messages suddenly stopped coming.ĭennison was a devout Muslim. “ISIS now calls for its followers to support the larger, metaphorical Islamic State by attacking opponents of its ideology. “The lack of consensus over what to do with these individuals will continue to be a security threat and potential source of the group’s resurgence,” said Josh Lipowsky, a senior researcher for the Counter Extremism Project. Many of their wives and children are wedged inside ailing camps where brainwashing and radicalization remains a fervent problem. Upwards of 10,000 foreign fighters still languish in northeastern Syrian prisons with dwindling security, their future in limbo as most governments refuse to take them back, an issue that has become a point of contention between Trump and allied nations. military which targeted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of the Islamic State group. People look at a destroyed van near the village of Barisha, in Idlib province, Syria, Sunday, Oct.