I’d been speaking with Russell Dennison just about day-to-day for more than six months when his messages quickly stopped coming.

Dennison was a devout Muslim. He thought the time and position of his dying ended up predetermined, that if a bomb were being intended for him, it would eliminate him, regardless of anything he may possibly do to stay away from it. That bomb located him in the spring of 2019 in Baghuz, a modest village in eastern Syria in the vicinity of the border with Iraq. I uncovered of his death months later on, following a witness told Dennison’s Syrian wife, and she advised me.

A red-bearded American who was raised Catholic in the Pennsylvania suburbs, Dennison was amongst the 1st Americans to be a part of the Islamic Condition, or ISIS. I had to begin with tried to speak to him in 2014, right after hearing rumors that he’d left the United States to combat in the Syrian civil war. For many years, I received no reaction. Then in August 2018 — after fleeing Raqqa as U.S.-led coalition forces approached ISIS’s de facto money — Dennison emailed me. He wished to converse.

In the months that adopted, he despatched me much more than 30 several hours of audio recordings by way of WhatsApp. Talking predominantly at evening, with the rumble of coalition airstrikes in the track record, he described his conversion to Islam in Pennsylvania, his drift to extremism in Florida, and his journey by the Middle East