War on Peace by Ronan Farrow

Author:Ronan Farrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE a place farther from Somalia than Wooburn Green, in Buckinghamshire, England, a working-class suburb of London. And it was difficult to imagine a person less likely to be affected by the chaos of the Horn of Africa than Sally Evans, whom I first saw in the narrow kitchenette of one of Wooburn Green’s low brick houses in 2016. Evans was fifty-eight, with graying hair cropped in a no-nonsense pageboy bob, and sensible shoes. She was pottering around, offering me a cup of instant coffee. “We’re just ordinary people,” she said, looking out at the hedge-lined street outside her window. “I never thought it would happen. No.” But Sally Evans carried with her a secret utterly alien to the rest of the mothers on her street in Wooburn Green.

Evans’s sons, Thomas and Micheal, grew up together. In home videos, they are interchangeable: carefree, skinny boys laughing and playing, with identical, tousled brown hair. “We kinda did everything together,” Micheal told me. “We had the same group of friends growin’ up.” Thomas was nineteen when that began to change. When he converted to Islam, Sally said, she took it as a positive, a sign that he was looking for more moral structure in his life. But that was before Thomas moved to a hard-line conservative mosque. After that, she recalled, “Little things began to change. Like his appearance, he grew the beard. Stopped listening to music. And he wouldn’t eat my food anymore. What I cooked wasn’t right for him anymore because it wasn’t halal meat. He just isolated himself from us.” Some of the developments had an air of absurdity. Thomas wouldn’t be in the living room as long as a Christmas tree was up during the holidays.

He began to spend more and more time behind closed doors, at his computer. “He was always upstairs in the bedroom,” Sally recalled. “I can’t believe he sat on there just, you know, browsing Facebook or whatever,” Micheal added. “He was on there specifically to look at—” he paused. “Look at things he was told to look at.”

Then Thomas began trying to leave the country. In February 2011, he was stopped by counterterrorism police at Heathrow, on the verge of flying to Kenya. A few months later, he successfully boarded a flight to Egypt. Initially, he told his mother he was traveling to study Arabic. But Evans disappeared for months, and, when he reemerged, calling Sally in January 2012, it was to say he was in Somalia. He had joined al-Shabaab. “He told us, didn’t he?” she said, turning to Micheal. “To go online and look at them. See who they were. And that’s when I realized what he’d become.” Sally pleaded with her son to come home. She told him that what he was doing “wasn’t right.” Thomas just kept invoking Allah. “I said, ‘No, no, no,’ ” she told me. “ ‘No god would guide you to this.’ ”

Over the ensuing year, mother and son fell into a strange rhythm.

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