In front of a packed auditorium at North-South University (NSU) in the capital, Saliha Ben Ali, a Belgian mother of a slain ISIS recruit named Sabri Ben Ali, yesterday lamented that it took her just 10 seconds to learn about the death of her son, but understanding more about why he went to Syria would take her a lifetime. Saliha's 19-year-old Belgian boy of Tunisian heritage drifted away from his family and could not resist the lure of radicalism that his mother is fighting against today as the founder of a Brussels-based NGO, the ‘Society Against Violent Extremism (SAVE) Belgium’.
As a part of her quest to fight worldwide extremism, Saliha recently came to Dhaka under the banner of S.A.V.E to address seminars and create awareness among the people. Yesterday, she was speaking at a seminar titled "Community Engagement in Countering Violent Extremism in Bangladesh" at the NSU.
In an emotional yet resolute manner, Saliha was talking about what happened to her son Sabri Ben Ali. "Sabri used to love basketball. He wanted to go to USA to play at NBA. He was the happiest of my four children. He was always joking with his brother and sister at home," she said.
It all changed in the summer of 2013. With European countries in a supposed frenzy against the Muslim community because of some ISIS terrorist attacks, the Muslim communities across the continents started facing discrimination. “Sabri’s happy persona started to change when he noticed inevitable changes among all his friends. He saw that he would be the sole person to get pulled aside and searched by law enforcement officers. He was affected by the suspicious looks that he often got from his peers, and how Muslims would get bullied,” she said. In the meantime, Sabri followed the conflicts in the Middle East and was enraged
by how Muslim countries did not come forward to help the women and children suffering in the war-torn countries.
He became more religious and he started trying to learn more about Islam and went to the mosque to seek help from the imam.
“The imam told Sabri that he was welcome to pray but he didn't have enough time to teach him more about Islam. Failing to learn from the imam of the mosque, Sabri met some preachers and they told him that they had time for him. And that was the starting,” Saliha continued.
It was these men, radical preachers, who filled a vacuum left by mosque elders and convinced her son that their version of Islam would provide the sense of identity he was seeking, she said, adding that she found Sabri’s bedroom empty just a few months later.
“One Sunday morning I went to his room. I found his bed empty and I knew exactly what had happened."Wake up," she remembers telling her husband. "Sabri is in Syria."
Sabri died in Syria sometime between August and December, 2013. Saliha came to know about her son's death, when an unknown man telephoned her husband to inform about their son.  Saliha is still haunted by the 10-second phone call in which the man said “congratulations, your son is a martyr”.
“My life project today is to try to understand why our children are obliged to go and die to feel useful,” she said, adding, “That’s my life question.”
“I couldn’t accept the way he died. That was too unjust for me,” she said, adding that because of it she had founded S.A.V.E and wanted to spread her message against radicalisation and extremism. Speaking on the occasion, Mohammad Monirul Islam, Chief of Counterterrorism Unit and Transnational Crime of Bangladesh, said the story of Sabri and the story of Nibras Islam, student of NSU, is no different. "If you look at the stories of young ISIS recruits, you will see a similar pattern. Extremism and terrorism have no country," he said. Monirul, however, said that there are differences between Belgium and Bangladesh. “In Belgium Saliha's son faced discrimination because he was a Muslim. In Bangladesh, there was no such discrimination yet many youths from here have joined the ISIS because they had been brainwashed by the distorted version of Islam." He said that through perceived sense of deprivation, the recruiters from terrorist and radicalised groups are manipulating the youth. Praising Saliha Ben Ali's initiative, Monirul urged all to work together to fight terrorism.