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Despite his jihadist path, Ali did not adopt the typical life of a strict Islamic fundamentalist. He is a Muslim in the Bosnian mold: he smokes, curses, and dresses like an American. Unlike Mohammed Zaki, who longed for the maidens of paradise as he lay dying, Ali speaks of leaving this life in weary, nihilistic terms. During the assassination attempt in Lebanon, he was clinically dead at the hospital before medical workers revived him.

That was like a really beautiful, peaceful moment. Being between this life and that life, and then you’re seeing into eternity, and that was like one of the most peaceful moments I have ever seen. There, all the madness, all the insanity of what I had seen over the years and even before [going to Lebanon], I knew that I was going to be free from this life. But that wasn’t the plan of the creator…. As far as death, or anything is concerned, I welcome that. Because this life is shit. To me. Maybe not to everybody else, but to me it is.33

For many reasons Isa Ali was an exceptional case, but his stated justifications fell in line with what other American jihadists were feeling. Whether he was driven by his own experience and a personal rage, in jihad he found a hook on which to hang his darker impulses, perhaps even to redeem them. Ali now lives in Bosnia with his family and travels freely back to the land of his birth. American authorities have no apparent interest in prosecuting him.

As with Afghanistan in the 1980s, the plight of Bosnian Muslims had received a sympathetic hearing from the U.S. media and political establishment. This opened up the pool of recruits to a much wider range of American Muslims, some of whom did not share the rabid anti-Americanism of ideologues such as Omar Abdel Rahman. They saw no conflict between being an American and helping Bosnian Muslims.

One of these relatively mainstream combatants was a young Caucasian convert named Ismail Royer. Born Randy Royer, his American experience couldn’t have been more different than that of Isa Ali’s, yet Royer too found his way to Bosnia as a combatant and eventually as a resident.

Royer grew up in a stable, loving family. His father was a photographer, his mother a former Roman Catholic nun turned public school teacher. They lived in St. Louis, where, encouraged by his parents, young Randy grew up with a keen sense of compassion and social awareness. He and his father sometimes volunteered together in homeless shelters.34

Randy was a voracious reader whose intense ability to focus seemed to evaporate when it came to schoolwork. “He was very intelligent, very smart,” his father Ray recalled. “And unfortunately, he thought he knew more than the teachers. Which is true, he did.”35

By the time Randy reached college, he had straightened up, majoring in political science and producing a string of As. He especially enjoyed philosophy and music.

After reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Royer became interested in Islam. He was moved in part by Islam’s commitment to social justice and its diversity, which stood in stark contrast to rising racial tensions in the United States at the time. A deciding moment came when he visited a mosque shortly after race riots in Los Angeles (provoked by the beating of Rodney King) grabbed headlines.

It was me and this guy, who was white, and a guy who was black. And then an Arab and a Pakistani guy came, and we were all there talking. And I was like, “This is amazing. We’re all talking. There are no barriers between us.” It was really amazing to me how that could be. I just felt something.36

Royer began to explore the religion with Muslim friends. He remembered one conversation in a park, where a bird was singing, that marked a turning point in his acceptance of Islam.

I said, “Wow, that’s a very beautiful bird.” And he said, “In Islam, that bird is Muslim, because the bird follows God’s laws and can do nothing but follow God’s laws. And if you see how beautiful and peaceful that