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At age nineteen he converted, taking the name Ismail, just as the war in Bosnia was beginning. Royer’s local mosque was helping resettle refugees from the war, and Ismail volunteered to help. His work with the refugees led him to start following the news coverage. “I was struck by footage of emaciated civilians in Serbian concentration camps and news of rape camps and massacres,” Royer recalled.38

Information flowing in from both mainstream media reports and Muslim sources also touched on familiar themes that had led many others before him to the fields of jihad—atrocities against Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular.

I just kept seeing on the news about women in rape camps and pregnant women having their children carved out of their womb and it was really disturbing to me, and I saw that no one was really helping them anywhere in the world.39

Stirred to action, he decided he had to act. He told his father he was going to Bosnia.

“I said, ‘There’s a war going on, Randy. Don’t you understand there’s a war going on?’And at that point, I thought I better sit down, and relax a bit,” his father recalled in a 2008 interview. “And, I figured well, he’s old enough to determine what he wanted to do in life.”40

Although Royer told his father he was going to work with a relief organization, he instead signed up with a unit of mujahideen and spent six weeks in combat. “I engaged in firefights to help repel Serbian forces from villages full of innocent women and children whom they sought to ethnically cleanse,” Royer wrote later.41

After his stint with the mujahideen, he worked in Sarajevo for a while, where he witnessed an infamous marketplace massacre in February 1994 that was one of the worst atrocities in the war up to that point.42 It reinforced his commitment to the cause. Royer traveled back and forth to Bosnia several times during and immediately after the war. Like Isa Ali, he eventually married a Bosnian woman before moving back to the United States in the late 1990s.

If Isa Ali is a nihilist, Ismail Royer is a idealist. Yet both cite the same general principles in support of jihadist intervention. In 2002 Royer wrote,

The only difference between a “political” event and a “personal” event is the difference in scale and geographic proximity to the event. Thus I never understood why if my neighbor or relative is raped, God forbid, it’s considered a “personal” event, but if many women are raped in Bosnia or Indonesia in the course of a war, it’s a “political” event, and therefore I should somehow not be as concerned. Only someone lacking in humanity would make a distinction between two equivalent events that differ only in location.43

Yet Royer also presents a far more sanitized version of the jihadist experience. Consider his account of his time with the mujahideen, which depicts the fighters as noble warriors following a strict code of conduct:

I never witnessed or heard tell of any deliberate killings of civilians by my unit or anyone else in the Bosnian army. In fact, the parent brigade of my unit issued a field manual laying down the rules and ethics of warfare in Islam as provided for in the Koran and words of the Prophet: no harming civilians or clergymen, no targeting of houses of worship, no harming animals or even cutting down trees and crops.

Those I encountered seemed to understand that the only legitimate reason for warfare in Islam is self-defense or removal of oppression. [ … ] Unlike extremists, at no time was I ever motivated by a desire to impose my religion on others, to “kill the infidel,” or to battle America or “the West,” nor did I hear any such sentiments from my compatriots or superiors in Bosnia.

Royer’s account of the Bosnian mujahideen stands in stark contrast to the evidence, including videos and photos produced by the mujahideen themselves during the war. One video shows mujahideen fighters playing soccer with the decapitated head of an executed captive. Photographs show Bosnian