In the Skin of a Jihadist: A Young Journalist Enters the ISIS Recruitment Network

Erelle is the pseudonym of a French journalist who, while researching a story on how the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) recruits online, found herself talking to—and proposed to by—one of the terrorist group's highest ranking militants, the Syria-based Abu Bilel al-Firanzi. She was posing as Mélodie, a 20-year-old French convert to Islam, and her memoir of their monthlong "relationship" (using dialog from Skype and Facebook conversations) is fascinating. Erelle writes her character in the third person, separating herself from the narrative between Mélodie and Bilel ("Mélodie saw in him a solution to her troubles") and providing some context for his lies. The result is a quick read that verges on absurd at times (Erelle, on vacation in a bikini, assuring Bilel by phone that she's "covered from head to toe") but the story is underscored with a sense of worry for not only Erelle as she delves deeper (a fatwa was eventually put out her) but also all the real Mélodies out there. While the facts of their relationship can't be independently verified, Erelle writes that their conversations were recorded. A quibble—Arabic terms are defined in footnotes in the text, but it would have been helpful to compile them in a glossary.