The Democracy Activist Who Became a Suicide Bomber

Robert F. Worth 

April 7, 2016 

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An idealistic young Egyptian who helped lead the Tahrir Square protests died three years later in Iraq as an Islamic State jihadist

Five years ago, Ahmad Darrawi was one of the idealistic young Egyptians whose bravery stirred world-wide admiration. In 2011, he stood among the protest vanguard in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and in the months afterward he often appeared on TV, outlining reforms for Egypt’s brutal and corrupt police. In the fall of 2011, he ran for parliament as an independent. His campaign ads showed a smiling, clean-shaven man in a gray suit under the slogan “Dignity and Security.” He was 32.

Three years later, Darrawi blew himself up on the battlefields of Iraq, where he was fighting as a loyal soldier of Islamic State, according to the terrorist group. 

How did it happen? How did a hopeful, principled young man from a middle-class family turn into a coldblooded suicide bomber? It is hard to separate that question from the Arab world’s broader descent over the past five years: from nonviolence to mass murder, from proclamations of tolerance and civic idealism to the savagery of Islamic State.

The gap between those ideals is so vast that any attempt to link them can seem like madness. But for Darrawi and others like him—in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia and more—the road from democracy to Islamic State wasn’t so strange. They had grown up amid shrunken horizons, sectarian rancor and daily humiliation. The brief, ecstatic moment of unity in 2011 in Tahrir Square (and its equivalents elsewhere) made the subsequent return to those same old frustrations all the more painful—and left some of the Arab world’s idealists open to the lure of a false dawn. 

Darrawi’s death in 2014 ramified across Egyptian protest circles because, as one of his friends from Tahrir Square told me, “If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.” Darrawi didn’t just participate in the Tahrir Square protests; he was a leader, a member of the elite known as the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth. He stood out there because he had firsthand experience with the Egyptian police, having served briefly as an officer years earlier. (He quit in disgust, he said, after witnessing corruption and torture.) 

In autumn 2011, after the toppling of longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak , Darrawi spent much of his savings to run for parliament. He lost, but he wasn’t unduly troubled and kept up his work as an activist. By 2012, however, the euphoria of Mr. Mubarak’s ouster had given way to a cold war between Egypt’s opposed political camps. 

Darrawi didn’t support the ascendant Muslim Brotherhood, which won the presidency in a June 2012 election. He viewed the Islamist group as another gaggle of tired old men. By late 2012, Egypt appeared to be sliding toward civil war, and Darrawi became disgusted. He told his brother that the revolution was over. Darrawi grew depressed. By the time the Egyptian military ousted Egypt’s elected Islamist president in a coup in the summer of 2013, Darrawi appeared almost catatonic, his friends said. That July, he disappeared.

A few months later, Darrawi posted a video on his new Twitter feed, which would remain unknown to his friends and family until the following year. The video showed a dozen rebel fighters sitting around a campfire in the woods of northwestern Syria, singing songs and hunched together against the cold. You can hear the wind shuddering in the microphone as they lean toward the fire for warmth, blankets wrapped around their bodies. Cigarette-ends glow orange and then fade out. The men’s eyes gleam as they sing in Arabic, raggedly but in unison:

How beautiful is the sound of guns echoing in the desert 

We don’t part from our grenades 

The moon and stars are our witnesses 

And the wilderness sings of our glory. 

Smoke rose behind an Islamic State flag after Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia fighters took control of the town of Saadiya from the Sunni extremist group Nov. 24, 2014. Photo: Reuters 

Darrawi, who shot the video, was now military commander of a small rebel brigade in Syria, the Lions of the Caliphate, which had just sworn its loyalty to Islamic State. Already, he was a passionate convert to the jihadist cause, and he frequently compared its cohesiveness to the toxic divisions of his native Egypt. “Once when we were sitting down to dinner, I noticed that there were more than 18 nationalities among us,” he wrote at one point. “God is the only force and purpose that can unite all these people and create harmony between them.” 

At the time, the sudden influx of foreign fighters was transforming the Syrian conflict—and turning Islamic State into one of the most powerful terrorist groups in history. But on Twitter, Darrawi said time and again that it wasn’t battle but the promise of an ideal community that inspired him. “Some wonder about all this love and sense of belonging to the Islamic State,” he wrote a few months later. “My brothers, it’s an old lost dream since the fall of the caliphate. And we will make it come true and pass it on, even if only through our mutilated bodies, to a new generation.”

Reading those posts, it is hard to avoid the sense that Darrawi was projecting onto the caliphate all the hopes that he had once invested in a healed and unified Egypt. “How beautiful to live your life dedicated to the revival of the caliphate, how beautiful to wait for the time when you meet the prophet in paradise and tell him what you’ve done, how you’ve made his promise come true,” he wrote at one point.

Along with the constant talk of death and battle, Darrawi’s tweets include incongruous glimpses of his old life. There is a poignant entry on how much he misses his three young children, with a hint that he feels some guilt for having left them behind in Egypt. There are flashes of playfulness: “I entered the brigade of the Chinese in Aleppo, and saw their training. It reminded me of Ninja films.” At one point, he wrote simply, “For sure, I’m not crazy”—as if to answer an imagined voice from the past.

Darrawi wrote his last tweet in March 2014. About two months later, his brother received an anonymous call from a man who called himself a holy warrior, saying that “Abu Mouaz al-Masri”—Darrawi’s nom de guerre—had blown himself up in a suicide bombing. In a subsequent email, Darrawi’s brother was told that the bombing had occurred in Iraq. When Darrawi’s brother emailed to ask for more details and a death certificate, he was told there would be none. 

Two years later, as the Arab world continues to unravel, most of the people who chanted for democracy and dignity in 2011 have no sympathy for the barbarism of Islamic State. Some former protesters are now in jail; some have fled on rickety boats to Europe; others have given way to despair or even suicide. But a handful continue to make their way into a cult that promises to redeem their broken world. 

— Mr. Worth, a former Beirut bureau chief of the New York Times, is the author of “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS,” which will be published later this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.