Kenneth Ballen spent five years interviewing more than one hundred Islamic radicals and terrorists, trying to understand their real motivations. What he found were young men who were often vulnerable, scared and full of conflicting emotions - in other words, not too different from the rest of us. From 2011.
Ahmed al-Shayea was badly burned by a failed suicide bomb and came to trust the Americans who helped him recover. He eventually renounced his jihadist past and became one of the success stories featured in Ballen's book. But since this interview in 2011, al-Shayea may have returned to Al-Qaeda.
