Covering the jihadist movement today is thrilling but exhausting work. Often thankless, it can be dangerous too. In practical terms, it means practising a ‘journalism of anxiety’, one that predicts and announces nothing but bad news. ‘David Thomson, or the kind of person you want to invite to parties, because he puts everybody in a good mood’, a colleague tweeted one day, in jest. I first encountered jihadist ideology by chance in Tunis in late 2011, when I spotted a roadside stand adorned with black flags. I stopped, talked. The uninhibited radicalism of this discourse after the revolution gave me pause. I was struck by its growing popularity with Tunisian youth, who were becoming increasingly violent. Since then, I’ve devoted a large part of my life to trying to understand this current of Islam – not entirely successfully.

This kind of journalism teaches you humility too. It’s a schizophrenic juggling act. I’ve discovered complexity where the explanation seemed obvious. I’ve often been forced to think against the grain of my own prejudices. To accept mystery beyond understanding. To keep the right distance, maintain a journalist’s neutrality. I’ve never been more than a mere observer. Even when conducting interviews with an old source who, at the same time, was holding hostage in Syria reporters I had worked with, before their execution. Of James Foley, my last memory is not of a man in an orange jumpsuit in an Islamic State execution video – rather, of a colleague I saw risk his life in Libya during the battle of Syrte to save a friend, under Kadhafist fire, whose body had just been torn to pieces by an RPG. My last memory of Steven Sotloof is that of a talented reporter who, during an evening vigil, generously helped me finish off a bottle of cognac after the fall of Tripoli. My last memory of Ghislaine Dupont, murdered together with Claude Verlon on another continent by AQIM [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], is that of a courageous, demanding and passionate colleague, the terror of African despots, who edited my first articles at Radio France Internationale.

Covering contemporary jihadism also means talking with another source I’ve worked with for a long time, whose joking demeanour belies his role as an executioner inside the Islamic State – and the fact that he wouldn’t hesitate to threaten or even kill me if necessary. Five years of daily conversations, of impossible trust and relentless suspicion, between enemy camps. Where every interviewee, at any of our meetings, can decide to kill me. An immersion in death, with young men and women barely 20 years old, whose goal in life is to kill and be killed. It also means hearing regularly that a contact you’ve known for years has just been killed in combat, by a drone, or in a terrorist attack. Or finding out through a notification on my iPhone that another has just been arrested in a ‘sweeping anti-terrorism operation’.

These are some of the most difficult milieus to gain access to. That’s why journalists are almost always forced to work at one remove, via secondary sources, through the police or judicial system: police custody reports, indictments, wiretaps, etc. Knowing that such an approach was indispensable yet biased, I decided from the outset not to use that kind of information, but to work only with primary sources, i.e. the jihadists themselves.

Almost all of the sources here have been anonymized so as to let them speak freely. The only material I’ve used is from my own articles and from interviews I’ve been conducting since 2011 with around 100 different jihadists – first with Tunisians, then with French, Belgian and even Swiss nationals. I’ve kept track of most of these jihadists for five years – some right up to their deaths. This has meant having to convince people who hate you three times over (as a French citizen, a Christian and a journalist) to spend a lot of time with you. This was made possible by my work as a regional correspondent in Tunis for Radio France Internationale for three years following the revolution.

It was in Tunis, in 2012, that I first established relations with jihadists. At that time, I knew nothing of their mental universe. I was filming a Salafist party meeting where sharia and Islamic jurisprudence on women’s rights were being discussed. At the end of the meeting, two young men with long beards and shaved moustaches approached me. One of them stood in front of me and waved a finger to say ‘No’. I thought he wanted to forbid me from filming. But it was something else. ‘These people aren’t real Salafis’, he said to me in French; ‘We are the real Salafis. We are jihadist Salafis.’ I didn’t know it then, but these two young men, both under 30, were already very influential within the Tunisian jihadist movement.

Before the revolution, they had been imprisoned for their relations with a group linked to the Algerian GSPC [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], who had attacked the Tunisian army under Ben Ali near the village of Soliman. After the revolution, they were granted amnesty. One currently holds an important position within the Islamic State. They agreed to let me follow them for several months, but only on the condition that I wouldn’t record, film or write anything down. Over the course of several months, they introduced me to the recently formed jihadist movement Ansar al-Sharia, which was taking advantage of the post-revolutionary instability to quickly become a mass movement preaching jihadism.

I followed them when they brought money to the families of the first ‘martyrs’ killed in Syria. And when they stepped in for the  failing government, providing milk packs, blankets, copies of  the Koran and niqabs to people left to fend for themselves in  the mountains near the Algerian border. I followed them as their officers, some of whom would become muftis in the Islamic State, tirelessly preached jihad, every day, in the suburbs of Tunis. And again, when they attacked the American embassy in Tunis. And when, after fighting with the state security forces, they buried their first dead.

It was because of this same movement that Tunisia was affected by the jihadist phenomenon more than any other country in the world. Almost 6,000 young Tunisians have left to take part in jihad since 2012, out of a population of 11 million. The same Tunisian youths who, throughout 2011, had tried to reach Europe illegally via Lampedusa, now began to flock to Syria the following year. Disappointed by the revolution, their hopes switched from the ideal of a land of plenty to that of a heavenly paradise. From economic to jihadist emigration.

I produced my first report on Tunisians leaving to fight in Syria in the spring of 2011. It featured a charismatic young man with a long beard and piercing green eyes. His name was still unfamiliar to me, but he quickly became an important figure in international jihad. The following year he was part of the commando team that assassinated the Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid and the politician from Sidi Bouzid, Mohamed Brahmi.

His brother had been in Iraq since 2003 and was already an important member of the jihadist movement. After a brief spell in prison for participating in the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya, he joined his brother in 2014, and became the emir of the borders of the Islamic State. The United States put a $3 million reward on the head of his brother, who was the emir of suicide operations. Both ended up being ‘droned’.

In Tunisia, after a few months, the emir of Ansar al-Sharia, Abu Ayadh, agreed to let me film his supporters. He was a veteran of the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, and formerly one of Bin Laden’s lieutenants in Europe. He had been the leader of the Tunisian Combat Group (TCG) under Al Qaeda, responsible for the assassination of Ahmad Massoud on 9 September 2001. He too had been granted amnesty after the Tunisian revolution. I followed Ansar al-Sharia for a year making a documentary about the group, which was later broadcast on the French–German cultural television channel, Arte.

At that time, I was publishing my work every day on social networks, especially on Twitter. From France and Belgium, jihadists following the turmoil in Tunisia would subscribe to my feed to stay informed. That’s how we began to communicate, freely. Some of them came to Tunisia to attend classes in the mosques of Ansar al-Sharia, before leaving for Libya, then on to Syria. This was the context in which our meetings took place. Among these French citizens, some went on to have significant ‘careers’ in the Islamic State. This allowed me to make my first contacts with dozens of jihadists from France, and with a few from Belgium. These relations were forged before their departures for Syria, and maintained during their stay – in some cases right up to their deaths or their return to France.

The jihadists try to give the impression that they represent a nebulous and sprawling organization. But it is actually a small world, where almost everyone knows everyone else and everything gets done on the basis of personal recommendation. One contact leads to the next. My first book came out in March 2014 and contained interviews I had conducted for over a year with twenty of these jihadists, all of whom were by that stage totally dedicated to their project. This second book, stemming from my work with the news website Les Jours, is the result of two years of interviews conducted with jihadists between 2014 and 2016, at their homes in France, in prison, in Syria and in Iraq by telephone, and with twenty or so others who came back disappointed, without necessarily having repented of jihad. A few are now free; many are in prison. Most are men, but there are a few women too.

This book tells their story, and tries to deconstruct the social, religious, political, familial and psychological mechanisms that pushed them over the edge. It also portrays their disappointments and the threat they continue to represent in France – an unprecedented threat that the state authorities, literally overwhelmed by the flood, have yet to learn how to manage.

Reporting on this reality, I have seen people come back to France to commit the most murderous attacks in its history, people I have known and kept track of for years. That simple fact continues to amaze me, even in people who had spoken and written openly about their intentions to commit acts of terrorism, often for a long time. Has the scale of this phenomenon been taken seriously enough, and understood in time? Certainly not. Covering the jihadi movement among the ‘Syria generation’ since its inception in 2011 has meant confronting, in television studios, a protean and cosmopolitan form of denial, tinged with ignorance and vanity. The denial expressed by those you could call the ‘jihad sceptics’.

In April 2014, the proponents of this ‘jihad scepticism’ hauled me over the coals on a public channel’s late-night TV show, as I tried in vain to explain that many French jihadists had left for Syria with the intention, right from the start, of committing terrorist attacks. A month after the publication of my first book, certain members of a French-speaking jihadist unit based in Aleppo told me anonymously that, as early as 2013, they had planned to return to France to kill as many civilians as possible. And, indeed, these were the very same people who, two years later, constituted the terrorist cell responsible for the attacks of 13 November 2015 on the Bataclan in Paris.

But evoking such a possibility was still taboo. For doing so on that TV programme in April 2014, I was called every name in the book. Having made a distinction between jihadist groups, I began to explain that, as regards the French citizens who formed part of a group as yet unknown to the general public (the ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, now IS), the logic was clear: ‘When you ask them about terrorist acts on French soil’, I said, ‘they’ll all tell you that it’s legitimate, they have to do it . . .’ At that point, I was interrupted by a sociologist. ‘Not at all!’ he cried. He mentioned one of his colleagues ‘who has been working on these subjects for fifteen years and has never encountered this phenomenon’. ‘Wait, let David Thomson finish’, said the presenter, with the satisfied smile of someone looking at an oddball whose amusing eccentricities are helping to bring the panel’s discussion to life. I tried to continue: ‘In their minds, attacking France would be a legitimate act, because its army is present . . .’ This was followed by another unanimous interruption. The panel was in an uproar. Without a doubt in his mind, the academic refuted what I’d just said: ‘I’ve never heard the like! Why would they travel so far, if their enemy is already right here? That’s what I’d like to know!’ He accused me of playing into the hands of the extremists: ‘You’re painting the same picture that lets some people in France think of this war as a potential terrorist threat to European territory, which gives European populists exactly what they want.’ A picture? No. Rather, factual analysis based on two years of work in the field with Tunisian and French jihadists.

It was a lonely moment for me, on live television. And it wasn’t over. A female sociologist who, a year later, would become the ‘Pasionaria of deradicalization’ in France, agreed: ‘Their fantasy is to die over there, not to come back here!’ Another sociologist then jumped in to warn against the risk of stigmatizing Muslims. ‘It’s a dangerous path to go down! Won’t it allow policies to be put into place that will target the Muslim population even further?’ And then came the final blow, by a famous lawyer. ‘What does Marc Trévidic say about this?’, the camera-friendly lawyer said; ‘He doesn’t agree with what you’re saying at all. I think he knows a bit more about this subject than you. Just because you’ve done some reporting and met a few dozen jihadists doesn’t make you the expert on the issue. I think a bit more humility is in order.’

Very well. Two years later, after almost 240 deaths and three times as many wounded, not counting French victims abroad, terrorism is now part of French daily life. It’s on everyone’s minds, and will be for a long time to come.

This reminder of the tenor of the debates before the 2015 attacks gives an idea of the level of denial and ignorance on the topic at a time when the general public was just beginning to learn of its existence. It also explains why the public is still so misinformed about jihadism. And politicians as well. Because, even if no one on that night’s TV panel had done any empirical work on the subject, every one of them drew on their academic or media credentials to legitimize what they were saying. It is this same alleged legitimacy that they use to market themselves to private and public institutions, parliamentary committees and ministerial offices. This posturing in turn misleads public debate and understanding, and for that reason has significant political consequences.

I am sometimes blamed for humanizing the jihadists. I fully accept this charge. Because the majority weren’t born jihadists. It’s something they became, often as teenagers. But even this reality is changing. Today, more than 400 French children live in Syria, being conditioned and socialized within the jihadi movement. A third of them were born there. Around 1,100 French citizens have left for Syria since 2012, often in a family group. The number of departures dropped for the first time in the summer of 2016, but almost 700 are still there, half of them women. One fifth have been killed. Another fifth have preferred to come back.

On the site Les Jours, we refer to them as the ‘returned’, and they’ve given this book its title. Not only because that’s what they sometimes call themselves, but also because they seem to be returning from ‘the beyond’. Recording their words allows me not to justify them, but rather to try to explain, understand and dissect these individual stories of French life that have driven their country into a new era of terrorism.