If we cover a court case involving a murderer, we would still seek out the side of that murderer, even as we realize that what people say is going to be self-serving.

You have to keep in mind that there's a number of logistical hurdles that they have to jump through in Europe in order to get explosives or guns. So for example, the Villejuif shooter in April 2015 who planned to attack a church: According to French press reports, he was instructed by ISIS to go to a sandwich shop, and the weapons would be waiting for him in a car parked outside. He was just told the make of the car, told to go there, told to pick them up. Putting that kind of attack together, using encrypted communications or other means, is not easy.

It's become extremely difficult to speak to active ISIS members now. I was speaking to them in 2015, and the last one was killed in a drone strike.

People who have left the group talk about how a religious inspiration took them to ISIS. It was their feeling of being marginalized as Muslims in the society where they were living, and then buying into the promise of a caliphate and of a Muslim land that is governed as in the time of the prophet. I have yet to meet anybody, or speak to anybody, who was not religiously motivated at some level.

[People who have left the ISIS] say that there comes a moment when the inconsistencies and apparent hypocrisies of their sheikh lets them down, and they begin rereading scripture and find ways that vouch for a nonliteralist reading of the Koran.

The systemic failure in the media in covering ISIS is that the majority of reporters are doing it in a semaphore fashion.

If we cover a court case involving a murderer, we would still seek out the side of that murderer, even as we realize that what people say is going to be self-serving.