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 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.

First, I would say, is ideology. I have never spoken to any member of these groups, not just ISIS, but also Al Qaeda, Shabab, etc., who wasn't driven by the ideology. Beyond that, a lot of people are wounded in some way - they've fallen out of society in some manner. All of the ones I've spoken to seem to have veered off course from lives we consider acceptable and successful. Of course, there are others like Osama bin Laden, who was a wealthy and successful businessperson.

I'm really curious as to the actual structure of the Emni [the intelligence unit that handles foreign attacks]. And Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the head of it. There are so few pictures of him. We don't even really know what he looks like. For somebody with this outsized influence projecting murder abroad, you'd think that we would know a lot more by now. And then the role of the hostages.

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.

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.

They're implementing what was the strategy of Al Qaeda, which was to have attacks of different levels simultaneously. ... So the idea is, on the one hand you have these spectacular attacks that take months to plan, and others like Reda Hame, a French national, who went to Syria and was there for about a week, given a couple of days of target practice and one day of encryption training, sent back and arrested almost immediately.