Rukmini Callimachi Talks to David Remnick About ISIS

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: Rukmini Callimachi Talks to David Remnick About ISIS
Date: February 1, 2016

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Episode Overview

In this gripping episode, New Yorker editor David Remnick interviews Rukmini Callimachi, renowned New York Times correspondent, about her frontline and digital reporting on ISIS and Islamic extremism. Their conversation explores the group's rise, its chilling propaganda, and the personal and ideological forces that draw recruits to its cause. They also reflect on the U.S. and global response, and the bleak prospects for the end of jihadist violence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reporting on ISIS: Risks and Methods

[01:43–02:45]

• On-the-ground reporting: Remnick recounts learning in Mali that while venturing into jihadist-controlled areas is perilous, critical stories emerge from border zones:

  “You can go to the line of control, to the last safe place before their territory starts. …there's often refugees…traders…survivors…” (Remnick, 01:43)

• Social media as a source: Callimachi explains using online platforms to interact directly with ISIS members and understand ideological currents:

  “A lot of what she brings to the world comes from social media, where she's getting much closer to jihadists than any of us want to be.” (Remnick, 02:21)

2. ISIS versus Al Qaeda: Openness and Propaganda

[03:09–03:46]

• Transparency of ISIS: Unlike Al Qaeda's secrecy, ISIS floods platforms with messaging:

  “Al Qaeda was secretive. ISIS has taken almost the opposite approach, where they've flooded the system. They have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter…” (Remnick, 03:27)

• Personal experiences with ISIS outreach: Callimachi shares how ISIS members attempt to proselytize her (often seeing her Christianity as a bridge) and the persistence of figures like Abu Khalid al Ameriki, whom she contacted via the platform Kik.

3. Western Blind Spots and Underestimation

[05:03–05:43]

• Delayed recognition: Both discuss how analysts and journalists underestimated ISIS’s seriousness:

  “We continue to not take them seriously, you know…These are people that are willing to die for this. Not in some metaphorical sense…” (Remnick, 05:09)

4. ISIS Atrocities and Psychological Conditioning

[05:43–09:32]

• Extreme violence: The level of ISIS’s cruelty often shocks even other terrorist actors:

  “So extensive and so grotesque that it even offends Al Qaeda. It even offends groups that you would have thought unoffendable.” (Callimachi, 05:43)

• Normalization of violence: Callimachi recounts interviews with Yazidi children forced to watch beheading videos as desensitization—a process she herself finds disturbing after repeated exposure.

  “It becomes normalized in some terrible way.” (Callimachi, 09:30)

5. The Allure and Psychology of Radicalization

[07:00–11:47]

• Apocalyptic ideology: Many recruits believe profoundly in an imminent, world-changing battle.

  “There's something exciting to them about being part of this apocalyptic project. You know, they literally believe that they are living at the moment before the rapture…” (Remnick, 07:00)

• Recruitment and community: Personal vulnerability and the desire for belonging play major roles; digital engagement breaks down the terror image.

  “These people are called terrorists, but they're some of the nicest people I've ever spoken to…” (Remnick, 11:47)

• Case study – U.S. convert: A young woman from Washington state, disconnected from news and community, is drawn to ISIS online after watching the James Foley execution video. She’s greeted with warmth and care, leading her to question media depictions and feel embraced.

6. Verifying Claims & Gender Dynamics in Reporting

[11:47–14:58]

• Exaggeration and truth: Sources often exaggerate exploits; Callimachi counters grandiose claims with her own knowledge and research.
• Being a female reporter:

  “The initial access to the jihadists is…harder for me than if I were a man. …But once I’m in, I feel that I have an advantage because they see me as soft, they see me as female, they see me as these things…” (Callimachi, 12:39)

  • However, this leads to complications, such as inappropriate advances—one source worked for a year turned the relationship into a marriage proposal.

7. The Longevity and Spread of Jihadist Conflict

[14:58–16:34]

• “Thirty years’ war” analogy: Policy experts suggest this fight could last decades. Remnick is pessimistic:

  “Honestly, I don’t see it ending. I wonder if in our lifetime we're going to see the end of this…” (Remnick, 15:25)

• The challenge of military intervention:

  “When you put real force against them…they fold very quickly. The problem is you then have to stay.” (Remnick, 15:35)

  • The ideological “poison” has spread globally, complicating any notion of a quick or comprehensive solution.

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Memorable Quotes

• “These are people that are willing to pay with their lives, not in some metaphorical sense, they are willing to die for this.”
  —David Remnick [05:09]

• “It becomes normalized in some terrible way.”
  —Rukmini Callimachi [09:30] (On repeated exposure to ISIS violence)

• “These people are called terrorists, but they're some of the nicest people I've ever spoken to.”
  —(Case study, per Callimachi) [11:47]

• “Honestly, I don't see it ending. I mean, I don't. I wonder if in our lifetime we're going to see the end of this…”
  —David Remnick [15:25]

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Noteworthy Moments & Timestamps

• [01:43]: Remnick on reporting along the borders of jihadist zones
• [03:09]: Difference between Al Qaeda’s secrecy and ISIS’s media barrage
• [04:30]: Callimachi describes digital engagement with ISIS members
• [05:09]: Discussion of Western underestimation of ISIS
• [06:41–07:32]: Grappling with the psychology behind extreme violence
• [08:32–09:32]: Callimachi’s Yazidi child interview and forced normalization of violence
• [09:45–11:47]: Case of the American Sunday school teacher radicalized online
• [12:39–14:58]: Unique challenges and moments as a female reporter—long-term outreach turning unexpectedly personal
• [15:25–16:34]: Reflections on whether this “war” has any foreseeable end

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Conclusion

Rukmini Callimachi and David Remnick deliver a profound insider’s account of the challenges, dangers, and paradoxes of reporting on ISIS. They untangle the group's global influence, digital sophistication, recruitment methods, and the personal toll of investigating terror. The episode grapples with tough questions about the roots of extremism and the West’s capacity to confront a hydra-headed, ideological conflict that feels, as both suggest, far from over.

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Transcript

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[David Remnick]

I'm Dorothy Wickenden and on today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick, the New Yorker's editor, talks with Rukmini Kalamaki I about her experiences covering ISIS and about the future of Islamic extremism.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Rukmini Kalamaki, who was born in totalitarian Romania and is a reporter for the New York Times, is doing some of the bravest and most astonishing reporting we have on ISIS and other terror groups.

[David Remnick]

I learned in Mali, in West Africa, where I was based for almost eight years, that when an Al Qaeda linked group or a jihadist group takes over an area, your initial reaction is, well, I can't go there. And so you kind of put down your hands and go, I can't cover this. And in fact, I learned from covering Mali that you can go to the line of control, to the last safe place before their territory starts. And in that area there's often refugees that are coming across, there's traders that are going back and forth, and there's survivors of whatever atrocities they're carrying out that are making it into the Safe Area.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

The catalog of horrors Rukmini has written about is long, and the personal risk she takes is terrifying. But a lot of what she brings to the world comes from social media, where she's getting much closer to jihadists than any of us want to be. By paying attention to Twitter and other platforms, she's trying to understand what motivates these people, what makes violent extremism so alluring to these young people.

[David Remnick]

In the case of ISIS and also Al Qaeda, you have the entire body of what they say, and most of ISIS propaganda and Al Qaeda propaganda, it's coming out almost like a word vomit. You know, multiple statements a day. And I think most reporters just on Twitter, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Telegram, on. You know, they make these little e books, videos, YouTube. I mean, they're extremely prolific.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

How is this different from al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was, at least to the popular imagination, largely a secretive.

[David Remnick]

Yes.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Organization. It did not hide in plain sight, where I get the impression that ISIS wants you to know everything and more isis.

[David Remnick]

So Al Qaeda was secretive. ISIS has taken almost the opposite approach, where they've flooded the system. They have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, and they are so good now at the pitch. And believe me, they've tried to convert me, and I put up with it because I want to talk to them.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

How have they tried to convert you?

[David Remnick]

When I reach out to these jihadists and speak to them, and I speak to them through a variety of platforms, encrypted, non encrypted, etc. Often the way that I'll get them to talk to me is they think that they can possibly convince me to give up my faith and accept theirs. The fact that I'm Christian to them, they think, gives them an avenue because I therefore already have a faith. And they will then try to convince me that Christ was actually just a prophet. And so I put up with this. You know, it's sometimes very tiring. There was one guy called Abu Khalid al Ameriki who I think was, according to reports, was killed in a drone strike a couple months ago. And it was just incessant.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

You met him where?

[David Remnick]

I never met him. Never met him. I spoke to him on a platform called Kik. He's an African American from the US not clear where he claimed he was a Christian before. And he came out in one of these early videos threatening the West. But it was just relentless, relentless, relentless. And to humor him, he would send me videos and say, rukmini, I will not talk to you until you watch this video. So I'D go and watch the video and then come back to him with more questions. But did you see the video? Did you see what it said about Christ?

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Were we slow to recognize the rise of isis? Was it rising in plain sight?

[David Remnick]

I think on the one hand we have done ourselves a disservice, and I mean journalists and policy analysts by constantly underestimating ISIS. And we've been doing that since 2012, 2013. The JV comments, you know, were sort of the framework for it. But we continue to sort of, we continue to not take them seriously, you know, and I know because I speak to them, I know that they're dead serious. I know that they really, these are people that are willing to pay with their lives, not in some metaphorical sense, they are willing to die for this.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Now we're sitting here in our nice warm and or air conditioned homes in the west and we watch what we're able to watch and read what we're able to read. And we're not just reading about resentful cadres fighting the western invader. We're alas used to this by now. We're seeing something else. We're seeing level, a level of depredation, of beheadings of as you've reported really brilliantly in the times, of sexual crime committed against Yazdi, women against children, rape as a means of control of self satisfaction. The list goes on. It's so extensive and so grotesque that it even offends Al Qaeda. It even offends groups that you would have thought unoffendable.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

When you think about this, why is this happening? What is driving people to what to us can only seem acts of that goes well beyond the political, that it goes into an area of psychosis.

[David Remnick]

Right. What drives it? Yeah, my God. I mean that's like the billion dollar question. I can say from, from the people I've interviewed who either became jihadists or attempted to be calm and then pull themselves back once you buy into their brand of Islam and you sort of let down your guard. There's something exciting to them about being part of this apocalyptic project. You know, they literally believe that they are living at the moment before the rapture. To use a Christian corollary, they think they're on the verge of this end of times battle, that it' sand it's not just some sort of metaphor. They really believe that this is going to happen and that they are there. You know, a lot of them have profile pictures of them on horses. They think they're going to be there on, you know, on their black steed at the moment of, you know, of the end of the world. And there's something. You know, a lot of ISIS members are basically teenagers, you know, and sort of early 20s, and think back to how impressionable one is.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

So this is the hard thing. Fundamentalism exists, right, in various forms and sadly in all religions. But this is different, is it not?

[David Remnick]

It's a form of fundamentalism. Right?

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

I mean, the level.

[David Remnick]

The level of intensity of it, the.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Level of organization, the level of cruelty, the level of millenarian thinking.

[David Remnick]

Yeah, yeah. And the thing with the cruelty is that I really do think that the senses get dull to it. And I just came back from Iraq, as, you know, one of the interviews that I did was with a young boy, I think he was 12, and he's a Yazidi child who had been separated from his mother and sent forcibly to a recruitment camp. And part of his training, he was taken by a Saudi deputy, Amir. Part of his training was the sheikh would take him into his office, sit him down at his plush chair in front of the laptop, and force him to watch beheading video after beheading video after beheading video. He actually, actually had a photo of it that they had posted on Facebook that he showed me. And you see this little kid with this blanched face just looking at this, you know, and once you see this over and over and over again, I can say, even for myself, because I've been forced to watch these videos, it.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Becomes normalized in some terrible way.

[David Remnick]

It becomes normalized. It becomes normalized. And a couple of months ago, you know, isis, I don't think could have predicted the PR hit that they got from the James Foley execution. I'm sure they thought it was going to be important.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

And when you say PR hit, you mean it in a perversely positive sense?

[David Remnick]

Yes, yes. I mean, recruitment spiked. Twitter traffic to the Islamic State spiked. The woman that I ended up profiling from Washington state, a Sunday school teacher, that was the avenue that brought her to them. You know, she saw this and went, oh, my God. And then she reached out to them, and within weeks, she was. She was thinking that they're her friends, you know, but pause on that.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Pause on that. You're a teacher in the state of Washington.

[David Remnick]

Yes.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

And you see a human being beheaded.

[David Remnick]

Yes.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

And this is attractive to you, and it causes you to completely transform your wife.

[David Remnick]

It's not attractive. She was disgusted and horrified by it, but she had never seen anything like that before. And this is a young woman who, like a Lot of young people had really no connection to the news. And she heard on CNN that they hadthat they were on Twitter and that they were under the hashtag MessageToAmerica. So she went on Twitter, like all young people do, and found a hashtag and decided to send questions to them. And what surprised her is that they responded. She couldn't believe, you know, that these so called terrorists were taking the time to write to her. And then the thing that really surprised her is that they were nice to her. And this is a young woman who has a bit of a misfit, you know, existence. She has some disabilities, doesn't have a lot of friends, doesn't have a lot of things to do. And suddenly she has this community.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

She's embraced.

[David Remnick]

She's embraced, yeah, she's embraced, she's loved, she's sent. And you see these messages just gushing with affection. My dear sister, how are you today? How's your blood pressure? Are you feeling better? Do you have a cold? Take this medicine for this cold. How's your gardening going? Oh, those kind of greens are better planted here. She suddenly has something to do. And so what the cognitive dissonance for her was. These people are called terrorists, but they're some of the nicest people I've ever spoken to. So therefore what the media is saying about them must be wrong.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

And your sources, when you talk to them, do they exaggerate? Is there any way to verify what their. I don't mean when they're talking about ideology or their ideas or their enthusiasms, but their experiences, of course they exaggerate.

[David Remnick]

You know, of course it's always like this. Abu Khalid Alamra tried to claim to me that he was holding multiple American hostages. And because this happens to be something that I followed very closely, I know he wasn't holding, you know, American hostages. And I called his bluff on it and he got kind of upset and didn't talk to me for a couple of days.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

And in this world, in this world, Rukmini, what factor does it play that you're a woman in this world working as a reporter? How do you navigate that? Good, bad or indifferent? Literally down to the details of what you wear, how you have to behave. Does it matter that you, Is it almost an advantage that you're working with a translator?

[David Remnick]

Sometimes on the one hand, the initial access to the jihadists is, I think, harder for me than if I were a man. I've had many of them shut me down, citing Quranic verses that prohibit them from speaking to women. That are not family. But once I'm in, I feel that I have an advantage because they see me as soft, they see me as female, they see me as these things. And so there's kind of like a sweet spot, you know, for a while. And then very quickly from there it goes to them hitting on me. And that's when it all goes to hell. Because as soon as, you know, I have to say very clearly early on now, I say, and by the way, I'm married. Here's a little bit about me. I live in the New York area. And I always throw in very early on that I'm married and happily so to try to shut down that avenue. There was this one guy, he was a member of Al Qaeda. And I worked on this guy for almost a year, David. I had a post it note next to my bed because he was. I suspected he was in Egypt. I wasn't totally sure, but by the time difference, I think he was in Egypt. And so he was getting up for early morning prayers around the time when I was going to bed. And so at every, every night I tried to, like, start texting him, you know, a little bit and have a little bit of discussion. And he always had, like. It was like this thing he was dangling in front of me where I always felt like he was almost going to start talking to me, almost, you know, open up. And a year into it, he, by the way, in the process of this year, he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. He left Al Qaeda. So I was able to sort of. I was able to get something, you know, out of this. And a year in, he finally said, rukmini, you know, I have something to tell you. And I'm like, yes, what? You know, what are you going to tell me? And please, you know, this is something quite sensitive. And I said, oh, sure, great. You know, go ahead. And he said, you remind me of a woman I wanted to marry. I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, like, you know, all of that effort for that.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Well, I've been reporting a very long time. That's never, never happened to me.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Oh, God.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Getting hit on by Al Qaeda.

[David Remnick]

Right, right.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

So how did this get resolved?

[David Remnick]

I'm married. I'm married. I'm happily married. And he actually sent me a message. The last time we spoke was three or four months ago. And he sent me a message saying that he's just gotten married. It's like, good.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Some major figures in American politics and also in the foreign policy world, ranging from the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass to Leon Panetta, who headed the CIA and the Pentagon, have used the same metaphor to describe what's going on in the Middle east in particular, which is that it's going to be a 30 years war. Why is this going to be with us for so long? What is the complication? How do you see it ending?

[David Remnick]

Oh, my God. Honestly, I don't see it ending. I mean, I don't. I wonder if in our lifetime we're going to see the end of this, because what I see, maybe we should.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Define what this is.

[David Remnick]

That means what the problem of extreme Islam. But on the other hand, militarily, what I saw in northern Iraq and in Syria is that when you put real force against them, it's like pushing on an open door. And this is what happens with these groups is I think if you have a real force pushing them back, they fold very quickly. The problem is you then have to stay. And does the United States or any Western power, do they want to stay in these places? And now the question isn't just staying in Iraq. Now the question is staying in Iraq. Syria, Libya, Nigeria, pretty soon Somalia, the Sinai, they're trying to take over Bangladesh, Afghanistan, I mean, and not to mention the suburbs of Paris. And so that's the, that's why your.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Forecast is for a very, very long time.

[David Remnick]

I think so, because I think it's. What I've seen about this ideology is it's almost like a poison that enters the groundwater. And how do you get it out?

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Rukmini, thank you so much, and I'd love to have you back again.

[David Remnick]

Thanks, David. It's a pleasure. That was David Remnick talking with reporter Rukmini Kalamaki.

[Rukmini Kalamaki]

Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

[David Remnick]

From prx.