The Current

Nagieb Khaja's quest to understand Western jihadis in Syria

Meet Nagieb Khaja .... a filmmaker who went to Syria to document a potent mix of insurgency and terrorism. He was embedded with the secretive Jahbat al Nusra, specifically to get access to Western Muslims to try to understand why they've joined the al-Qaeda affiliate and the fight in Syria.
Danish filmmaker Nagieb Khaja is determined to understand why young Western Muslim men are abandoning their countries and heading to fight in Syria. So he embedded himself with the group Jabhat al Nusra, an al-Qaeda ally in the Syrian civil war. (Valerie Macon/Getty Images)

Next week, on March 15th, the crisis in Syria will enter its fifth year. And even as much of the world's attention is focused on the militant group ISIS, there remain dozens more groups and proxies entrenched in ongoing conflict inside Syria today. They're waging a war against the state's leader, Bashar al Assad... and waging war against each other as well.

It's territory that the Danish filmmaker Nagieb Khaja has been travelling through but it's not easy to get to the heart of the story -- in the heart of such a complex conflict. But Nagieb Khaja managed to do just that, embedding with the group Jabhat al Nusra -- an al Qaeda ally in the Syrian civil war. 

He was there to hear the stories of some of the many young, western Muslim men who have left their old lives behind, and travelled into that conflict to join in the fight.  His new documentary is titled "Western Jihadis in Syria," and Nagieb Khaja joined us from Copenhagen. 


This segment was produced by The Current's Naheed Mustafa
 


RELATED LINKS

♦ Western Jihadis in Syria: Filmmaker's View - Al Jazeera