Brüder (2017)

After a period of personal uncertainty, German computer science student Jan Welke falls into the clutches of militant Salafists and converts to Islam. As this development unfolds, he travels to Syria to fight on the side of the terrorist group Islamic State in the country’s civil war. Jan later returns to Germany with the aim of carrying out a major terrorist attack of his own. But, in a surprising turn at the end, he prevents the plan, prepared to pay a high price for doing so: he shoots his accomplices and is then imprisoned. The student, who drifts between lecture halls and clubs with no notable emotional involvement, is gripped by a profound inner emptiness. Unconsciously, he yearns for a new truth that can give him purpose and direction. Jan’s roommate, Tariq al-Jabari, a doctor, faces much more immediate problems: his parents and younger brother are trapped as civilians in Aleppo, Syria, where fighting is intense. Only his sister Samia manages to reach Germany, where she now hopes to obtain a residence permit through an asylum application. Jan advocates for her, but fails: the traumatized young woman is to be sent back to Bulgaria, where the authorities have already registered her. When Jan meets Abadin Hasanovic, a Bosnian Salafist, he is fascinated by the ease with which Hasanovic discusses the questions troubling him. At first, Jan wants nothing to do with Islam. But with Hasanovic and his fellow believers, he finds community, calm, and direction. The men are proud to see themselves as the “al-Ghurabaa,” the strangers in the world. For Hasanovic and his brothers, the feeling of being foreign—which Jan also experiences—is not a flaw but a distinction, supposedly a sign of “awakening to the truth.” Jan begins to study Hasanovic’s sermons intensely and converts. He now wants to fight the supposed enemies of his new community: those who, as Jan comes to believe, lead useless, selfish lives, and Assad, Syria’s dictator, whose soldiers are threatening the lives of Tariq’s family in Aleppo. Jan persuades Tariq to let Abadin Hasanovic help him get the rest of his family out of Syria. Thanks to Hasanovic’s connections, the two travel through Anatolia to Syria. At an IS checkpoint, Jan is arrested and abducted by the fighters in front of Tariq. He is taken to an IS base near Al-Bab, another city where fighting is intense, and trained there as a terrorist fighter. He now goes into battle with his “brothers.” Meanwhile, Tariq succeeds in getting his parents out of Syria. He continues to believe that Jan was abducted by IS. Together with his new brothers, Jan burns his German passport, symbolically severing his ties to his former life. With IS, he finds a sense of community among the “brothers,” who, like him, profess jihad and swear an oath of allegiance to their leader. But he also has horrific experiences that at times make him question his decision to fight in Syria. Among other things, he sees IS members brutally execute supposed deserters from their own ranks, and the IS commander set cruel examples even against Syrian civilians in occupied territory who have bent IS rules only slightly. When Turkish forces completely capture the region around Al-Bab in a military offensive, Jan is freed as an apparent IS captive and flown to Germany. While leading a more or less orderly life there and even resuming contact with his father, he is targeted by the domestic intelligence service, which recruits Tariq to keep tabs on him. In exchange for his information, Tariq’s family is granted permission to stay in Germany. Not only the domestic intelligence service but also Tariq increasingly doubts whether Jan really was an IS captive, as he claims, or whether he may be planning an attack in Germany. Jan gathers four IS fighters around him and prepares a mass-casualty attack on Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz. Just as they are about to begin their plan with the IS battle cry, Jan unexpectedly shoots his four accomplices. He himself is arrested by the advancing SEK.