Foreign Correspondent: July 22

Tonight on Foreign Correspondent Michael Brissenden looks at a former criminal who heads to Syria to fight the army of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria’s civil war has become a magnet for jihadis from all over the world. While nations like Australia wrestle with the threat of those dangerously radicalised warriors returning home, Foreign Correspondent presents an extraordinarily intimate and confronting journey as a violent, criminal king-pin leaves his drug-running turf behind to head to Syria’s frontlines to fight a war he doesn’t really comprehend.

This is a searing insight into the many different motivations inspiring foot-soldiers to Syria’s conflict and beyond, into the fold of the super-violent radicals of ISIS, wreaking terror in Iraq.

He’s a hardened criminal who has used extreme violence and intimidation to establish his drug-trafficking kingdom and then to protect that turf. He’s done serious prison time. In many ways he’s used to war. But battles with rival gangs and inmates is one thing. Heading to Syria to fight the army of President Bashar al-Assad is another.

So what has prompted a powerful European gangster like Abderrozak Benarabe to join a Middle East civil war and wage jihad?

Like so many rallying to the call to arms from places as far and unlikely as Britain, the United States and Australia, the motivation for Big A – as he is known on the street – is as muddy and uncertain as his understanding of the conflict.

It’s what makes this extraordinarily intimate program so important and compelling.

Big A – unreligious, certainly unschooled in Islam – nevertheless makes a pact with Allah. If his brother is delivered from newly diagnosed cancer he pledges to redeem his criminal ways by fighting Jihad in Syria.

Despite having only a very vague comprehension of the situation in Syria, as his brother gains in strength, so too does his resolve to serve Allah, and soon he joins the ranks of a Salafi-Islamist group involved in the conflict.

A camera is by his side, filming his every move as he packs and leaves Copenhagen, heads to Syria and finds himself in pitched battles with the Syrian Army.

In bombed-out city ruins, men fight alongside children with rudimentary arms against an army of tanks and aerial bombardments.

The camera accompanies Benerabe as he returns home to gather supplies to level the playing field. He spends his criminal gains to buy better gear for his Jihadi comrades.

With shocking footage of rebel fighters picked off yards from the camera, this is an uncompromising look at an intractable warzone and the myriad motivations of rag-tag band of jihadis fighting in it.

Tuesday, 22 July at 8pm on ABC1