"A Different Person"

"So this is the way we live and suffer.  We have food to cook and eat, thanks to Allah.  And also have brothers and try to do as much as we can for Allah.  Kafirs, you're not going to get what you expect.  Allah is with us.  He protects us.  You don't have a protector.
"We will kill you.  We're going to build plans against you.  But no matter how many plans you make, nothing is going to succeed because whatever He described in His books is the truth. Allah is the truth.  All of you others are waste, garbage."  William Plotnikov, 23, Russian-Canadian citizen

Is that not representative of the supreme irony?  Parents concerned about the welfare, education, opportunities and aspirational future of their child take that young person on a journey to another country that offers freedom, equality and no end of opportunities.  The parents feel comfortable in that new country where they have migrated, and swiftly adjust to the profound changes.  The boy, a teen, is confused.  He misses his old life, his old friends.

Although he must learn a new language, so too do his parents.  And although young people swiftly adapt themselves to new surroundings and have the remarkable ability to absorb new languages in record time, he is unhappy, restless, looking for something much, much more.  Not that he hasn't been exposed to quite singular opportunities, for the young man is also talented.  His father, himself of an athletic disposition, points his son in that direction, too.

And his son excelled in athletics.  Before the family - living in Western Siberia where the father was employed by an oil company - moved to Canada, son William Plotnikov twice won the Russian youth championships in boxing.  Fifteen-year-old William enrolled at a boxing club in Thornhill, Ontario.  "He was not physically strong but he was very, very talented...  Very smart", said his coach.

So talented and so smart that he won fights in Ontario, two silver medals.  And the family took Canadian citizenship in 2008.  "He came here and he sees that his parents are working somewhere, not a good position maybe.  And like any kid he has some difficulties - language difficulties, to study at school, different culture, different everything."

William Plotnikov was looking for something.  He wrote in his diary about human existence.  He read the Bible, the Torah and the Koran.  And he decided to visit a Toronto mosque.  "So he went to the mosque to clear that up and he just got caught up with a mullah who had very radical views.  Islam on its own, it's not a bad religion.  But like in any other case, the extremists are not always good", said his father Vitaly, generously.

William became steadily more withdrawn and isolated.  "It wasn't extremism but first of all his behaviour changed.  He practically stopped communicating with us."  William, countering his father's reminder that they were Christians, reminded his father that his mother was of Tatar stock with a tradition of Islam.  He stopped shaving, fasted for Ramadan, prayed five times daily, stopped eating pork.

Then he left Canada.  Ended up back in Moscow.  "William started expressing his radical views, that basically from here he was already a ready-to-go, prepped fighter.  He only was looking for a chance to get inside, into mujahed [jihadist] forces", his father explained.  William travelled to Dagestan, a republic in the North Caucasus, sharing a border with Chechnya, notorious for its Islamist militants.

He lived in a village of about three thousand people, called Utamysh.  Then he joined jihadists.  "It's not only that they were reading the Koran in the forest, they were attacking the forces, the troops, the military."  Russian troops ambushed a group of gunmen in the forests near Utamysh having "received information about the possible movements" of insurgents.

The firefight that resulted saw some security personnel wounded, one killed.  And by morning there were seven militants dead.  Two local faction leaders, a head of a jihadist group nearby, and among the others William Plotnikov whom a jihadist website called a martyr.  "May Allah reward all the brothers."