'The Darkness Inside,' an Excerpt

The genesis of?The Darkness Inside?was purely coincidental. I started writing it initially as a screenplay, after working with director Peter Kosminsky on a four-part drama series,?The State, about young ISIS recruits from Britain. It gave me insight into the writing process for a television drama, and Kosminsky was very encouraging. Actor Riz Ahmed even got in touch to ask if I wrote screenplays for dramas and if I might work with some of his writers in the BBC writers' room. There was one piece of advice from Ahmed I didn't listen to: "Unless it's comic book stuff, most stories are now for TV, not film."

I wrote a three-part screenplay about foreign fighters and jihadists in Syria and went to a production company, where I sat in front of an executive who clearly hadn't bothered to read it and instead came up with an absurd idea of comic book proportions: "What if Jihadi John returned?" I don't know what sort of caricatures the man had playing inside his head.

I realized that perhaps screenplays couldn't really deal with this topic as I hoped. As a journalist, I had also focused on Afghanistan, which I believe in many ways is the cradle of modern jihadism. Understanding the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the resistance of the mujahideen is crucial to any reporting on jihadism today. For this reason, I worked with Algerian Islamist?Abdullah Anas?to co-write his memoir,?To The Mountains: My Life in Jihad, From Algeria to Afghanistan. One of the first Arabs to join the Afghan mujahideen, Anas later fell out with Osama bin Laden and what became al-Qaida. He?dedicated?the book to the memory of his friend Jamal Khashoggi.

But I still wanted to document the stories of foreign fighters and jihadists in Syria's civil war, because it remains an untold story. Covering jihadism, and especially foreign fighters like those depicted in?The State, has become increasingly difficult in the United Kingdom, though, where?anti-terror legislation?has had a cooling effect on the media and publishing industry. Whenever I suggested the project, publishers would fear that they would be presented with a production order from the police, and they would be forced to hand over the manuscript.

So how does one tell the story of these men? Even if my screenplay had been optioned, a colleague had advised that it might sit in the drawer of the executive and rot for years. I decided, then, to turn it into a novel, knowing fiction can allow a writer to divine truths that nonfiction cannot.

In my mind, it had to be a compelling detective story that also, like a Henrik Ibsen play, made the mundane profound. So the story begins with something mundane: the stabbing of Anis, a young man in South London. To Sid, the journalist protagonist, he is yet another statistic of Sadiq Khan's London, and a story worth chasing. Yet as Sid begins to investigate his death, he discovers that Anis had been a foreign fighter in Syria, and it is this experience that got him killed back in London.

This is the story of the seemingly ordinary men who walk among us—who were once "emirs" in Syria and now, having returned to the U.K., go back to their old, mundane lives. Even though the war has left an indelible mark on their souls, they can tell no one of their past for fear of being caught by the law.

Read the Excerpt From The Darkness Inside here and buy it here on Amazon