LEIDEN, Netherlands — In the private video Mohamed Nidalha showed of his son, Reda, the young man is seen partying. The 19-year-old dances and raps to loud hip-hop music, while behind him, a girl dressed in a tight top cooks something in the kitchen. A bottle of liquor sits on the table. People are smoking. It is an unremarkable video, one that anyone would expect to find on a teenager’s cell phone.
In June 2014, a few weeks after the video was recorded, Reda Nidalha, a Dutch teenager of Moroccan descent, would leave for Syria to join the Islamic State (IS). He called his younger sister from Turkey and said he was in Istanbul, on his way to “help raped women and children in Syria.” When Mohamed Nidalha found out that his son was headed for Syria, he tried to stop him. He contacted the Dutch police and secret service, but they said they couldn’t do anything because there was no international arrest warrant for Reda Nidalha.
