The characters in I Was Told to Come Alone by Souad Mekhennet include the author herself, her family, her colleagues, and her interview subjects.
Souad Mekhennet is the author, narrator, and the primary character in the book. She's a German woman of Morrocan and Turkish descent born to immigrant parents in Frankfurt in the late 1970's. Growing up, she witnesses the spread of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West and the changes in the Muslim communities that result. It fills her with fear, but she resolves to fight back against it.
After her first internship at a newspaper, she attends college and begins working as a journalist. She covers stories all over the world, working for newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post. As she travels, she is granted interviews that other Western journalists couldn't get, including meetings with ISIS and Al-Qaeda leadership.
Throughout the book, Mekhennet seeks to uncover the roots of radicalization and condemns both anti-Muslim hate in the West and anti-West attitudes in the Middle East. She believes that the two cultures need to have a better understanding of each other and that discovering why people are radicalized is one way to help prevent it.
Aydanur is Mekhennet's mother. She was born in Turkey and moved to Germany when she was 19. She says that her mother "had long hair that she didn't cover with a scarf, and she liked to wear skirts that showed off her legs." Mekhennet's father, Boujema, came to Germany from Morocco around the same time. He worked as a cook when he was young and met Aydanur through an older friend.
Fatima and Hannan are Mekhennet's older sisters.
Mekhennet's grandmother lives in Morrocco. She says she's "very strong-willed and never let anybody boss her around." Mekhennet later views this as favorable compared to her father, who she says was often bossed around and mistreated by his bosses and supervisors when she was young.
Mrs. Weiss, who lives in the same apartment building as Mekhennet when she's a teenager, lived through the Holocaust. She warns Mekhennet to stay safe and keep her family safe when the riots in East Germany intensify. She says that "right-wing groups attacked workers from Vietnam and Mozambique."
Michael Moss is a reporter at The New York Times who Mekhennet describes as "a friendly silver-haired Californian now living in Brooklyn." They work together for years and they become very close friends. She says he helped her learn how to approach her stories from different vantages and how to better find information. They both worked for the investigative unit.
Shaker al-Abssi is a Palestinian militant. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was an associate of his. Abssi refuses an interview with Mekhennet but agrees to have tea with her. She's told that he refuses, as a rule, to speak with any journalists—especially Western ones—so she's lucky to have gotten a meeting. She describes the meeting as a mixture of interrogation and discussion, but she also makes the armed men in the room laugh. Later, he agrees to give her an interview after she doesn't publish details of their conversation over tea, as requested.
Serce is the pseudonym of a friend of Mekhennet's, who calls her for help when her nephew Pero leaves Germany and travels to Syria to join the jihadis. His mother is named Bagica and his father is named Mitko; Mitko is Serce's brother. Pero's family travels to Turkey and sets up a meeting with him, then takes him by force to keep him away from the jihadis. He returns to Germany and is arrested there. His family works hard to help him heal and return to a normal life in German society. When Mekhennet sees him more than a year later, he's in modern and trendy clothes and walking hand-in-hand with a girl whose hair isn't covered. He looks happy and reminds her of the little boy he once was. She notes, however, that some of his friends later leave Germany to join the group Pero left for; some leave to join ISIS, which was just beginning.
