Biography
Montasser Yousef Ali Abdallah Yousef ALDE'EMEH (alternative spellings: AL DAMEH or AL-DAMEH) was born on April 8, 1989, in Jordan. His parents were both born in Sabbarin (alternative spelling: Subbarin), a Palestinian village in the subdistrict of Haifa that was ethnically cleansed during the Nakba (1948). His father Yousef Ali Abdallah Yousef (d. 2018, رحمه الله) was born in 1941 during World War II, his mother Wadha Mustafa Taha in 1947.
In 1948, the clan to which Montasser belongs fled from Sabbarin. His family ended up in the Nur Shams camp and Far'a camp, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank. During the Six-Day War in 1967, a part of the family fled to Jordan. Since Montasser’s father was working in Lebanon at the time, his mother left the Nur Shams refugee camp to reunite with those family members who were then residing in Jordan.
Montasser’s father worked in Germany before permanently settling in Belgium in the late 1980s. There, he started to work as a butcher – a popular profession amongst some family members in Palestine and Jordan at the time. He was soon joined by two of his older sons, who immediately began work as butchers in Brussels.
In the early 1990s, Montasser arrived in Belgium at the age of two, accompanying his mother and sister. Here, the Alde'emehs settled with a Moroccan family from Fes, in an apartment near the metro station Comte de Flandre or Graaf van Vlaanderen, Molenbeek. Montasser attended a French-speaking kindergarten in the municipality, before relocating with his family to Asse, and then eventually to Baardegem, where he grew up.
He attended a municipal school in Meldert (East Flanders), but he completed his elementary education at Saint Vincent’s Primary School in Dendermonde. In 2002, he started his secondary education at the College of the Holy Virgin in Dendermonde, before moving to complete this stage of his education in 2008 at the Royal Atheneum of Dendermonde.
In 2011, Montasser graduated cum laude from the Catholic University of Leuven with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Language and Area Studies: Arabic and Islamic Studies (Minor in Language, Culture, History and Society). During his undergraduate studies, he visited various countries in West Asia (the Middle East), including Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Jordan, where he obtained a certificate in Modern Standard Arabic at Zarqa University, and Saudi Arabia, where he took private Islamic lessons in Dammam and received (but declined) an offer of a scholarship from the Saudi government for the academic year 2011-2012.
Montasser then returned to KU Leuven to obtain a master’s degree in Language and Area studies: Arabic and Islamic Studies (Magna cum laude). In 2013, he pursued a master’s degree in World Religions, Inter-religious Dialogue and Religious Studies at KU Leuven, and Jewish History, Thought and Civilisation at the Institut d’Etudes du Judaïsme of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), but he terminated these studies early to instead begin a doctoral programme. He started this mode of study at the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp and at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen, but in 2017 he decided to return to KU Leuven, the university where it all started for him.
During the summer of 2014, he conducted field research in western Aleppo, Syria for a period of two weeks. He followed Belgian and Dutch fighters from the Al-Nusra Front, the former branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria.
Also in 2014, he contributed research to the Belgian government with the intention of aiding their efforts in tackling the ideology of ISIS. Immediately following the 2016 Brussels bombings, Montasser started working with Scholengroep Brussel as the head of anti-radicalisation, a position he held until 31 December 2022. He also held similar positions at VCLB Pieter Breughel for three school years (2016-2019), at GO! Brussel during the 2018/19 academic year, and at CVO Brussel during the 2020/21 academic year.
In 2017, he conducted further field research in Kirkuk, Iraq; here he followed the PUK Peshmerga fighters led by the Kurdish general Wasta Rasul, during their battles with ISIS at the frontline between Kirkuk and Mosul. He also researched Salafi-Jihadi groups in countries such as Jordan (2014) and Tunisia (2015 and 2017). In December 2019, he visited the Gweran Prison in Hasakah, where he interviewed Belgian ISIS prisoners. In December 2020 and March 2022, he conducted fieldwork as part of a research project at the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), Ghent University, at the Al-Roj camp, where he interviewed Belgian women affiliated with ISIS; elsewhere in northeastern Syria, he also interviewed Belgian male prisoners who had fought for the group.
Since 2014, he has written dozens of articles for the Belgian newspaper De Morgen (since September 2018) and the magazines MO* (June 2014), Knack (March 2014-April 2018), Humo (since March 2017), the Catholic publication Tertio (since September 2023), and the Dutch magazines De Groene Amsterdammer en Vrij Nederland (since 2024).
During the academic year 2019/20, he continued his studies and research in the United Kingdom, where he obtained a postgraduate diploma with distinction from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London). The focus of his study was Academic English with Social Sciences (International Political Economy and International Relations). In 2021, he successfully completed a Certificate in Terrorism Awareness and Prevention at the Security Institute of Ireland. The following year, he earned a professional diploma with distinction in Terrorism and International Security at City Colleges Dublin. In April 2025, he was awarded a Master of Philosophy with distinction from Trinity College Dublin.
