Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad

by Åsne Seierstad

  Sara was prone to thinking the worst. Perhaps somebody had assaulted her daughter? She knew there were Norwegians who did not like those with darker skin, or Muslims, at any rate, and Leila had said she’d been harassed by a gang of boys once.

  Finally Ayan answered her telephone.

  “Where are you?” her mother burst out. “I’m very anxious about Leila, she hasn’t come home yet!”

  “Don’t worry. Leila is with me,” Ayan replied.

  “Ahh!” Sara exclaimed, relieved. “That’s good!”

  As long as they were together, everything was all right. She took a few cuts of lamb from the refrigerator and filled a saucepan with enough water to boil rice for seven.

  * * *

  Sadiq was sitting in the library in Sandvika, the center of Bærum municipality, reading Science Illustrated. His shoulder ached; it was going to be a while before he would be able to return to work at Coca-Cola. He wanted another job. Once, he had dreamed of being an engineer and had attended an evening course in Oslo to obtain the qualifications needed for serious study—but he had given up.

  He loved this library. He came here nearly every day. The first thing he did was pluck his favorite magazine off the shelf, peruse it, and then go online.

  Sadiq went outside to have a cigarette and noticed the missed calls.

  “The girls are out doing something,” his wife told him. “Can you call them and say you’ll pick them up? Then you all come home for dinner.”

  He pressed Ayan’s number, then Leila’s. They might be at the Rahma Mosque nearby or at Aisha’s. Leila’s telephone was turned off. Ayan did not answer. Could they have gone to the Tawfiiq Mosque in Oslo?

  He went back into the library and chatted for a while with a friend. Around five o’clock he left for home. He took off his shoes in the hall before heading straight for the living room and the sofa. He wanted to lie down while he waited for dinner.

  The sofa, in black imitation leather, was across from the TV. On the wall behind him hung a picture of Mecca. In the corner, over toward the balcony, were a few carpets and an old exercise machine. Otherwise the living room was empty, sparsely furnished à la Somali.

  Sara asked him to try to call the girls again.

  “Where are they? I don’t have time for this!” he exclaimed.

  A little after six o’clock, Ayan answered her telephone.

  “Calm down, Dad,” she said. Then she waited a moment, as though to give him time, before continuing. “Abo, sit down.” Her voice was slightly hoarse. “We’ve sent you an e-mail. Read it.”

  She hung up.

  Sadiq fetched the laptop from his backpack, found his glasses, and opened his e-mail. There was an unread message at the top, sent at 17:49, October 17, 2013.

  “Peace, God’s mercy and blessings upon you, Mom and Dad,” it said in Somali. The text continued in Norwegian.

  We love you both sooo much and you have given us everything in life. We are eternally grateful for everything ♥.

  Sadiq read on.

  We ask your forgiveness for all the pain we have caused you. We love you both sooo much, would do anything for you, and would never do anything to purposely hurt you, and is it not then fair and proper that we do everything for ALLAH swt’s sake and are grateful for what he has given us by following his rules, laws, and commands.

  Muslims are under attack from all quarters, and we need to do something. We want so much to help Muslims, and the only way we can really do that is by being with them in both suffering and joy. Sitting home and sending money is no longer enough. With this in mind we have decided to travel to Syria and help out down there as best we can. We know this sounds absurd but it is haqq and we must go. We fear what ALLAH swt will say to us on the day of judgment.

  The blood drained from Sadiq’s head. Everything went black. All his energy left him. While he continued to read, the air around him thickened. This had to be a joke. They were messing around with him.

  Abo you know this is fard al-ayn not only for men but also for women and whoever is able.

  Sadiq quickly scanned the e-mail to find an explanation for all this nonsense. He knew fard al-ayn—the obligations of each individual, like prayer, fasting, charity, and traveling to Mecca.

  We have now left and will soon arrive inshallah. Please do not be cross with us, it was sooo hard for us to leave without saying goodbye in the way you both deserve. Forgive us inshallah, when we made this choice we did so with what was best for our ummah in mind, but also what was best for our family, and it might be difficult to understand now, but inshallah this decision will help us all on the day of judgment inshallah.

  We love you both sooo much and hope you will not break off ties with us, inshallah we will send a message when we arrive at the hotel and then you can call inshallah.

  We want to tell you again that we love you with all of our hearts and are sorry you had to find out this way, we have already asked too much of you but we have to ask a favor: for both our safety and yours no one outside the family can know we have left, this cannot be stressed enough. Please try to understand our actions inshallah.

  Praise be to Allah, the lord of the worlds ♥. Ayan & Leila ♥.

  Sadiq held his hands in front of his face.

  “What does it say?” Sara stood leaning over his shoulder, her gaze switching between the black letters on the screen and her husband.

  “Ismael, come here!” Sadiq called out.

  In his room, Ismael, hearing his father’s unsteady voice, wondered what he had done wrong now.

  “Read it aloud,” Sadiq said when his son entered the room.

  After a few lines, Ismael’s voice began to quiver.

  “What? What?” Sara shouted. Ismael read first in Norwegian and then translated into Somali for his mother.

  “… We have decided to travel to Syria…” he read.

  “Illahayow i awi! Allah, help me!” Sara cried, and fell to the floor.

  Sadiq tried to help her up but tumbled down himself. He remained sitting there, his arms around his wife, rocking her.

  “I can’t believe it,” he mumbled. “It’s not possible.”

  The smaller boys stared at them. Isaq came over, crept close to his parents.

  “Daddy, where have they gone?” Jibril asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sadiq replied.

  He tried to gather the chaos in his mind. They could not have taken off just like that, without warning, no, he did not believe it. There were three possibilities. One, they were joking. Two, someone else had written the e-mail. Three, he had not read it correctly.

  * * *

  The police operations center logged the call at 9:54 p.m. The caller had “received an e-mail from two daughters where they informed him they had left for Syria to take part in jihad.”

  Sadiq implored the police to track the girls’ telephones to find out where they were.

  “Someone has kidnapped them!” Sara exclaimed.

  Sadiq called and called. The girls could not have gotten far! Finally he heard a click on the other end of the line.

  “Abo—”

  He interrupted his daughter, cleared his throat, and tried to calm down.

  “Ayan, stop where you are, it doesn’t matter where, stay there, I’m on my way, I’ll put gas in the tank, please, wherever you are, just wait there and—”

  “Dad, listen to me—”

  “I’m coming to pick you up, I’m taking the car, where are you?”

  “In Sweden.”

  “Wait for me. I’ll drive, or no, I’ll fly, I’ll take a plane!”

  “Forget about it, Dad.”

  “Think about this, both of you, we need to talk. Who are you with?”

  The line went dead. When Sadiq rang back, he was told the number he was trying to call had no network coverage.

  He rang the police operations center again. The operator logged the girls’ location as “an unidentified hotel in Sweden.”

  Suddenly Ismael
shouted something from his room and came into the living room pointing at his laptop.

  “Ayan is online, she’s on Facebook!”

  Sadiq saw a name he recognized, his daughter’s middle name: Fatima Abdallah.

  He sat down and wrote to her: “My child, tell me where you are so I can come and meet you, or answer the telephone. You’re causing the family huge problems. Don’t make things worse. My dear chiiiiild, please, my chiiiild, talk to me.”

  He sat staring at the screen. Ayan’s voice had been firm. Obdurate. They had to go to Syria. To help. The people there were in need. It was their duty.

  The decisiveness Sadiq had mustered when he called the police was gone.

  Sara was talking to a friend on the telephone.

  “Oh, you poor things,” her friend said. “I heard about some girls from England who went to Syria and…”

  There was a smell of burning coming from the kitchen. The rice lay black in the bottom of the saucepan.

  Isaq seemed to have become a part of Sadiq’s body, clinging to his father like a baby animal. Sadiq let him be. Jibril circled them both, anxiously, vigilantly.

  Ayan usually put the boys to bed, read to them from the Koran, then told them about the life of Muhammad or talked to them about the day that had been.

  That night they went to bed without the blessings of the Prophet.

  * * *

  At 10:47 p.m. a reply ticked in from Fatima Abdallah, aka Ayan. She used Facebook Messenger.

  “Abo, you all need to relax. It’s better to speak when everyone has calmed down and had a chance to think.”

  “Okay, talk to me now,” her father answered.

  “Can’t we talk tomorrow?” she suggested. “Whatever you do, for all our sakes, don’t tell anyone.”

  “My child, you are stronger than to allow yourself to be brainwashed. I believe you are my little Ayan who used to listen to me. Your mother is in a coma. The house is full of policemen. Child Welfare are here.”

  “Why did you call them? We told you not to do that!”

  “My child, did either of you tell us anything?”

  “You would never have let us go.”

  “Ayyyaaaan, fear God if you truly believe in Him. You are not allowed to travel without a male guardian. Name one sheikh who has permitted this so that he can convince me with theological evidence. I’ll go blind if I don’t find you!”

  “Abo, relax! I’ll send you an entire book.”

  “My daughters, we will never forgive what you have done, not now or in eternity. And neither will you receive any divine reward for this.”

  “Dad, don’t say things you will regret. Everyone is worn-out, we’re very tired, can we talk tomorrow?”

  “Paradise lies at the feet of your mother. That is a hadith, my child—the word of the Prophet. Your mother’s in the hospital, lying in a coma. How will you succeed? Where will the divine reward you seek come from? My child, do not invest in hell!”

  “You have two small children to take care of, be strong for their sakes. We’re safe and can look after ourselves,” Ayan assured him.

  “Don’t be naïve!” Sadiq wrote, and repeated that paradise was at their mother’s feet. “Have you forgotten that?” he asked his elder daughter.

  “Paradise comes with the grace of Allah,” Ayan replied. She logged off Messenger.

  * * *

  A picture appeared on Ismael’s mobile phone, on Snapchat: a large steak on a plate, a white tablecloth, nice cutlery.

  “Last meal in Europe!” it said beneath the photo, which disappeared after a few seconds.

  The text had been sent via Viber. Ismael clicked on the message. What his sister did not know was that the message app automatically showed your whereabouts if you had not disabled that function.

  Seyhan, Adana, Turkey, it read. He clicked again. A map came up, and a blue dot. He zoomed in and saw an intersection, streets.

  “They’re in Turkey!” Ismael came rushing in to show his parents the dot. “I can see exactly where they are! Call the police, they need to get in touch with the Turkish police, they can arrest them, there in the restaurant. They’re eating there right now!”

  Sadiq called the police and gave them the information his daughter had unwittingly provided. It was past eleven o’clock at night.

  “We’re in a desperate situation. You need to help us right now. Find them before it is too late!” Sadiq urged.

  His words were taken down in the operations center and the information forwarded to the local department of PST, the Norwegian Police Security Service.

  The message lay there, unread, in an unopened e-mail, all night, while the girls settled down to sleep at the Grand Hotel in Adana, where they had checked in using their own passports and under their full names.

  * * *

  Half an hour before midnight, Sadiq’s laptop notified him an e-mail message had been received. It was from Ayan. It contained no greeting, no dear Mom and Dad, but got straight to the point.

  Read the ENTIRE book and find out who the author is before replying, we have planned and thought this through for almost an ENTIRE year, we would never do something like this on impulse. Yours sincerely Ayan

  Sadiq opened the attachment. It was a book manuscript and on the first page it read:

  DEFENSE OF THE MUSLIM LANDS

  The First Obligation After Iman

  By Dr. Abdullah Azzam

  (May Allah accept him as Shaheed)

  It started with a quotation from Muhammad: “… But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, he will never let their deeds be lost.”

  Sadiq remained seated and read. Ismael shut the door to his room. He lay on the bed with the phone in his hand, staring at the ceiling. It all felt unreal. He logged on to Facebook, scrolled, clicked, and his mind whirled. Suddenly he saw that Fatima Abdallah was back online again.

  “Ayan. It’s Ismael,” he typed. “I know you have left. What are you planning to do there? Like, actually do. When do you land in Syria?”

  His big sister replied right away. “First, what’s happening at home? Are the police there? Are child services there?”

  “No. No.”

  “Thank God! Is Mom in a coma?”

  “She’s crying. Is miserable. Your turn.”

  “Well, we’re going to do what we need to do.”

  “What do you mean by that exactly?”

  “Everything from fetching water for the sick to working in refugee camps.”

  “Mom thinks you’re going to get married. With men waging jihad in order to satisfy them. Lol. Mom thinks you’re going to be raped.”

  “God forbid. You know we’re not like that.”

  “I’m not sure what I know anymore.”

  “What do you think I am, a whore?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Ismael, adding a sad emoji. “Thought you trusted me more. You could have at least said something to me.”

  “You would have stopped us!” his sister wrote. “Tell Mom we’re sorry for the worry we’ve caused, but Allah comes first, before anyone else.”

  “She’s mad at you, in her coma.”

  “She’s not in a coma.”

  “She can just about manage to speak, and she’s crying. What would you call that?”

  “If she’s crying then she’s not in a coma. Don’t lie to us about things like that.”

  “Hmm, I exaggerated, I can make a video of her.”

  “Nooo.”

  “How did you get the money?”

  “I worked.”

  “How much money do you have?”

  “We have enough. Anyway, ask Dad to read the whole book I e-mailed him.”

  She handed the telephone to her sister.

  “Ismael, dear Ismael, it’s Leila. I love Mom more than anything on earth, but when it comes to ALLAH and the Prophet, I fear what ALLAH will ask me on the day of judgment. I know I am hurting a lot of people here in dunya, but I am not thinking of dunya at the moment. I’m doing t
his because I love my mother and father and my whole family sooo much, it’s not just for my akhirah but for all of yours too. I’m not a particularly good daughter and I don’t give my parents what they REALLY deserve, but this is my chance to make up for that by being of help to them in akhirah. Please try to understand. If you had the chance to help your parents on judgment day at the expense of maybe hurting them in dunya but in so doing help get them into Jannah, wouldn’t you also do EVERYTHING in your power for that chance?”

  The message came in bits. Leila was pressing Send line by line as she wrote. Ismael knew enough about Islam to understand the content. Dunya was life here on earth, akhirah was the afterlife, and Jannah was paradise.

  “Are you coming back? Like, ever?” Ismael wrote from his bed.

  “We don’t know for sure, but we have no wish to,” Leila answered.

  “So we’re probably never going to see each other again?” Ismael included a crying emoji.

  “Don’t ever think that, we always have Skype, haha.”

  “But in real life?”

  “You never know.”

  Ismael sent a disappointed emoji and added, “Oh, well.”

  “How are you?” his little sister asked.

  “Feel weird. Dunno. Sad.”

  “It hasn’t sunk in yet for us either. Don’t be sad, we’re not dead and we’re doing fine. Try to think positive. Think pink ☺ Remember in the spring? You said I would NEVER do anything like this because I was too cowardly?”

  “Yeah, you win. Can you come home now?”

  Leila did not reply right away, so he added quickly: “Haha. Have fun. Do what you think is right.”

  “We will.”

  “I’m cool,” answered Ismael.

  “Good night.”

  Leila sent a smiley and a heart.

  She logged off.

  Ismael lay in bed with the phone in his hand. Tears trickled down his cheeks.

  * * *

  In the living room, Sadiq was reading Defense of the Muslim Lands while keeping an eye on his mobile phone and Facebook account in case his daughters texted him or went online.

  “There is no Caliphate,” the text began. “A glorious empire the world once feared. A people entrusted with the final revelation of God. The religion destined for the whole of humanity. Where is it today?” asked the writer. “The unclean have duped the dull masses of Muslims by installing their wooden-headed puppets as false figureheads of states that remain under their control. Colonialism has taken a new face. They have come from every horizon to share us among them like callers to a feast. There is no greater humiliation for the people expected to lead humanity to redemption. How will they recognize the gravity of the situation? Their house is crumbling and their neighbors are laughing.”