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

by Åsne Seierstad

  “We need to start looking beyond this province,” Osman said to him one day. “But that’s not going to be cheap.”

  For a third time, Sadiq had to get his hands on money. The following day was a public holiday for the Turks, Osman told him, so crossing over would be no problem. He was right. Sadiq ran over, was picked up by Mehmut, emptied his account from the ATM in Hatay, and went to pick up the belongings he had left at the Sugar Palace. Suddenly Osman himself showed up in town, saying he had pressing business to attend to.

  “For a few dollars, I can ensure your return journey is a lot more pleasant,” he promised.

  A car picked them up and drove toward the Bab al-Hawa border station. The barrier was raised for them to go straight through without being checked or searched. They were back in Atmeh by dinnertime.

  Osman had secured himself safe conduct across the border. He had leased out to a foreign aid organization a parcel of the family’s olive grove where Sadiq had first met him. In addition to money for the land and free passage across the border, he had seen to it that his relations got jobs at the camp, which had increased the population of Atmeh tenfold. Thirty thousand people lived in and around the olive grove: those who didn’t have the hundred dollars required for the run across the frontier.

  The electrician from Aleppo cashed in on all this misery, making sure the wheels of war were kept in motion by smuggling even more jihadists into Syria.

  He took Sadiq south. Refugees were moving in the opposite direction. Women, men, the elderly, children. On foot, in carts, and in cars. Headed toward the camp in the olive grove, toward the Turkish border, anywhere, just away. By autumn 2013, two million Syrians had fled the country. Many more were internally displaced and sought refuge in areas on the peripheries of the fighting.

  Sadiq was downhearted. Bombed-out buildings. Fresh graves. Rubble. People. All the time, more people.

  The regime had launched a new offensive in an effort to regain strategic areas around Aleppo, and opposition forces were now suffering heavy losses. Aleppo had long been a fighting ground for hundreds of jihadist factions, secular militias, and Salafist armies. Efforts were under way to unite and mobilize against the regime; several groups were on the way from the front at Raqqa and from Idlib.

  The men stopped at every camp to ask if anyone had seen the girls. No one had. Who would be looking for girls when a war was raging around them?

  Foreign fighters from Europe had arrived in the thousands that autumn. Their number had tripled since the summer. Some came to fight against Assad, others to abet the fulfillment of the prophecy that the final battle before judgment day would take place in the Syrian town of Dabiq.

  ISIS used Assad’s abuses of the civilian population as a means of recruitment. When a thousand human beings slowly choked to death in a chemical weapon attack carried out by the regime that same summer, they exploited it in their propaganda. ISIS was the most open to taking in random foreigners. Other militias were more selective, preferring experienced soldiers, not cannon fodder.

  Speaking to local Syrians, Sadiq got the impression they were fed up with jihadists coming to wage war in their country. They arrived with their own customs and ways from European cities or moneyed backgrounds in the Gulf. They were arrogant, boorish, and cruel, and set about trying to create their own state, a divine state on earth. On Syrian soil.

  Sadiq pondered the nature of war. Everyone was sure that they had the right to the land and the others should be forced to leave. That they had God on their side while the others were in league with the devil. Everyone believed they owned the truth, and everyone seemed thirsty for blood. At night, words echoed through his mind. Kill, behead, avenge.

  Like combatants, Sadiq and Osman sheltered in abandoned buildings. They had to look up, at the holes in the roof, at the concrete left hanging around the exposed reinforcing steel. Would the roof hold for one more night? Would the house stand for yet another day?

  Sadiq couldn’t get used to it, settling down for the night in a deserted house, a home a family had left behind, taking their children by the hand and fleeing.

  He inquired, he despaired. The front line had moved. Carrying on along the road would mean driving into territory under regime control. They had to leave the truck and negotiate the rugged terrain away from the road in order to avoid the regime soldiers. Osman suggested hiring donkeys.

  “Abu Ismael, can you ride a donkey?”

  A small boy showed him how to get the donkey moving. The gangly Somali mounted the animal, which refused to shift from the spot.

  “No, not like that. Look. Slap here. Kick there!”

  To think it could be so hard! He had ridden camels and dromedaries and had been a goatherd for his grandfather. He asked the boy how old he was.

  “Eight.”

  Isaq will soon be eight, Sadiq thought. My son, who cannot walk to school alone or tie his shoelaces.

  The Syrian boy had holes in his trousers and no shoes.

  “Like so, sit this way,” he continued patiently.

  Sadiq slid off.

  Eventually he let the donkey carry his rucksack and weapon while he trudged alongside. He lagged behind. The $10-a-day minders followed the ridge of the hill, he kept farther down.

  Suddenly there was a crackle of gunfire. They had wandered into a firefight. Bursts of shots from various calibers of weapon sounded. Sadiq stayed flat on the ground among the scrub. He tried to control his breathing. If he managed to slow it down, he could get a good aim. He had two full magazines. This was how he had survived the civil war in Somalia, by being a better shot than the enemy.

  His throat was dry. He began crawling away from the sound of firing. His arms and legs on the ground, he felt he was in free fall, a feeling of first hanging poised in the air, then crashing down, as if a parachute did not open. I have no control over my life, over the situation, nothing. Now, all he had to do was keep his head down. He tried to figure out where he was in relation to the landmarks Osman had pointed out. That is where they are, and we are here, the Syrian had explained. But Sadiq had had enough on his plate with the donkey. He was angry with himself for relying blindly on Osman instead of attempting to gain an overview on his own.

  Assad’s soldiers would mistake him for an Islamist if they came across him, there were many Somalis among their ranks. He heard low voices.

  “Alhamdulillah,” said Osman. “Are you in one piece?”

  “Yes, thankfully,” Sadiq answered.

  “Keep your head down,” Osman said. “If they see us, they’ll take aim.”

  * * *

  Syria is big. Sadiq began to lose hope.

  They were on the outskirts of Aleppo. The once splendid city stank. The smell in the rebel-controlled areas was overpowering. Corpses lay beneath the ruins. He could not dwell on it, he had to keep going. Find them! was the last thing Sara had said to him.

  In some neighborhoods hardly a building was left undamaged. One more round and they would collapse. The structures were built close together, most of them with shared walls, and there were holes in those walls that allowed the rebels to move from house to house, as though through a tunnel, to the front, which was nothing more than a street or corner. A place where schoolchildren had walked, young couples had necked.

  Now death visited daily.

  When darkness fell, they took refuge in an apartment block.

  Sadiq looked around. This would once have been a very nice apartment, he thought. It was only partially destroyed, though the façade was missing, like in a doll’s house. There were plates in the cupboard, saucepans you could use to soak beans in or make foul, and dried onionskins in a basket. There were books on the shelves and clothes hanging in the wardrobes.

  A framed wedding photograph hung on the wall. The couple had gleaming eyes and were beautiful in the way happy people are. She was powdered, made up, wore a long white dress, and had flowers in her hair. He was clean-shaven, in a white shirt and dark suit. The style of the clo
thing suggested the wedding had not been long ago, they seemed so modern, so contemporary. They are still young, he thought. This is happening in our time.

  Where could they be now? Among the people they met along the road, dragging themselves onward, trudging over sandy, muddy, stony surfaces?

  Standing there, in front of the beautiful couple, in the ashes of their happiness, he could not hold the tears back.

  So many shattered dreams.

  He grew furious at his daughters. He cried out loud. The Syrians did not need more people coming here to fight! Not girls and boys from the West! They needed peace! He slammed his hand against the wall. A hollow thud sounded in response. He searched his pockets for a cigarette. Found none. Left the living room.

  There was a double bed in one of the rooms. He threw himself down on it, then stiffened. Their bed. He had lain down on their marital bed.

  He sobbed loudly.

  Why did my girls come here?

  Ayan! Leila! What is wrong with you?!

  PART II

  Seven Steps to Radicalization

  1.  Otherization: I am of one group, they are from another.

  2.  Collectivization: They are all the same.

  3.  Oppression narrative: They are oppressing us.

  4.  Collective guilt: They are all complicit in oppressing us.

  5.  Supremacism narrative: We are better than them.

  6.  Self-defense: We have to retaliate against their aggression.

  7.  The idea of violence: Violence is the only way.

  —@iyad_elbaghdadi, Arab Spring activist, 2015

  5

  EARLY TEENS

  Gjettum Lower Secondary School was situated on Bærum’s east–west divide. On the east side, the houses were larger and the fortunes fatter; in the west, row houses and average incomes dominated.

  The school claimed the student body was diverse, but the pupils were for the most part blond, blue-eyed, and Norwegian through and through. The girls were preppy, shopped as a hobby, and wore Uggs, leggings, checked shirts, and yachting jackets. They had long blond hair, wore pale, subtle makeup and lip gloss.

  Three girls stood out among the thirteen-year-olds starting at the school in autumn 2006. Ivana had an emo style, dressing completely in black. Ela wore oversized Red Hot Chili Peppers and KISS T-shirts. Ayan wore turquoise shawls, large earrings, and skinny jeans. All three had jet-black hair.

  Their outsider status drew them together. They were known as the immigrant gang. Ivana was a refugee from Croatia. Ela’s parents had come from China, and Ayan was, as in primary school, the only African in her class. The girls spoke Croatian, Mandarin, and Somali at home. Ivana was Catholic, Ela was a member of the Chinese congregation in Oslo, while Ayan regularly attended Koran school. They discussed their faiths, the similarities and differences. God. Life after death. Heaven and hell. Sex. Homosexuality. Abortion. Those kinds of things. When Ela had her confirmation, Ayan and Ivana were invited to the family gathering as a matter of course. All three would say they owed their lives to Norway; Ayan and Ivana had fled from civil war, while Ela had eluded China’s one-child policy. The youngest of three, she would not have come into the world had her parents not left. Her father had been a masseur at a Beijing hotel when one day the Norwegian billionaire Stein Erik Hagen was a customer. The supermarket magnate was so pleased with the treatment that he arranged for Ela’s father to move to Norway.

  All three girls were certain, however, that when they grew up they would leave Norway. “I want to live in Australia,” Ivana said. “Norway is cold and boring.” She disliked the winters intensely. As did Ayan. “The sun in Norway is like a flashlight,” she said, “only light, no heat!” She wanted to be a diplomat, work at the UN, and fight injustice and poverty. Ela, whom the class referred to as “our little Christian Chinese piano player,” wanted to sing in a rock band and tour the world.

  Everything they did for the first time, they did together.

  They went to parties.

  They developed crushes.

  They squeezed pimples. Ate tortilla chips. Put on weight. Began jogging. Measured their waistlines. Synchronized periods. Shared lip gloss, feelings, and the details of their romantic conquests.

  They went from thirteen to fourteen to fifteen together.

  * * *

  The Juma family belonged to the lowest economic tier in Bærum and lived in council housing. Sadiq worked at times, before returning to the welfare rolls and training courses, all the while dreaming of becoming an engineer. Sara had been enrolled in a Norwegian course but couldn’t focus. When Isaq began kindergarten, she was still at home and had not learned the language.

  But Ayan had discovered books. Knut Hamsun was her favorite author. “In neo-romanticism the first-person takes center stage,” she wrote in an essay about Hunger. “Everything is about what I think, what I feel, and the human psyche is all-important. Neo-romanticism is not concerned with religion or nationality, but with imagination, with matters mystical, irrational and inexplicable.” She describes the end of Hunger, where the main character lingers around in Kristiania, that later changed its name to Oslo. “He views himself as a loser, then on impulse boards a ship to escape the misery of Kristiania, the city that no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him.”

  Ayan was impatient, as well as prone to acting on a whim, which came through in her writing. Punctuation and spelling were secondary to making her opinion clear. She could produce the wildest compositions, like the time they were to write “a short story where a change for the better occurs.” The first sentence was supplied in the assignment: “Finally! Her eyes shone!” Ayan called her story “Heart Beat,” a title the teacher “corrected” to “Heartbeat.” It was about Oda, who had once had “eyes like a beautiful night sky filled with sparkling stars, but that now more closely resembled two bottomless holes,” because Oda had become a prostitute. A man employed at the local mortuary becomes a customer. “They were supposed to have sex on one of the examination tables at his workplace the first time she was with him. But things got a little hot and heavy, causing a corpse to fall down on top of her, prompting him to ask her to have sex with it. He paid her very well so she went along with the idea and has met him once a week since.” One night Oda sleeps over at the customer’s place and “lies thinking about how nice it is to wake up in the arms of a man you love. A man I love, she mouthed quietly to herself, and realized they had in a way a good relationship. He had been kind to her from the beginning and she had stayed over with him several times when she had no place else to go. Just the thought that she was in love with him made her whole body tingle, and a warm, peculiar feeling built up and grew the more she thought about it. A life with him would not be so bad, he had a job and earned good money.”

  The short story ended with the customer taking a business trip to Germany and asking Oda to come along. “The offer left her stunned, then he came out with the most shocking thing of all: I love you, Oda, come with me. She thought about it carefully—did she have anything to lose? No, there was nothing for her in Norway, so why not take the chance?”

  Ayan received a B–. Her teacher said the piece was “well thought out with good depictions as well as the use of literary devices to underscore the plot” but gave it a “minus for a load of homonymic errors, incorrect punctuation for quoted speech, and failure to combine compound words.”

  In her next essay, she wrote from the perspective of Torvald Helmer, Nora’s husband in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. “23.9.1890. Dear diary, today I was promoted to manager of the bank. What glorious news, my dear darling Nora was delighted on my behalf. But no matter what I do, I cannot refrain from worrying, there is something she is not telling me. I can see it in her sad dove’s eyes, such a wonderful little lark ought not look so melancholy.”

  In another composition, she imagined she was an American soldier in Vietnam. The year was 1966. “Dear diary. Today is my eighteenth birthday. I feel ter
rible and cannot even look at myself in the little shard of glass I use as a mirror. We were on night patrol doing a recon. Those sly gooks could be hiding just about anywhere. We were ordered to stay out of sight until the sun rose once again, removing the dark blanket that lay over all the bodies, covering all the blood.” The soldier described massacres he had taken part in, where women and children were tied up and oil was poured over them and set alight. “How can the sky be so beautiful when the world is so sickening? How can the stars twinkle and sparkle when the earth is on fire?” the soldier asked. Six months later, he simply writes: “Dear diary. I wonder if there is a God.”

  * * *

  From the age of fifteen, romance loomed large.

  “I feel like DYING,” Ayan wrote to Ela in the winter. They were in their third year at Gjettum. “I found out he has a girlfriend. (But that’s just the way it is, he can live happily with her:)”

  Ela responded, “Awwwwwh poor you … but it’s good you accept it and are happy for him. THERE ARE PLENTY MORE FISH IN THE SEA!!!!!!!! I’ll be there for you, NO MATTER WHAT!!!!!! LOVE YOU LOADS BABE!!!!!!”

  The text messages flitting among three housing blocks in Bærum were strewn with hearts and smileys, emojis crying and weeping tears of laughter. During the summer holidays, text messages flew back and forth between Europe and Africa, from the Dalmatian coast to the Chinese congregation’s youth camp all the way to Somaliland.

  “Tons of cute boys here, but I can’t even hit on them,” Ayan wrote to Ela in the summer between third and fourth year. “It’s roasting here, but I bought Snapple so now I’m happy. I haven’t seen a single cockroach so far, happy about that, and Granny is coming from Djibouti soon, can’t wait! Have you heard from Ivana?”

  “Yo bitch,” Ela wrote back. “The weather here in Norway is amazing (hoping to work a little more on my tan, I’m so pale-.-!) I’ve been hanging around with the people from the church a lot lately and summer camp is in two weeks. I can’t wait.”