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

by Åsne Seierstad

  Ismael’s group did not win, but it had been a memorable weekend. He posted a photograph of his new friends on Facebook, all of them standing with their arms around one another. Ismael was dressed in the same style as the blond boys with him, in a light blue shirt and jeans, looking the part of a young businessman. “@emaxnorway fantastic experience!” he wrote.

  When summer was over, he boarded the train back to college to start the second year of his automation engineering course. When he got back, he changed the background picture on his iPhone. The white writing on a gray background summed up his situation: Be willing to walk alone. Many who started with you, won’t finish with you.

  * * *

  Being back together again as mother, father, and children was not all rosy. They had lost the old and spacious apartment, and the one-bedroom unit that Sadiq had been allocated by the county when he was alone was overcrowded. Neither was Sara happy with the location or the neighbors. The apartment was in a block of flats for social welfare clients and most of the residents were single. There were alcoholics, drug addicts, and a lot of noise. People could be heard making dinner at three in the morning, playing loud music all night, or arguing. Sara complained to a friend that there were syringes and broken bottles everywhere. “It’s no place for children,” she stressed. She went to NAV and asked for a new apartment. The family was told to look for one themselves. The local authority could subsidize the rent, but they would be responsible for finding a place themselves. Sadiq searched online and they went to viewings, but they were refused as tenants at each turn. Norwegians don’t like Somalis, Sara concluded.

  But Somalis like Somalis, and as soon as Sara returned to Norway she got back in touch with her circle of friends in Bærum. After fifteen years in the country, she had built up a large network of female compatriots, many of whom were members of the Somali Women’s Association.

  On her return, Sara had wanted to lance the boil. Sadiq had made the Somali community aware of his anger at Mustafa, the young Koran teacher, whom he held responsible for the radicalization of his daughters. “He is the start of our nightmare,” he used to say. The association viewed Sadiq’s accusations against Mustafa as criticism of them. They were the ones who had hired him, after all, and had chosen to keep him on as a teacher—even after the girls left. If their radicalization and journey to Syria had anything to do with him, then surely others would also have departed, they argued.

  Sara had attempted to get hold of Mustafa after the girls left, but the young man, whose salary had been partly financed by her household budget, refused to meet her.

  Eventually he sent her a message via one of her friends saying, “I had nothing to do with their journey to Syria. Their leaving came as a shock to me. May God protect you all.”

  Well, so it wasn’t him, then, Sara concluded.

  Sadiq, on the other hand, was reprimanded on social media for having accused the Koran teacher of terror recruitment, thereby bringing shame on all Somalis. It was time to close ranks.

  Rumors abounded. When the criticism in the media had come out, the Tawfiiq Mosque had asked Mustafa to stay away for a while. The religious leaders were worried. The mosque, like others in Oslo, was occupied with fronting the fight against radicalization. They dispatched a young religious leader named Abdibasid Ali Mohammed, a handsome, well-spoken, well-educated Somali, to participate in panel discussions on how to combat extremism. He was a willing participant, as long as he did not have to shake the hands of any female members on a panel.

  Mustafa was interrogated by PST because of the sisters’ trip. PST had received tip-offs about his alleged ties to al-Shabaab, to IS, and terror recruitment activity. His friends were also called in for questioning.

  One of them, a teenager closely involved with the Prophet’s Ummah, was first asked some questions of a general nature before being asked if he knew Mustafa.

  “Mustafa…? No…”

  “So how come you’ve stayed the night at his place, then?” the policeman responded.

  The young man realized that they must have been in possession of a lot of information, as he had spent the night on Mustafa’s sofa only a single time. Halfway through the interview, a man entered the room, a tall, fair-haired Norwegian who spoke fluent Somali and had detailed knowledge of clans, ethnic groupings, and movements in Somalia. The teenager was impressed. Sometime later, following a visit from PST to his parents’ home and a subsequent dressing-down from his father for ruining the opportunities Norway had given him, he made the decision to withdraw from the extremist network.

  Teaching the Koran was not his main source of income. He also had a job as a security guard. Long after the sisters had left, the young Islamist was employed at the University of Oslo at its Blindern campus. In his dark blue uniform adorned with NOKAS, the name of the security company, he made the rounds of the faculty buildings at night.

  PST searched but found no evidence against Mustafa.

  He merely gave Koran lessons, everyone said. He was a good Muslim, he collected money for war victims, spent time with troubled youths. He sometimes drove around picking up boys who needed guidance. He might go to a bar and offer an inebriated Somali a lift home. They could have a chat on the way. Did the boy need help? Did he have problems?

  Mustafa came across as a brother. He was a brother. He stood with open arms and a ready ear. Then things would come full circle, the helping hand would tighten its grip. It was time to give something back.

  * * *

  One who was eventually taken in, arrested, and charged was Ubaydullah Hussain—“Allah’s little slave” and Dilal’s former husband.

  In September 2016, he became the first Norwegian to be charged with terror recruitment. The Director of Public Prosecutions believed there was sufficient evidence to prove he had recruited and facilitated the travel of would-be terrorists to Syria. Several of those he had helped had later been killed in action, according to the indictment. He had made travel arrangements, purchased clothing and equipment, helped procure tickets, and put the departed in touch with other contacts. “He was in direct communication with individuals with ties to ISIS in order to ensure that those traveling were picked up and transported across the border in Turkey,” the charges stated. PST believed him to be in effect a member of IS until his imprisonment.

  The Prophet’s Ummah lay with a broken spine. Ubaydullah was in custody, Bastian and several others were dead, most of the other members were in Syria. Arfan Bhatti, who Aisha had called “the glue of the group,” was still a godfather of sorts, but the Prophet’s Ummah no longer arranged demonstrations and the Facebook group was no more. They still met over a meal, preferably at one another’s homes.

  Arfan Bhatti was among those who had kept in close contact with Hisham in Syria. Many no longer dared chat with the Norwegians waging jihad, wary of coming to the attention of the security services. Because PST hounded the young Islamists, paying visits to their families, uncovering other activities of a criminal nature they were involved in, activities that could more easily lead to a conviction than terror recruitment. It appeared to have an effect. In 2016, as far as PST knew, no one left Norway for Syria. While the way to paradise no longer went through Syria, the radicalization continued.

  For young women, the pious wave continued too. There were girls in different parts of Oslo who had considered traveling at the same time as Ayan and Leila but had remained behind. Many now agreed that IS was not true Islam. Only in the event of a state being created that really was proper Islam would they journey down.

  One of the mosques the strict teenage practitioners were drawn to was Tawfiiq. “Going to the mosque twice a week used to be enough,” one of the girls in the Tawfiiq Sisterhood related. “Learn about the Koran on the weekends, behave correctly, and wear a shawl, or at least have one on when you arrived at the mosque and take it off on the way out. Now the girls practically live in the mosque, kids in their early teens.”

  What were they looking for?

>   Sisterhood. A place to belong. Paradise. To follow the Prophet. To marry young, because “marriage was half the religion.” Many parents were proud when their daughters began practicing their religion with more enthusiasm, but the line between this increased activity and radicalization was thin. You did not suddenly wake up one day a fanatic; it was a direction you grew in. The girls in the extremist networks influenced one another, supported one another when the world opposed them. They excluded those who disagreed with them, dismissing them as either kuffar or friends of kuffar. They lent their ears to preachers claiming the West would not be satisfied until there were no Muslims left. And why would they not, when the West was becoming increasingly preoccupied with what Muslims should and should not do, what they could and could not wear? There was fear and ignorance on both sides, the more moderate stated.

  Ayan and Leila had sailed on the early wave of radicalization that led them to Syria. They left precisely when the doors were wide open, both out of Norway and into Syria. Had they waited a year or two, they might not have been borne along but been content to be among these pious new practitioners, living in and at the same time parallel to Norwegian society.

  * * *

  Leila called to wish the family a happy Eid al-Fitr in September. She complained about her leg hurting and being in pain when walking. Getting to the internet café to call was a trial, she told Sara. The foot she had been shot in had never healed properly. Otherwise everything was good.

  Sara had accepted that the girls did not want to return home. She was not interested in digging any more into it or finding out who was to blame. She believed her daughters had misunderstood something or other in Islam. That was all.

  In Sadiq’s mind, there was no room for acceptance. Anxiety had taken root in him body and soul. He had dreamed of getting his old boring life back—of the boys returning, of Sara returning—but now that they were back, he thought his life was just that, boring.

  Osman and he continued their nightly conversations and indulgence in daydreams. “They’re getting out, whether they want to or not,” he told his Syrian helper.

  “It’s out of my hands,” Osman admitted.

  Sadiq could no longer rely on his assistance. Smuggling had become harder. Everything had become difficult. Turkey had partially closed its borders. Where there had been barbed-wire fencing with holes in it there was now in places a seven-foot-high concrete wall. The border station of Bab al-Hawa where Osman used to cross had been damaged by a missile. At the other frontier posts, he did not have a permit to cross, or else they were under Kurdish control. Osman was stranded in Syria.

  They went back and forth analyzing who and when and how and what would happen in Raqqa. How long would Raqqa hold out? Who would take the city? How long would IS survive? And if IS was driven out, who would take its place?

  Many of the local groups that were cooperating in the fight against IS had little in common; they were enemies who had entered a tactical alliance. When IS was defeated, new wars would break out. There were so many competing interests on the ground that any solution seemed far off. Turkey, the United States, Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia; Hezbollah, Kurdish guerrillas, Iranian Shia Muslims, and a multitude of Salafists, Wahabists, Islamists, and jihadists were all fighting for their own interests on an ever more bloody battlefield. And then there was Assad.

  Five years of international impotence had passed. There had been negotiations and condemnations, diplomats and politicians were hamstrung. There was only one thing that never let up: death from the skies.

  Assad was left in peace to massacre his own people. The images were shared on social media: people who were alive yesterday but not today.

  * * *

  It was primarily the rebel-controlled areas that Assad bombed. In autumn 2016, the inhabitants of the caliphate still lived in relative security. Attitudes became reinforced. Only one truth existed and it was never opposed. The jihadist wives shared a mentality and influenced one another. Girls from modest backgrounds could brag of their slaves on Twitter: “My house help (slave) showed me how to bake Syrian bread. Today I finally made my own,” Muslimah4Life wrote.

  Access to open sources about daily life in Raqqa had diminished. Twitter had put an effective monitoring system in place to quickly close IS accounts. In addition, the caliphate placed its own restrictions on use of the internet.

  The good times were long gone. The standard of living sank, even for the foreign fighters. From late summer 2016, IS no longer shared a border with Turkey. At the start of the year, the Islamic State had announced a 50 percent cut in soldiers’ salaries. The reason was “extraordinary circumstances.” Local fighters now received $200 a month while their foreign counterparts could expect $400. The foreigners had constituted an overclass of sorts in Raqqa. They had moved into the best neighborhoods. Some of them, like Ayan, had brought money along with them from home and could live better than the local population as long as the funds lasted.

  Over the course of the autumn, several of the supply lines into Raqqa were shut. Prices soared. People lined up for hours for a pail of soup or a sack of rice, in queues IS wanted to hide but that Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently continued to report on.

  Even though a woman was to remain in the home, there was a lot of work that could be imposed on her. For the girls in Raqqa, this meant making food from early in the morning until late at night. Ayan and the sisters prepared meals for the fighters in large cooking pots. Rice, meat, and vegetables. Potatoes in deep fryers. Chicken casseroles. Fried fish from the Euphrates.

  The food was made at home or in large communal kitchens. At dinnertime the freshly prepared food was trucked out to soldiers defending the state at the front or at checkpoints.

  The sisters had completely embraced Islamic State ideology concerning obedience to one’s husband. Ayan, who back in Norway had been such an advocate of gender equality, told a friend from home she chatted with that she was open to Hisham taking another wife.

  “Wouldn’t you be jealous?” her friend asked.

  “No, we need to make more babies,” Ayan replied. “If the war is a long one we’ll need new soldiers.”

  Personally, she was hoping God would bless her with sons.

  * * *

  Both Aisha and Emira had remarried after Bastian was killed. Aisha had given birth to a son after Salahuddin’s death.

  “What more could you want than to be able to raise the next generation of lions the in Islamic State who will go on to spread Islam?” Umm Muthanna wrote on Twitter. According to the counterterrorism research foundation Quilliam, there were now just over thirty thousand pregnant women in the caliphate.

  From a young age children were taught to revere the state and hate nonbelievers. Intensive study of the Koran was required from early on. School, which started at age six, was an instrument to teach them to obey. The children were to be indoctrinated to be loyal subjects, to become the new preachers, the new fighters. History, philosophy, and civics, referred to as “the methodology of atheism,” were removed from the curricula, as were art and music. In geography, they learned solely about the Islamic world, while physical education was replaced with “jihad training,” which focused on martial arts and shooting.

  The teachers had also to be reeducated. All the laws of physics and chemistry originated with God when he created the world. All evolutionary teaching was out. Darwin’s name was taboo. The instructions were detailed, the word watan, “homeland,” and all appellations for Syria were to be replaced by “the Islamic State,” “Land of the Muslims,” or “Al-Sham province.” Examples in mathematics that had anything to do with interest rates, democracy, or elections had to go, and units of calculation were now in tanks, artillery, and bullets. All images not in accordance with sharia were eliminated: women’s faces, uncovered body parts, non-Islamic dress.

  In order to achieve an ideal Islamic society, as Muhammad had outlined, you had to start with the children. The best boys in each age grou
p were given special training. They watched people being stoned, crucified, and beheaded. Witnessing such events was presented as a privilege, and being allowed to participate was a greater privilege still. Small kids who distinguished themselves were granted the honor of handing the executioner the knife he would use to sever the head of victims; in some cases they were allowed to carry out the killing themselves. Children were trained to spy on their family and neighbors, to be messengers, fighters at the front, foot soldiers, suicide bombers, or snipers. Small hands were trained to make explosives and handle light weapons, rifles, submachine guns, and grenade launchers.

  The extreme was becoming the ordinary.

  * * *

  Girls received their own special upbringing. They couldn’t be Cubs of the Caliphate; instead they were to be Pearls of the Caliphate.

  The Salafist rhetoric gleamed.

  What is more precious than a pearl? If you owned one, would you leave it lying around, would you allow it to be soiled, would you leave it outside the door for people to touch, even steal?

  No, you would wrap it up, place it in a jewelry case, on silk or velvet, and lock it away so as not to tempt thieves. You would take it out only on special occasions, when the circumstances were safe.

  Women were pearls. So beautiful, so precious.

  Best keep the box locked.

  IS set a whole host of rules prescribing the upbringing of girls. They were to have some education but not too much. When very small, they were to stay close to their mothers, learning virtue by example. From the ages of seven to nine, a girl was to study the Koran, mathematics, and Islamic natural sciences. From ten to twelve, she was to learn the fundamentals of Islamic law, particularly the parts concerning women. She was to learn to sew, knit, and cook. From thirteen to fifteen, she was to study sharia, Islamic history, the life and doctrine of Muhammad in depth, as well as housework and child rearing. Marriage should not occur too late in life, possibly at nine years of age, which was the lower limit, while sixteen was viewed as the ideal.