SHARMEENA, KADIZA, AMIRA, AND SHAMIMA
July 2015, London and Raqqa
Shortly after the ISIS beach attack on British tourists in Tunisia in June 2015 that gained attention around the world, an undercover reporter with the tabloid Daily Mail contacted Amira on Twitter, posing as a young girl interested in going to Syria and asking her if what the news media reported about ISIS was true. Amira responded: “Don’t believe anything they say about islam because they are the enemies of islam and they will never speak good about it. Everything they say is a lie, trust me.” The reporter then fished for her views on the Tunisia attack. Amira responded only with “loool.” When asked whether the tourists were innocent, she advised the reporter to “research, like read about it.”
The newspaper splashed Amira’s face on its front cover, a hammed-up photo from her school days where her eyes are rolled back in mock comic horror. The July 2015 story accused Amira of trying to lure the reporter to join ISIS and documented how “the joking London teen” delivered a “sickening verdict on beach atrocity.” A couple of months prior, in the spring after her arrival in Syria, Amira had married an Australian fighter called Abdullah Elmir, a former butcher from Sydney. In what was possibly one of the most peculiar confrontations in the history of the British press, Elmir contacted the Daily Mail and threatened it with an attack if the newspaper did not stop harassing his wife.
All throughout that summer, the families of the British girls who had gone to Syria nervously monitored their phones and the daily newspapers, wondering how their daughters regarded the violence and inhumanity that now surrounded them. The parents of Aqsa Mahmood, the Scottish blogger known as Umm Layth, found out by reading her blog that she praised ISIS attacks that summer. They issued a stern public disavowal, making clear that Aqsa represented neither their religion nor her family:
The family of Aqsa Mahmood became aware yesterday of her blog Umm Layth posting praise for the attacks in Tunisia, France and Kuwait. They are full of rage at her latest diatribe masquerading as Islam during the holy month of Ramadan. Whilst their daughter may have destroyed any chance of happiness for her own family, they are sickened that she now celebrates the heartbreak of other families. The Mahmood family have a message for any young person attracted to Isis: they say there is no honor, no glory, no god at work in the cowardly massacre of holidaymakers, people at prayer in a Shia mosque or an innocent man at his place of work. As for Aqsa’s words, they can only be described as twisted and evil, this is not the daughter that they raised.
Aqsa’s parents knew that her blog offered easy material to newspapers that were already determined to portray British Muslims, most of whom hated ISIS’s nihilistic brutality, as sympathizers.
Later that year, in November, a little over a week after the terrorist attacks in Paris, The Sun ran a front-page photo of Jihadi John, the young man from London who had become an ISIS executioner, wielding a knife. Above him the headline screamed, “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ Sympathy for Jihadis.” The headline distorted the findings of a survey about British Muslim political opinion, which had asked people to what extent they had sympathy with “young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.” The government press regulator said the paper had conflated many things that were not equal at all: traveling to Syria versus going there to fight; sympathy for those individuals having taken such a path versus support for their actions there; the terms fighters and ISIS.
One of the young pollsters who conducted the survey later wrote anonymously for Vice News about how uncomfortable he had been with the strangely worded, reductive language of the poll, how it elicited answers at odds with the views of the respondents. “Every single person I spoke to for more than five minutes condemned the terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam,” the pollster wrote. “These thoughts and feelings were lost in a small set of multiple-choice questions. The idea that that one badly worded poll can speak for complex and emotional topics such as identity and religion would be funny if it wasn’t so damaging.”
The same week in November as the poll appeared, anti-Muslim racist attacks in the United Kingdom tripled. Women wearing hijab were spat at and had their headscarves ripped off. On social media, hijabi women shared safety tips for train platforms, to minimize chances of getting pushed onto the tracks. The British government press regulator ruled against The Sun for its distorting survey. But the regulatory body was ultimately powerless over the press. Its conditions for investigation were so finicky that it regularly passed over complaints; it imposed no fines, and when it told papers to make corrections, it demanded neither apology nor any placement of prominence. The press suffered no lasting consequences, and as a result had no incentive to change their practices.
Hatred of Muslims sold. As the editor of The Sun said after facing a ruling on a separate incident, he would do the exact same thing again.
RAHMA AND GHOUFRAN
September 2014, Zawiya, Libya
Olfa had spent years working seasonal shifts as a cleaner in Libya, and if there was one thing she could do, it was pick a suitable household in which to become a maid. The lady of the house had to be sufficiently pretty, otherwise she would resent the presence of an attractive woman around her husband and punish her for it with unpleasant tasks and harsh words. She had to be decently tempered, not the sort to scream if the eggplants ended up costing a dinar more than she believed them to be worth. This was easily gauged by a quick chat with the existing housegirls. Olfa was pleased: that summer, she had found good households for both Rahma and Ghoufran in Zawiya, a small city on the Libyan coast.
Zawiya, with its palm trees and apricot municipal buildings, housed one of Libya’s largest oil refineries. The country’s oil wealth, though not evenly distributed, enabled many Libyans to live in sprawling villas staffed with help. Olfa liked Zawiya. The streets were cleaner and there were cafés that served pancakes and mille-feuille. Sometimes the bodies of drowned migrants trying to sail to Sicily washed ashore and were lined up on the sand in black body bags, almost like sardines when you squinted from a distance.
Libyans had risen up against their dictator, Muammar al-Qaddafi, in February 2011, and in March NATO led air strikes ostensibly to protect civilians from government killings. The NATO mission quickly shifted to one of deposing Qaddafi, who was killed later that same year. Chaos engulfed the country, which soon became a breeding ground for various extremist groups, attracting militants from abroad. Competing militias financed by various Arab states vied for control of key cities and oil-rich regions in Libya. The city of Zawiya was locked in confrontation with other armed groups, and the girls’ households were associated with the local militia that ruled the city.
The woman who hired Rahma was welcoming, but had looked confused when Olfa escorted Rahma to the home for her first day of work. “She wants to wear that?” the woman asked, looking at Rahma’s full niqab.
“Yes,” sighed Olfa. “But, inshallah, you can persuade her to take it off during the day, at home at least.”
The matron made clucking noises, and smiled at Rahma. “Here we are like family to you. Don’t feel like you’re with strangers.”
Rahma smiled back with her eyes. Olfa asked to speak privately to the matron, in the kitchen. In a low voice, she explained that her daughter had fallen in with some unsavory groups back in Sousse, and that if she behaved oddly, could the woman please let her know.
The household Rahma worked in was awash in arms. It might have been a depot for the local militia, or perhaps every militiaman’s house was so stocked, Rahma had no idea. While she was cleaning the house, dusting and vacuuming, her gaze moved from a spindle of rifles in the corner to a wooden bureau stacked with teacups on the top shelf and pistols on the others. She couldn’t wait to be alone with these weapons, to peer at her reflection in the gilt-rimmed mirror, with a rifle slung over her shoulder.
Olfa viewed Ghoufran as more
sensible than Rahma, and allowed her a phone. She was working in an equally comfortable home, the household of an oil engineer whose grown-up children were away, and the workload was light. In the ground floor of the apartment block where Ghoufran worked, the girls started attending Quran classes. Rahma was in her second year of trying to memorize the Quran.
In the late afternoon of each day, when she was done with her own cleaning work at her own household, Olfa alternated paying calls to the girls’ households, to help them out with whatever work they had left to do. One hot weekday morning, as Olfa was preparing to mop the floors, Ghoufran showed up at the home her mother worked in. She flung her arms around Olfa and gripped her tight. “Please forgive me,” she whispered in her mother’s ear.
“Forgive you for what? You haven’t done anything wrong. Why aren’t you at work?” Olfa asked suspiciously, disentangling herself from Ghoufran’s dramatic grip.
“Rahma needs your help today,” Ghoufran said. “They’re having guests, so even though it’s my day, could you please go to her instead?”
Olfa agreed and shooed Ghoufran off; she wanted to get the mopping done before lunch. After she finished her own work, she went to Rahma’s home and stayed with her until sunset, even though she didn’t see any preparations under way for a party. “It got canceled,” Rahma said, shrugging.
The next morning, Olfa’s phone rang. The woman who employed Ghoufran said she hadn’t come home the night before. She hadn’t left a note. The panic struck Olfa so completely that she ran out of the house without her shoes, flying the three blocks to Ghoufran’s house. She stopped every person she passed on the way and asked, panting, “Do you know my daughter Ghoufran? Have you seen her?” She had thought Rahma was the impetuous one, the one in danger of going astray. Never did she think that Ghoufran, her confidante, her wise eldest and most beloved child, would be the one to go! Olfa imagined what might have happened. Perhaps she had met a man, a nice man, and run off with him. Perhaps she would hear from her soon, a phone call to say that his stuffy middle-class parents hadn’t approved, so they had eloped, and were living in Tripoli and could Olfa make arrangements to visit soon.
When she arrived at Rahma’s household, her daughter looked at her disheveled clothes, her bare feet caked with dust and dirt. “Don’t stress yourself, Mummy, there’s nothing you can do. Ghoufran has gone to Syria,” she said in a mild voice.
“Syria!” Olfa hissed.
The woman who employed Rahma, the wife of the militia leader, overheard the exchange. “Has she really gone to Syria?” she asked, curiously.
Olfa knelt down and began kissing Rahma’s feet, weeping and begging her daughter, “Tell me where she’s gone, don’t take your sister away from me.”
“Calm down,” Rahma’s employer told Olfa. “Let’s find out exactly what’s happened.” She called her husband and asked him to come home. The militias operated a tight security cordon around the city, and if Rahma helped them with a bit of information—told them who Ghoufran had left with, what kind of car they had been driving—her husband could probably track her down.
The husband, a tall man with a clipped beard, soon arrived, followed by two men wearing beige camouflage. One of these camouflaged men sat across from Rahma and tried to reason with her. “Listen, girl, we can dispatch to checkpoints on all roads going out of this city, but we need a scrap from you. A name, a town, a direction, a call. Something.” Rahma sat silent. He tried, and the other man tried again, but with no luck. Olfa beat at her chest and shrieked. Her histrionics made the militiamen grow impatient with Rahma. One of them pushed her down to her knees. “How dare you do this to your mother! Tell me right now where your sister has gone.”
Rahma slipped a hand into her pocket, waved a scrap of paper with a phone number, and shoved it into her mouth. “I won’t say a thing,” she said. Olfa grabbed her throat. Rahma grasped at her mother’s hands, her eyes watery, and swallowed.
The militiaman turned to Olfa. “Lady, your daughter is really pissing me off. I’m gonna kill her if she doesn’t give me something to go on.”
Olfa was fed up too. “I don’t care, kill her!” she shouted. She was furious with Rahma, this girl who had been trouble from the start.
Rahma straightened her headscarf, pulled back her shoulders, and smilingly began to recite, “There is no God but God…”
At this, Olfa smacked her in the face. “Shut up with your dawla bullshit!”
By morning, her eyes raw from crying, Olfa accepted that Ghoufran was gone. Overnight she had called friends and acquaintances in Tunisia asking for help, and everyone had advised her to return home; Libya didn’t have a government, and you needed a government to get a missing girl back.
Back in Tunis, the weeks that followed were a blur of meetings in police stations and lawyers’ offices and television appearances. By this point, Olfa told the police that they could do what they wanted with Rahma. “I don’t need her anymore. Just make her tell you where her sister is. All I want is her sister back.”
The security services interrogated Rahma on and off for days, sometimes keeping her in detention overnight. Rahma, the fearless and stubborn daughter, actually seemed to thrive on the ordeal. She told her mother that if she was hurt or killed before she made it out to the caliphate in Syria, she would still qualify as a martyr. Often the police permitted Olfa to sit in on the interrogations, as Rahma was still a minor. What came out of her daughter’s mouth stunned her. Rahma admitted openly to being with ISIS; she declared she had given her allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She mentioned sites on the internet she had used to learn about handling weapons.
The policeman looked genuinely tired of taking these notes. “If you’re such a true believer, why didn’t you just go with your sister?” he asked.
“Because I want my operation to be here in Tunisia,” she replied.
“Lady, you really should advise your daughter to keep quiet. She’s going to spend her whole life in prison,” the officer said to Olfa.
But it seemed to Olfa that the security establishment wanted the exact opposite: they wanted Rahma to run her mouth, to glean intelligence. To show up at the security directorate every morning looking at Facebook Messenger, where she messaged with Ghoufran, so the police could monitor their exchanges. Perhaps they were using her daughter to collect intelligence (likely). Or perhaps it suited those in power to let this fester and blow up (also likely). The political and security machinations that shaped the official handling of her daughter eluded Olfa, who felt like a pawn in a much wider, more intricate game.
By that time, the end of 2015, hundreds of Tunisian women had left the country to join ISIS. Olfa was the rare mother willing to go on television and speak about her experience. The public conversation about young Tunisians joining the jihad in Syria tended to overlook women, and when they were addressed at all, the media cast their motivations as purely sexual. Media reports claimed that Tunisian women were traveling to Syria and Libya to become Islamic concubines under a practice breathlessly termed “sex jihad.” It was a fake, mash-up concept of layered misrepresentations: one, that women were traveling to Syria as comfort women to fighters; two, that they justified this behavior theologically.
The “sex jihad” coverage emanated from media outlets associated with either the Tunisian security services or the Syrian state, both of which were keen to portray the fighters and women flowing into Syria as deviants or terrorists, or, in this instance, deviant-slut terrorists. There were headlines everywhere in the Tunisian press about women returning en masse from Syria, pregnant or with HIV. Among the Tunisian media and political establishment, there was no wish for a conversation about why hundreds of women were voting with their feet—voting against the failed promises of the new Tunisia, voting against the present regional order—by going to Syria. It was far easier to cast blame on violent extremists motivated by deformed religion and lust.<
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Olfa knew her girls weren’t motivated by sex. They weren’t even motivated by finding a husband. Of course they were, to varying degrees, romantics, but what teenage girls weren’t? But they hadn’t been seduced into the cause by a particular young man. In fact, both girls had received numerous proposals from local men after the dawah tent, but neither had shown any interest. When a TV presenter confronted Olfa with the sex jihad theory for the first time, as an explanation for her wayward daughters, Olfa was furious. “This idea is just ridiculous. I am not defending these organizations by saying that, but the idea that my daughter went as some sort of sex slave is just not true. She had choices and she made this choice.”
NOUR
August 2014, Le Kram, Tunis
Nour fell asleep every night with her mobile phone in her palm. It was how she kept in touch with Karim, who had flown to Paris, then driven to Brussels, and from there gone on to Turkey. She had given birth to their daughter in the spring and sent Karim a photo of her on Telegram, although the picture didn’t seem like enough. She wished he could smell the milk breath and feel the strangling grip of their daughter’s little fist.
She thought they would join him after a few weeks, after the baby passed her forty-day cocooning period, but everything started going wrong. She learned from the passport office that she would need her husband’s permission in order to leave the country with the baby, and her father’s permission to leave at all. To stem the flow of young Tunisians to Syria, the government had started imposing often arbitrary travel restrictions on citizens under thirty-five. The cost of the journey, the air tickets alone, amounted to more than she had.
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