JULY / AUGUST 2019 | MOTHER JONES 39she deserved everything else she got.
He began talking about wanting to buy
Yazidi girls. isis had been selling mem-
bers of the ancient religious minority
as slaves since it captured thousands of
them in Iraq in August 2014. Moussa
decided to buy a 17-year-old girl. Then
he bought a 14-year-old girl. After that,
Samantha says she convinced him to pay
$1,500 for a seven-year-old boy.
Samantha tells me she treated the
children like her own. “They became my
best friends,” she says. She taught them
some English. “They called me Mom. We
were very close. And they hated my hus-
band. You can imagine why.”
When Moussa came home, Samantha
says, he would tell her which girl he
wanted for the night. Samantha would
ask the girl to shower and put on nice
clothes and would send her to Moussa’s
room. “He would go in, and then he would
leave. It was like a two-minute thing,” she
says. “He wanted to have babies.” When
one of the girls refused to shower, Moussa
became angry and told Samantha to force
her to bathe. “I’m like, I’m not going to
make her do anything,” she says. He put
the girl in the shower, stripped her, and
beat her. “I cried,” Samantha tells me.
“What can I do, you know?”
When Moussa was away, Samantha
says, everything was different. “When-
ever he would leave, we were all relaxed,
and we could laugh and we would sing
and we would have fun.” Their little
house felt like a refuge.
But by early 2017, it felt like a real war
was coming. Not far from Raqqa, the
Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-
led alliance backed by the United States,
tried to seize Syria’s largest dam from isis.
Raqqa residents, afraid the dam would
break and flood the city, began to flee.^
Coalition jets bombed an empty build-
ing and dropped flyers that she remem-
bers warned, “We’re going to do this to
your city. Get out.” But the planes had also
bombed the bridges across the Euphrates
and there was no easy way out. “If we sur-
vive this, we get out of here,” she told her
kids. “We go home.”
As Kurdish forces approached, Moussa
gave Samantha the keys to their car and
told her to take the kids to an isis-held
town in Deir Ezzor province, while he
stayed behind and fought. She refused.
Sticking out the US-led assault seemed
like her best chance for getting out of
the Islamic State, she tells me.
“You understand you might die here,”
Moussa said.
“You understand I might die there,” she
responded. “You understood this when
you brought me here. Don’t pretend now
you have some sort of respect of life.” If
she left Raqqa, she thought, she’d still be
trapped. In August 2017, she gave birthto her fourth child, a daughter.
During the battle, Moussa would dis-
appear for a week at a time. “Any day, he’s
going to die,” Samantha would tell the
kids. “It’s inevitable. Just be patient.” In
September 2017, Abdelhadi told her he’d
seen Moussa get killed. She was relieved.
As she tells me about her efforts to
resist Moussa, Samantha doesn’t mention
one of the most troubling episodes of her
story—one that the government would
later present as evidence that she went
along with her husband’s radicalization
and that she would say is proof of how
he coerced her. In August 2017, 10-year-
old Michael appeared in an isis propa-
ganda video. In it, he introduces himself
as Yusuf. He says he is from the land of
unbelievers, the child of “an American
soldier who fought the mujahideen in
Iraq.” When he and his mother came to
the Islamic State, he says, they learned the
“correct Islamic creed.”
“We live in a small city called Raqqa,”
Michael recites. “This city has scared
the whole world, because the Muslims
who live in it have learned the meaning
of jihad and have established the rule of
Allah. Because of this, all the nations of
the world who are led by America have
gathered to scare us away from what
we have established.”
He continues: “My message to Trump,
the puppet of the Jews: Allah promised usYou Can’t
Go Home
Again
eight years of civil war in
Syria have uprooted more than
half the country’s prewar
population. More than 6
million people are displaced
internally; another 6 million
have fled the country. With isis
defeated and Bashar al-Assad
still firmly in power, the
question of what’s next for
displaced Syrians remains
unanswered.
Most Syrians who left the
country are in neighboring
countries: 3.6 million in Turkey,
nearly 1 million in Lebanon, and
more than 600,000 in Jordan.
More than 90 percent are living
outside refugee camps in
makeshift shelters and urban
areas, often in dangerous and
overcrowded conditions. One
million Syrians have gone to
Europe, fueling the rise of
far-right anti-immigrant
parties. President Trump, who
has characterized Syrian
refugees as potential terrorists,
has all but slammed the door in
their faces: Nearly 15,500 were
admitted to the United Statesin 2016, but only 41 in 2018.
In a crisis of this scale, says
Shelly Culbertson, a senior
policy researcher at the rand
Corporation, allowing refugees
to languish in camps or
resettling them all in new
countries are both unrealistic
solutions. “There needs to be
sustained effort and leader-
ship by the US and EU and
other stakeholders, looking at
the refugee issue, not to just
hope that it resolves itself—
because it won’t,” she says.
Yet the prospect of
rebuilding a Syria that refugees
can return to remains daunt-
ing. The United Nations putsthe reconstruction bill at $250
billion; Assad has said it may be
closer to $400 billion. None of
the major players in the
conflict are ready to pony up.
Russia has said the United
States and its Western allies
should pay, a notion then –UN
Ambassador Nikki Haley
dismissed as “absurd.” Last
summer, Trump announced the
end of a “ridiculous” $230
million commitment to fixing
Syria’s infrastructure and
clearing mines, tweeting that
“Saudi Arabia and other rich
countries in the Middle East
will start making payments
instead of the U.S.” —Annie Ma