Mother Jones – July-August 2019

BEHIND THE LINES

behind the fence of a refugee camp in the green

plains of northeastern Syria, a white woman ap-

proaches from the sea of tents. Her long brown

hair spills out of a beanie, and there is a black tattoo

of a kiss on her neck. She tells me she’d like to talk,

and we sit down in a prefabricated office on the

edge of the camp. An intelligence officer from the

Kurdish women’s militia listens in to our conversa-

tion. Samantha Elhassani tells me she’s an Ameri-

can and a Christian and that she’d come from

Indi ana to Syria with her young son and daughter

after her husband decided to join isis without telling her.

“I was not aware we were coming to Syria,” she says. She

lived under control of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

for three years in Raqqa, where she had two more children.

She survived the American-led assault on the city, escaped

isis, and now wants to go home.

Samantha says her Syrian saga started around 2014. She

was living near South Bend, Indiana, with her husband,

Moussa, who had immigrated to the United States from

Morocco about a decade earlier. “He was very American,

nothing abnormal about him,” Samantha tells me. “He’s

Muslim, I’m Christian. He never had a problem with any-

thing I did. He drove a Porsche.” He wasn’t religious, she

says. “He didn’t even grow a beard.”

When she couldn’t afford to get knee surgery, she says

that Moussa suggested she get it done in Morocco. He also

mentioned that houses were cheap and they should con-

sider moving there. Samantha says she traveled to a pretty

coastal town in Morocco where she found luxury apart-

ments for sale for $30,000. She could imagine raising her

one-and-a-half-year-old daughter and her seven-year-old

son from a previous relationship there. By the time she got

back to Indiana, she says, Moussa had put their cars up for

sale and had sold their washer and dryer.

From here, Samantha’s story gets more bizarre. She says

that as her family prepared to move, she made trips to Hong

Kong, where she deposited cash in a safe deposit box to

“evade taxes.” Then the family flew to Turkey—after stopping

in Hong Kong to pick up their money. When they arrived

in Turkey, Samantha was surprised to find one of Moussa’s

brothers, Abdelhadi, waiting for them. Samantha says they

traveled together to Sanliurfa, a city near the Syrian border,

to visit a Muslim pilgrimage site.

When they got there, Samantha says, Moussa began acting

strangely. He would go off with his brother all day, telling

her to stay in their hotel room. After a week, Moussa told

An American

in the

Islamic State

“If we survive this,

we get out of

here,” Samantha

told her kids.

“We go home.”

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