Mother Jones – July-August 2019

JULY  AUGUST 2019  MOTHER JONES 35

her to gather her things. The family got

into a white van. Samantha says she soon

realized they weren’t heading to the air-

port to go to Morocco. They stopped in

the middle of nowhere, near a stretch of

the Syrian border with heavy  pres-

ence. Moussa grabbed their daughter

and Samantha’s handbag, which held her

passport and their cash. Then he walked

toward the frontier. “Do I go or do I stay?”

she asked herself. She grabbed her son, got

out of the van, and followed her husband.

This story seems ishy to me. If

Samantha couldn’t aff ord knee surgery,

why was she fl ying around the world de-

positing cash? Did she really have no idea

Moussa was planning to head into  ter-

ritory until this Sophie’s Choice moment?

Samantha is not the only American

woman to have survived her time inside

 territory who now says she didn’t

know what she was getting into. “Once

I look back on it, I can’t stress how much

of a crazy idea it was,” Hoda Muthana, a

young woman from Alabama who’d run

a pro- Twitter account from inside

Syria, told the New York Times earlier this

year. Kimberly Polman, who has Amer-

ican and Canadian citizenship, said she

entered the Islamic State “as a humani-

tarian.” “How do you go from burning a

passport to crying yourself to sleep be-

cause you have so much deep regret?” she

asked. At least seven American women

are known to have traveled to join 

and other jihadist groups in Syria and

Iraq; at least 57 American men have.

Samantha has good reason to be cagey

as she talks to me. Two months later,

she was fl own back to the United States,

where she was charged with aiding her

husband’s eff ort to join  and provid-

ing material support to a terrorist group.

Federal prosecutors have described her

as “an adventure-seeker, prone to reck-

lessness and...willing to lie and use

people and relationships to advance her

goals.” Many of the things she told me

are contradicted by the government’s ac-

count of her journey. Prosecutors assert

that Samantha told the  that Moussa

had told her about his desire to join 

months before they went to Syria. When

one of Moussa’s relatives in Morocco

confronted her about her husband’s in-

terest in , she allegedly said she would

“follow him anywhere.”

   or coerce Samantha

to come to the Islamic State or did she

come of her own free will? Sitting with her

in the refugee camp, it’s hard to fathom

what could have motivated her. She does

not seem to be driven by religion, ideol-

ogy, or any fi rm beliefs. Much of her ac-

count of her time in Syria is impossible to

confi rm, but it’s clear she wasn’t prepared

for what she encountered.

She says that soon after her family

crossed the Syrian border, she and her

kids were separated from her husband.

They drove to Raqqa, where she was

confi ned in a house with women from

France, Germany, and Arab countries

while their husbands were taken off to

training. The women scolded her for

not praying. “Nobody knew that I wasn’t

Muslim,” she tells me.

After three months in the house, she

saw Moussa again. “I didn’t even recog-

nize him,” she says. He was grimy, with

a beard, a gun, and a huge smile. He

hugged his daughter.

“I’m leaving,” Samantha told him. “You

can’t keep us here.”

“You can try and go,” she recalls him

saying. “But you’ll never make it.”

Moussa rented an apartment in Raqqa,

then went off to fi ght. “I was terrifi ed of

living in this city,” Samantha says. “Ter-

rifi ed.” Armed men were everywhere.

“These guys wearing long beards, and

women in niqab, and everybody is just

so angry.” After Moussa left, she bought

a small house outside the city. “I moved

as far away from the city as I could get to

where there’s no security checkpoints.”

When Moussa came back about a month

later, he was mad that she hadn’t con-

sulted him. Samantha told him that if

she was going to accept her new life, she

needed her space, and he relented.

Now that he was an  soldier, Moussa

“was confused on whether he wanted to

die or if he wanted to live,” Samantha

says. Should he be a martyr and go to

heaven or live and provide for his family?

In between his stints at the front, Moussa

Qamishli

SYRIA

Aleppo

Deir Ezzor

Raqqa

Damascus

Homs

LEBANON

ISRAEL

JORDAN

IRAQ

TURKEY

Conoco gas fi eld

Gas and oil fi elds Euphrates River

Tigris River

DEMOCRATIC

FEDERATION OF

NORTHERN SYRIA

R O J AVA

MAP BY LO BÉNICHOU AT MAPBOX. © MAPBOX, © OPENSTREETMAP

Go to motherjones.com/syria to read

Shane Bauer’s full report, watch his

videos from Syria, and listen to him

on the Mother Jones Podcast.