Mother Jones – July-August 2019

36 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019

BEHIND THE LINES

would try to make the family happy,

bringing home a cat and taking them

to restaurants selling Western food. He

wanted her son, whom I’ll call Michael, to

go to school, but Samantha refused and

homeschooled him.

Samantha didn’t speak Arabic, but

she would occasionally go to a neigh-

bor’s house for tea. The neighbor was a

smoker; cigarettes were banned by isis,

so she thought she might be able to trust

him. Eventually, she managed to commu-

nicate that she wanted to leave Syria with

her kids. The neighbor said he’d arrange a

smuggler. She prepared mentally for the

journey, waiting for Moussa to return to

the battlefield after he recovered from a

mortar blowing up in his hand.

While he was recuperating, isis’s police

broke down their door and arrested

Samantha and Moussa. Apparently, her

escape plot had been discovered. The

police brought her to the Black Stadium,

the soccer arena that isis had turned into

its main prison in Raqqa, where she was

held for two and a half months. A French

woman, an Australian man, an Egyptian

man, and a Syrian man interrogated her

and pressured her to admit to being a spy,

she says. She was told that Moussa was

dead and her children had been sold as

slaves in Iraq.

“I was tortured, I was beaten—just

the sickest things that you could possi-

bly imagine happened to me,” she recalls.

“I was told that they were going to do ev-

erything to me that the Americans did to

their brothers in Guantánamo Bay. You

hear screams, you see blood on the floor.

It’s all night: sleep deprivation, hunger,

living in your own filth, regular beatings,

the humiliation, electrocution. You stay

in a cell that you can’t even stretch your

legs in. There’s no toilet, there’s nothing.

You just can’t imagine. They hang you up

by the ceiling and they strip you naked

and they beat you in front of a bunch of

men. They take their imagination and

they just roll with it.” Samantha was vis-

ibly pregnant. An Egyptian interrogator

put cables on her belly and asked, “Does

your child move when I electrocute you?”

In June 2016, as the Syrian army was

attempting to take the city, she heard

bombs falling around the prison. Sud-

denly, the ceiling of her cagelike cell

fell in, busting the door open. She and

other prisoners spilled into the streets.

In the confusion, she spotted Moussa.

She couldn’t believe it. “He looked like

a walking ghost,” she recalls. They took

cover and when the bombing ended, they

ran. Then he stopped.

“We have to go back,” he told her.

“They have to know you didn’t do any-

thing wrong.”

It dawned on her that they had no-

where to go. The city was surrounded

by checkpoints. If they went home, they

would be arrested again and punished for

escaping. They had fled one prison only to

find themselves in a larger one. They went

back and turned themselves in. Samantha

says she was taken before isis judges, who

said they would try to get her released.

A few days later, she was dropped off on

the street about a mile from her house.

She was nine months pregnant, covered

in scars, and she says she could barely

walk on the leg her interrogators had frac-

tured. Her kids, who had been passed be-

tween the houses of people she knew in

Raqqa, were returned to her. Her son told

Samantha that when he had asked about

her, he was told that she was an infidel

and that she had been killed.

In January 2017, Samantha posted on

Facebook: “Just so everyone knows, I’m

ok and my kiddos are ok :) We are all

doing just fine. I will get on soon and

update everyone with a very public

update about what’s up and I miss ev-

eryone so much. I love you guys!!”

after i leave Syria, I track down people

who might know more about Samantha’s

journey. “This is not a story of Syria,” Lori

Sally Nishat, her sister and the ex-wife

of Moussa’s brother Yassine, tells me.

“It’s not about jihad—at all.” The stories

I hear from Lori and other people who

knew Samantha reveal patterns of attrac-

tion, abuse, and escape that would follow

her to Syria. “This did not start in even

the last 10 years,” Lori says. “This started

way back when we were younger.”

I meet with Lori in South Bend, about

an hour’s drive from where Samantha

is now jailed. Lori tells me about their

childhood growing up as Jehovah’s Wit-

nesses in Arkansas^ and Oklahoma. Out-

siders to the faith were kept at a distance.

Their parents were not fond of public

schooling and eventually home schooled

them. Their upbringing emphasized

Bible study, worshipping God, and pre-

paring for Armageddon. At one point,

Lori remembers, their mother believed

their house was possessed by demons.

To fix the problem, church elders told the

family to burn their videotapes of Dances

With Wolves and Field of Dreams.

Samantha and Lori’s dad, who asked

not to be named, doesn’t remember that

incident. He was away from home a lot,

Samantha says she

was waiting for her

husband to die in

battle. “It’s inevitable.

Just be patient.”

64

Americans are

known to have

joined isis

and other jihadist

groups in Syria

and Iraq between

2011 and 2018.

7

of them were

women.

34%

died overseas.

75%

of those who

returned home

have been charged

with terrorism-

related crimes.

16

American service

members have

been killed in action

during the campaign

against isis.