38 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
BEHIND THE LINEScocaine, and liked action. On one binge,
he wrecked a Dodge Viper. “Moussa was
very successful,” his father, Mohamed
Almahdi Elhassani, tells me over the
phone from Morocco. “He loved ex-
pensive cars.” Moussa worked for the
family business, but Lori was trying
to push him out. Employees had com-
plained that he was trying to sell them
coke and that he had sexually harassed a
teenage employee. When the girl’s boy-
friend confronted Moussa, Moussa held
a hunting knife to his throat and slashed
his car tires. Lori fired Moussa several
times, but he kept coming back.
Within a month of arriving in Indiana,
Samantha started dating Moussa. They
were married in 2012. Court documents
say Samantha “has consistently described
Moussa prior to Syria as a loving, dedi-
cated father and husband, who spared
no expense for his family, showered her
with jewelry and cars and treated [her
son] as his own son.” But according to
people who knew Samantha and Moussa,their relationship quickly went bad. AJ
Moring, a childhood friend of Samantha’s
who worked at the shipping company
and lived with the couple, says Moussa
hit Samantha and sometimes took away
her keys and credit cards so she couldn’t
leave. Moring says Moussa would go on
cocaine binges and barricade himself and
Samantha in their house. Both Lori and
Moring recall that Moussa once tried to
tear off Samantha’s clothes, telling Mi-
chael to grab a pair of scissors so he could
“finish the job.”
Moring says Samantha told him that
Moussa had threatened to kill her if
she ever left. Lori tells me Samantha
gave her three expensive watches to
hang onto “in case she ever needed to
escape.” But Samantha also protected
Moussa. Samantha filed a restrainingorder against Moring after he confronted
Moussa about his abusive behavior. Lori
recalls a time when Moussa threw Sa-
mantha and her son out in the cold. She
convinced Samantha to leave town, but
then Moussa called and begged Saman-
tha to come back. She relented.
Moring says Samantha started abus-
ing hydrocodone. Lori recalls seeing nee-
dles in her house. Federal prosecutors say
Samantha has acknowledged that she and
her husband abused drugs.
The shipping company’s warehouse
manager, Angela Benke, tells me that
Moussa was packaging gun parts and
marking them as toys before send-
ing them to other countries, partic-
ularly Turkey. Lori says she reported
the shipments to the fbi, and she and
other employees say law enforcement
seized some of the packages. Samantha
also talked to the fbi, according to Lori
and their father. In a hearing last year,
one of Samantha’s lawyers said she had
spent two years as a paid informant for
the agency, providing the serial numbers
of cellphones shipped to Yemen. Fed-
eral prosecutors confirmed that she was
a confidential source for the fbi before
she left for Syria. They didn’t specify the
nature of her work, but they said it was
not part of a terrorism investigation.
In 2012, Lori quit her job and divorced
her husband, who had been charged with
domestic battery. In a written statement,
Samantha told the prosecutor that he
was “being played” by Lori, who was a
“scorned woman with delusions of get-
ting even.” Samantha also testified that
her sister was “not truthful” and that she
bruised easily. Yassine was acquitted. (He
pleaded guilty in a subsequent case. He
did not respond to requests for com-
ment.) The sisters stopped talking.
Then, in early 2015, Lori heard that
Samantha and Moussa were selling ev-
erything, including their cars and house.
Their neighbor told Lori that Moussa had
showed him gold bullion in the back seat
of his car. According to federal prosecu-
tors, Moussa bought more than $60,000
worth of precious metals and melted
them down in the company warehouse
with Samantha’s help. Samantha pulled
Michael out of class; the school was told
they were moving to Mexico. Prosecutors
say Samantha also lied to Michael’s father,saying she was taking him on vacation to
Paris. Samantha also allegedly lied about
her travel plans to the fbi agents she’d
been providing information to.
According to the government’s version
of events, Samantha visited Morocco but
never looked for houses there. Shortly
after that, she took Michael to Hong
Kong twice, depositing at least $30,000
in a safe deposit box. She then returned
to Hong Kong with Moussa and her two
kids. There she allegedly arranged to buy
rifle scopes and image-stabilized binocu-
lars. Then the family flew to Istanbul—
along with Moussa’s brother Abdelhadi.
They entered Syria sometime between
April and July 2015, when isis was near
the peak of its expansion, and more than
a year after Samantha had told me they’d
crossed the border.
According to his father, Moussa said
he was being “targeted” for taxes and he
wanted to live in an Islamic country where
he wouldn’t have to pay taxes. Moussa also
told his dad it seemed like the Islamic
State was becoming a genuine caliphate,
and he thought life would be better there.
“We told him, ‘We will disown you if you
go to Syria,’” his father recalls. Moussa told
his dad he would not become a fighter;
he’d merely be an administrative em-
ployee for the Islamic State.
When Samantha and Moussa disap-
peared, Lori didn’t have the slightest
idea they had left the country. She fig-
ured they had ripped off a drug dealer.
It wouldn’t have been the first time
Samantha was on the run.in early 2017 , Samantha called Lori for
the first time in two years to say she was
in Raqqa. She phoned occasionally after
that, but their conversations were fur-
tive and brief. Lori asked Abdelhadi to
send Samantha’s kids home, but he told
her he would rather they died in the
Islamic State than go back to America.
Later, he said he would send Michael if
she paid a ransom. Lori showed me what
she described as a “proof-of-life picture”
of Michael in Syria. It shows him holding
a sign that says: “I miss you auntie Lori.
Happy Valentine’s Day. February, 2017.”
Moussa grew hardened after being
imprisoned by isis, Samantha says. He
didn’t excuse the sexual abuse she’d been
subjected to behind bars, but he saidThe video shows her
10-year-old son
loading rifle rounds.
“Get ready,” he says,
“for the fighting has
ju s t b e g u n .”