40 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
BEHIND THE LINESvictory, and he’s promised you defeat. This
battle is not gonna end in Raqqa or Mosul.
It’s gonna end in your lands. By the will of
Allah, we will have victory. So get ready,
for the fighting has just begun.” Michael is
shown loading rounds into an assault rifle
magazine. A man in a black mask shows
him how to fire a sniper rifle. He is also
shown playing with the Yazidi boy, who
says, “We are like brothers.”
A couple of months into the coalition
campaign, the bombardment intensi-
fied. “There was one day I think the hos-
pital got hit with 700 rounds of cannon
fire,” Samantha says. “Everything was
destroyed.” Then, in October 2017, the
bombing stopped. “I woke up one morn-
ing, there was no airplanes, there was no
bombs,” Samantha recalls. “There was
nothing. It was just quiet. We heard birds
singing. It was amazing.”
Abdelhadi showed up and said he was
taking her and the kids to a town near
the Iraq border. When Samantha re-
fused, Abdelhadi said he would take theYazidi children and the three kids she
had with Moussa. She could stay behind
in Raqqa with Michael, but she said no.
“The promises that I’d made, everything
that had been done to survive at this point
would have been undone. How could I
just walk out with my son when I could’ve
done that on the first day?” She agreed to
go with her brother-in-law.
The sdf and the coalition had secretly
agreed to allow isis fighters and their
families to leave the city. Publicly, the sdf
said only a few hundred unarmed fight-
ers were let out, but Samantha says she
rode in a convoy with “thousands of men,
all armed.” (Shortly afterward, an sdf
spokesperson who had defected to Turkey
claimed 4,000 “terrorists” and their fami-
lies had been allowed to evacuate.)
A couple of days after they reachedtheir destination, Samantha says she be-
friended a man who said he could help
them get out. The first smugglers he
found backed out when they learned there
were Yazidi children involved; isis’s pur-
ported penalty for smuggling a Yazidi to
freedom was death. Through an illicit in-
ternet connection, one of the Yazidi girls
contacted her uncle in Iraq, who then
contacted the Kurdish ypg militia. In late
2017, Samantha gave a smuggler $10,000
and a Glock pistol to drive her and the kids
into the desert where a truck was wait-
ing for them. They were then taken to the
Democratic Federation of Northern Syria.fbi agents questioned Samantha while
she was held by US-backed forces. She
tells me the interrogations lasted for
four or five days. On her last day of in-
terviews, the agents told Samantha they
were going to send her to a refugee camp.
She begged them not to. “There are a lot
of people who, especially if my husband’s
brother is still alive, would see us dead,”
she told them. The agents told her it
wouldn’t be long; one said they’d get her
out of Syria in just a few weeks.
When I meet Samantha in the camp
in May 2018, six months have passed
since she escaped the Islamic State. I ask
her what she thinks will happen when
she goes home. She’s not sure, but she
says the fbi told her she would not face
charges. Two months later, she was sent
back to Indiana on a military cargo plane
and brought before a federal judge. So
far, she is the only American woman to
have been charged with terrorism-related
crimes after living inside isis territory.
The evidence against Samantha is
sealed, but the government has argued
that she knowingly assisted Moussa’s ef-
forts to join isis and “willfully brought
her children along for the treacherous
ride.” In their petition for pretrial re-
lease, Samantha’s lawyers said she was
“compelled, both psychologically and
physically, to follow her husband’s and
his brother’s absurd ideas” and that she
had been traumatized by the torture and
abuse she experienced in Syria. They
argued that she had been a “hostage” in
Raqqa and that she saved the lives of her
four children and the three Yazidis. In a
hearing last December, one of her attor-
neys, Thomas Durkin, accused the gov-ernment of prosecuting another victim of
her husband’s crimes. “When you’re mar-
ried to a crazy man who abuses you and
terrorizes you, you do what the crazy man
tells you to do,” he said. “Everything that
you’re looking at here has to be viewed
through the lens of domestic violence and
patriarchal abuse.”
Michael’s propaganda video is likely
to be a key piece of evidence in her trial,
as are two home videos obtained by the
fbi. In one, according to a court docu-
ment, Moussa tells Michael he’ll reward
him with an explosive suicide belt if he
can take apart an assault rifle. In another,
recorded by Samantha, Michael puts to-
gether a suicide belt. Moussa asks him
what he would do if the “American pigs”
come for them. Michael explains how he
would detonate the belt and become a
martyr. Before her arrest, Samantha told
cnn that Moussa beat her when she pro-
tested the making of Michael’s propa-
ganda video. “He became very violent and
scared my son into becoming complicit.
I ended up with two broken ribs on that
video,” she said.
The question of Samantha’s culpability
will also hinge on the Yazidi slaves. Pros-
ecutors have described her involvement
in the purchase and supervision of the
Yazidi children as part of her “horrifying
conduct” in Syria. Durkin has called this
claim “offensive.” “The big pig of a hus-
band bought the Yazidi slaves and had
sex with them in front of her,” he said in
a hearing. “She had nothing to do with
the Yazidi slaves other than to befriend
them...She saved the Yazidis’ lives.”
The Yazidi kids rejoined their families
in Iraq shortly after their escape from isis.
When I contacted the Yazidi boy’s uncle,
he said the boy “thinks about Sam and
her children a lot.” One of the Yazidi girls
sent a video message to cnn in which she
attested to Samantha’s kindness, and said
that Moussa had beaten Samantha for
trying to protect her.
Samantha’s four children were put into
state-supervised care. Michael’s father has
requested to take care of him; her parents
have also asked to care for her children.
She has not been allowed to see her kids
since her arrest. Her trial is scheduled to
begin in January 2020. If she is convicted,
she could be sentenced to more than a
decade in federal prison.“I woke up one
morning, there was
no airplanes, there
was no bombs.
It was just quiet. It
was amazing.”