Bastian locked her indoors. He locked her out of the house. He hit her. Worst of all, he beat Salahuddin. He now had in his custody the son of Arfan Bhatti, the man he had always dreamed of impressing and resembling.
When Aisha attempted to protect her son, when she screamed at her new husband, he just pushed her aside.
He boasted that he was going to teach Bhatti’s son how to be tough. Salahuddin was going to be a Cub of the Caliphate, and thus he needed to be disciplined from an early age. The boy was not yet two.
Aisha was forbidden from going out. Bastian told her he would kill her if she left the house. One day, needing something for Salahuddin, she had tried to sneak out.
Bastian found out and fired shots after her in the street, she later told a friend, forcing her to turn and go back.
Dilal had tried and tried but had not been able to get in touch with her since she had received the picture of the battered and bruised little boy. She didn’t have a phone number for her, so she sent a message on WhatsApp.
“How are things with Salahuddin?” she asked. “What’s happened to him?? Answer me! Aisha, please!”
There was no reply from Raqqa.
Then one night she received a message from Aisha saying she needed the money in the aid account.
“What happened to Salahuddin?” Dilal asked.
Everything was fine with him now, Aisha answered, adding praise for the Islamic State. The system was fantastic, everything worked, they were very happy and were having a great time.
Dilal told her she had given the money to Save the Children, and inquired more about Salahuddin’s blue marks in the photo she had been sent a few weeks earlier. Aisha did not respond. Then several hours later, shortly after midnight, when Dilal was about to doze off, she received a new message on WhatsApp.
“I have to tell you something,” it began.
Aisha was typing.
She and Bastian had argued, a couple of weeks back, she wrote. He had slapped her before throwing her into the backyard, locking the door, and beginning to hit Salahuddin. She had stood with her ear to the closed door, pleading for him to stop.
The child had screamed. Loudly, desperately. Gradually, only exhausted crying was audible. She heard a thump against the wall. The sobbing stopped. It was quiet.
Then she heard the sound of Emira gasping from inside, the key was turned and the door thrown open. Salahuddin lay lifeless in her friend’s arms.
His face was swollen, covered in blood and vomit; his cartilage was smashed, the whites of his eyes were red, the blood vessels burst. Aisha tried to bring him around, shook him. His body was warm but limp. He had no pulse. No heartbeat. No breath.
Dilal sat in bed, shuddering.
The blows to Salahuddin’s head must have caused him to throw up, she reasoned. He would then have lost consciousness and suffocated on his own vomit, or his respiratory tract might have filled with blood.
The student nurse sat looking at the words as they appeared on the screen.
“I held him in my arms. I carried him out to the backyard,” Aisha wrote. “I went around the garden the whole night with my dead son in my arms.”
Dilal was numb.
She was also furious. At the child murderer, and at her friend. She was to blame for her son’s death, she had taken him to a war zone filled with psychopaths, for her own damn sake. She was deranged!
“What about Emira?” Dilal asked. “Couldn’t she have stopped him?”
Emira, who had just given birth, sought refuge when Bastian became violent, tried to protect herself and her own child. Bastian never laid a hand on her, Aisha added.
Dilal received another picture.
It was a grave in sandy soil, some dry straws coming up through it. There was Arabic writing on the stone that Dilal could not read. Perhaps they were words of praise to Allah, perhaps it read Salahuddin. The light was yellowish, a breeze must have been blowing, filling the air with sand.
There, beneath the stone, beneath the thistles, beneath the sand, lay Salahuddin.
Just shy of his second birthday.
“He’s in a better place now,” Aisha wrote. “He is a martyr. He is with God.”
Children went straight to God, she emphasized. Their souls were carried by beautiful birds. In paradise, the children were free, they could fly anywhere they wanted, and when they grew tired they could rest in the lanterns hanging from God’s throne, just like the martyrs.
“Can I ask you a favor?” Aisha continued. It was now late at night.
“Of course,” Dilal replied.
“Can you tell my mother that Salahuddin is dead?”
Dilal could not believe it. “Have you not told your mother?!”
“I can’t bring myself to…”
That night the student nurse wept for the boy she had kissed as a newborn but barely known. She was still married to Ubaydullah back then. He had held the boy and said he had Arfan’s smile. Later, she had cuddled with him, pushed him in his stroller. What if she had reported Aisha to the police when she had started talking about traveling to Syria? She had threatened to contact Child Welfare but had not. She had been busy with her own life. The student nurse was at a loss. She might have been obliged to report it? Could she have saved Salahuddin’s life? Would he still be alive now…?
It turned out Aisha had approached several friends and asked them to tell her mother about Salahuddin. Three of them met to consider what to do.
“Every time I see a little Pakistani baby, my eyes well up with tears!” one
