He took a cup of tea with sugar. It tasted metallic.
How had he not seen this coming?!
But who could imagine his little girls wanting to wage jihad?
They dulled us with hugs. They milked my love.
His little girls. The only ones.
The plane entered Turkish airspace.
* * *
At home, Sara, too, was at a loss. She was trying to piece together whatever she could from memory.
The girls had begun to live by strict rules sometime back. Prayer, attire, food, behavior—everything was to be right and pure. They stopped wearing makeup and jewelry. Perfume containing alcohol was thrown out, and then all perfume was disposed of. It was haram—it could attract men.
The girls had downloaded lists of E numbers, the codes for food additives that appeared on food packaging in Europe, and examined packets and cans, checking the ingredients against the lists to see if the product was fit to be consumed by Muslims. Several household foodstuffs were deemed unacceptable. Eventually Sadiq had grown angry. “Where in the Koran does it say anything about E numbers?”
One day Sara had opened the family photo album and found that several pictures had been ripped out. Some had been removed completely, while heads and bodies had been cut out of others. Ayan and Leila had been expunged from the album.
Sara had been furious.
“But we’re not covered, Mom! Imagine if someone outside the family saw us. It’s haram!”
The memories were gone. She had mourned the loss of those photos.
She went into the girls’ room. Stood looking around. No, it was too painful. She went out again. They had left. Without saying goodbye. “We love you both sooo much, would do anything for you, and would never do anything to purposely hurt you,” they had written. So come home, then!
Years ago, she used to scold Ayan for having become too Norwegian. Back then she had been afraid of losing her. Her elder daughter had begun going to parties, and one night Sadiq had seen a packet of snus fall out of her pocket.
Ayan had dressed like her friends, in tight jeans and close-fitting T-shirts. One unusually hot summer evening, Ayan had invited some classmates over for samosa. They had entered the kitchen in low-cut tops, all bare midriffs and white thighs. “My God, they’re naked!” Sara had exclaimed in Somali.
“Get over it, Mom, let people be how they want,” her teenage daughter had replied.
“As long as you promise me never to walk around like that!” Sara said. Ayan had glared at her before turning to her friends and laughing.
Only now did Sara try to recall the last time the girls from the class had visited. She could not remember. She herself had only Somali friends and did not consider it out of the ordinary for Ayan to lose touch with her classmates.
When she and the children came to Norway, Ayan was six, Ismael five, and Leila three years old. They should never have come! They should never have left home! Then this would not have happened and she would have had her daughters with her. She had never actually wanted to leave Somaliland; it was Sadiq who was convinced they would get a better life in the West.
While she had been pregnant with Leila, Sadiq had bought a passport, got a tourist visa to Denmark, and flown from Addis Ababa to Copenhagen. A friend there told him he should go to Norway, that it was the best place for Somalis. Sadiq traveled on to Oslo, where he went to the police and told them that if he returned home he would be killed, as both his father and his brother had been. He related that when he was fourteen years old, all the men in his neighborhood had been rounded up. Those who had supported the rebellion against the dictator Siad Barre were to be put to death. He had been taken along with the men, but his mother had come screaming: “He’s only a child! He’s only a child!”
That was what saved him, he told the asylum authorities. While all the others, including his father, were killed in front of his eyes. “Avenge him!” his mother had later said. He had taken a weapon from a body in the street, he told the authorities, and had joined the rebel forces.
The rebellion was successful but peace was short-lived. The victors began fighting among themselves for control. Two clans, formerly part of the opposition army, from opposite sides of the river running through Hargeisa, both wanted to rule and again took up arms. This was not a war worth dying for, so he left.
Sadiq was sent to the Tanum reception center for asylum seekers in Bærum, after which he was transferred some 350 miles north to Levanger, spending six months there before being sent south again, to Klemetsrud reception center in Oslo. He told them he had been arrested and held prisoner aboard the family’s small cargo boat, together with his brother and the rest of the crew, while it was used to transport weapons. His brother had been killed but Sadiq had been released.
“I’m a dangerous man,” he had told the police upon arrival. The reception center arranged for him to see a psychologist to treat his war trauma. As time went on, his anger lessened, and he calmed down. It was time to bring over his family. But first he needed to be granted asylum. Time dragged on. In May 1998, after two years in Norway, he received an answer.
“The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) is not of the view that the statements of the applicant justify his belief in persecution, in respect of pertinent laws and conventions, upon return to his home country. The civil war and the overall difficulty of the situation in Somalia do not in themselves form a basis for asylum.”
UDI’s opinion was that the capture of the family boat bore the hallmarks
