thank god
their father found them, one of them had gunshot wounds and it was Leila
No! Are you serious?
What?!
Not exactly a bombshell
Play on words?
No … oh, shit
Soon after his arrival back in the country, Sadiq was debriefed by the Police Security Service. They wanted to get an overview of the different militias in Syria, of how and where they operated. Sadiq had gained some insight in the time he spent with Osman, as well as intimate knowledge of the conditions in an ISIS prison. PST was particularly interested in Norwegian jihadists in Syria. Had he spoken to any?
When the girls had left, Sadiq had sought advice from Geir Lippestad, who had come into the public eye as defense counsel for the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Lippestad was the only lawyer Sadiq had heard of, so therefore he contacted him. The lawyer now spoke to the media on behalf of the family. He told NRK, the state broadcaster, that the girls would be leaving Syria as soon as the younger one was on her feet again.
A young Somali, a good friend of Hisham, was surprised to hear this. Was Ayan going to leave his friend after only a month of marriage?
The young man knew both Ayan and Hisham well, and was also a friend of the Koran teacher, Mustafa, who had exchanged letters with Ayan before she had left, letters he assumed had been about the trip to Syria. Now, was Ayan and Leila’s stay coming to an end already?
He called Hisham in Syria to ask if it was true.
“Chill out, brother,” Hisham replied. “Don’t believe everything you hear!”
“What happened?” his friend in Oslo asked. He had wanted to travel to Syria himself but had remained behind in Norway, first when Hisham left, and then when Ayan departed. He was among the few who had been privy to Ayan’s plans and had urged her to reconsider. Not because he did not support jihad—he did—but because he believed women should not go until the fighting was over. War was no place for them. But Ayan had taken umbrage at that.
He told her, “No matter how much I may want to go, I just can’t do that to my mom.”
Ayan had merely smiled and said she was doing it as much for her parents as for herself.
Hisham’s friend knew it would destroy his mother if he left. Like Sara, she was a traditional Somali woman, devout but not an extremist. The trip was Ayan’s business, she was of age, but he had been caught off guard when it emerged that she had taken her younger sister along with her.
“Hisham, akhi, what happened? Tell me!”
“Her father came and began threatening her,” Hisham told him. “If she didn’t return with him, then this and that and the other were going to happen. Ayan had to tell him over and over that they wanted to stay in Syria and weren’t coming back to Norway.”
“Oh, right.”
“So what he’s coming out with now are lies.”
“Okay, good.”
“He lost it when she refused to go with him. He threatened to kill her. He said he’d strangle her with his own hands. The guards had to pull him away from her. Then he shouted that the punishment for disobeying your parents was death.”
“Whoa!” his friend said. “So they’re not coming back, then?”
“Not planning on it, no,” Hisham replied.
“Okay, have fun!”
* * *
In Atmeh, the young men in Osman’s group were disappointed in Sadiq for going home without rescuing his daughters. How could he just leave them with ISIS? He should have stayed longer, tried harder, and not, as they saw it, given up. He had failed in his task, they thought.
In mid-November, just after Sadiq had been imprisoned, fighting had broken out in the border town. The bone of contention had been seven truckloads of weapons sent by the FSA general staff in Turkey. The trucks were to travel on from Atmeh and distribute the shipment across the whole region. But Suqur al-Islam, a moderate Islamist movement that had split from the FSA, demanded its share.
The skirmishes had lasted a few hours, until a solution was found. When the shooting died down and the various factions were licking their wounds, a group of ISIS soldiers drove quietly into town. They parked outside the headquarters of Suqur al-Islam, stormed inside, and following a brief exchange of fire, arrested the local militia leader along with a couple dozen of his men, then drove them to al-Dana, where Sadiq was imprisoned. In Atmeh, the heavily equipped ISIS fighters set about putting checkpoints in place.
Al-Nusra stood watching, because ISIS had seized only Suqur al-Islam territory. But then al-Nusra was attacked and soon ISIS had control of the routes in and out of Atmeh, including the roundabout, while al-Nusra was left in possession of unimportant parts of the town. For ISIS’s rivals, Atmeh, which had been spared Assad’s rockets due to its proximity to the Turkish border, was a big strategic loss.
After seizing control, the extreme Islamists began their purge. Men were arrested, women warned not to venture outside without a mahram, a male family member. ISIS trawled the shops for prohibited goods like cigarettes and alcohol. Everyone knew what these new authorities were capable of and bowed to their demands.
Only a few hours after taking control of the population, ISIS proceeded to take action against nature. An oak tree with a girth that exceeded the arm span of four men was a source of annoyance. The jihadists were of the opinion the tree seemed proud and overbearing, and they accused the inhabitants of worshipping it. The same afternoon they took over the town, they felled the tree. The growth rings were counted at 150.
“Thank God, the Almighty, that this old tree is removed, after people were worshipping it instead of God,” a jihadist posted on the Our Call Is Our Jihad Twitter account. There was a picture of a masked man dressed in black posing proudly with a chain saw and the felled tree beneath. A
