* * *
Shortly after Sadiq arrived back in Bærum, a text appeared on the site Justpaste.it, written by one of the young men who had accompanied him during his stay. The piece was titled “The untold story of the 2 Somali-Norwegian girls who joined ISIS,” and it was attributed to Mujahid Jazrawi.
You may have read in the media how two young Somali girls (who’re sisters) from Norway left their family to join ISIS a few months ago, how their father went after them, how at one point we thought they were being held by gangs (well, they were, sort of, by gangs who use the cloak of Islam). Many questions were left unanswered and details remained sketchy. However today we present to you the true untold story of their fate, and we hope that this serves as a warning and a wake-up call to ALL of our sisters insha’ Allah.
The soldier wrote that Sadiq’s daughters had left behind a note at home in Norway that read: “You have taught us jihad in theory, we will now apply it in practice.”
“We began asking around, and the emirs of the battalions ordered their people to keep an eye out. The father told us the girls were being held hostage. After a while he received a telephone call from his daughter.”
Jazrawi wrote that the brothers, as he called his cosoldiers, had turned up at a prearranged location, thinking they were to negotiate a ransom for the release of the girls. They had been caught off guard when a black man—a Nigerian, the soldier wrote—turned up with the girls in the backseat of his vehicle. “The brothers stopped him and a heated conversation ensued. The Nigerian turned his car around and the brothers opened fire. The car stopped at an ISIS checkpoint in Atmeh where the driver sought help as he was one of them. The ISIS fighters surrounded the brothers and the shooting began.”
After one of the daughters was hit in the leg, everyone went to the court in Atmeh, only to be told that the case would be heard at the court in al-Dana. “Upon arriving at the court he was informed that his eldest daughter had married an ISIS fighter through a sharia contract at that very court! He was then put in prison for twelve days, nine of which he spent in solitary confinement and was also accused of being a spy for Turkey! He was humiliated and tortured and the director of the ISIS prison threatened to kill him.”
The Nusra soldier wrote that “a judge called an-Najdi something or other” was to decide the father’s fate.
“The judge asked the prosecutors to bring evidence against him but they were unable to show anything that proved his apostasy or that he was a spy. The judge ruled he was innocent and that he be released. This enraged the director of the prison and he protested the verdict!”
Back in Atmeh, the fighter had met Sadiq at Osman’s.
“I asked, ‘What about your daughters?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do anything for them, they even refused to let me sit with them!’
“I tried to get him to change his mind, promised we would protect him and do everything in our power to secure his daughters’ release, but he refused and insisted on leaving. Whereupon he left to save himself from being killed.”
The young soldier had later met the “Nigerian.”
“We discussed his marriage to the elder daughter, and I said to him: ‘How can you marry a girl without permission from her father?’ He responded: ‘Her father has no guardianship, al-Baghdadi is her guardian! And we were wed by legal sharia contract!’ I wore myself out trying to make him understand the concept of paternal authority. I left the man, with the impression he lacked skill in the Arabic language and was quite simply ignorant.”
This incident was one of many. “A result of the ISIS leaders inciting women to come here. Forcing them to leave the lands of the infidels to travel to ‘the house of Islam’ and their headquarters in Raqqa, by saying it is one’s duty.”
* * *
Christmas was drawing near.
Sadiq and Sara were living in a daze. Sadiq slept all day. Sara cried all night. They puttered around, shutting themselves off, each living in solitary sorrow. The days came to a standstill, they would go to the supermarket only to find themselves wondering, What are we doing here?
Their lives had fallen apart, the simplest things seemed insurmountable, and when they emerged now and again from the isolated chaos of their own minds, they were short-tempered. They had always pulled in the same direction, but now they were beginning to pull at either end.
Sara heard about some youths who had traveled to Syria and returned home. She heard about children being rescued. Her friends told her about parents in Sweden who had received assistance from the state to get their children out, been given money, tickets, passports. The Swedish authorities paid for the parents’ stay in Turkey while they looked for their children, one of her friends said.
“I want to hand in my Norwegian passport and move to Sweden,” Sara announced, and blamed the state for not having done enough, the officials at border control for not stopping the girls, the police for being too passive.
Her daughters were blameless. Because her daughters would never have gone.
* * *
His body was in Norway, his mind in Syria. He was still on sick leave, still unable to work, and now not only on account of his shoulder.
He lay awake at night. He smoked. Sometimes he collapsed, only to snap awake drenched in sweat from a nightmare. He dreamed he was back in the cell, he felt the knife against his throat, or he was racing after his daughters as they ran away from him. Ikhlaque Chan, the integration officer for Bærum county, saw him standing in a corner at Sandvika shopping center talking to himself. Chan recognized Sadiq from meetings he had arranged for
