Sara felt that a part of her had been torn away. The loss left a lump in her stomach.
They were shown into an office at the police station. First Sadiq, then Sara.
“What will I tell them?” she asked Sadiq.
“Just answer their questions. Leila has just turned sixteen. Ayan is scarcely an adult. They’re Norwegian citizens. The police will do everything in their power to track them down,” he assured her.
There were two men present during the questioning, one from the missing persons unit and another from the local PST.
Finally it was Ismael’s turn.
“How are things with you?” they asked. “Have you gone to the Koran school as well?”
“Do you attend the mosque?”
“What are you going to do next year? Do you have plans?”
“Have you applied for college, or are you going traveling?”
“Did you know what your sisters were planning?”
“Were they forced to travel?”
“What did your parents know?”
“Are you also a radical?”
The questions annoyed the eighteen-year-old. It seemed that the interviewers’ aim was to determine if he was ideologically close to his sisters and might follow them, and if they formed part of a larger network. For Ismael, however, stopping his sisters was the priority. As he spoke, he established one point for the investigators that Sadiq had not made clear: The sisters had traveled of their own free will.
In the car on the way home, Sadiq was dejected.
“They see us as a danger,” he said, “not as a family who’ve reported two daughters missing. We asked them for help and they’re treating us like criminals!”
At around five o’clock that day, the doorbell rang.
There were three policemen standing outside, two in uniform and one in plain clothes.
“We have a search warrant,” one of the officers said.
First they searched the girls’ room. The men in uniform opened wardrobes and drawers while the plainclothes officer took notes. They gathered papers, notebooks, and everything computer related, then moved on to the other rooms. They looked through closets, shelves, and boxes.
Isaq was clinging to Sadiq again. “Daddy, give me your hand,” he softly pleaded, while looking at the men.
The family was asked to remain in the living room, and when Sadiq got up to see what the police were doing, he was bluntly instructed to keep his distance.
“Are we terrorists?!” Sara exclaimed in Somali, pacing the living room. “Are you going to terrorize us instead of helping us?”
“Sit down, calm yourself. It’s their job,” Sadiq told her.
“God help me! God help me!” Sara cried out.
Distressed after all the questioning at the station and now the ransacking of her home, she phoned a friend. But she did not find much solace.
“What! You got in touch with the police? That was a big mistake! They’re not going to do anything for Somalis! Find the girls yourself; don’t expect the Norwegian police to help you.”
Ismael couldn’t take any more of his mother’s crying and his father’s agitation. He went to his room and shut the door. He had not received any answer to the message he’d sent that morning.
At seven o’clock he sent a new text: “Hello. Answer pls.”
Eight o’clock: “Hello.”
Nine o’clock: “Ayan?”
* * *
That same morning, the girls had checked out of the Grand Hotel in Adana. They retrieved the passports they had handed in at reception. Then they headed south, toward the Syrian border. In the afternoon, they no longer appeared on the Turkish telecom network.
Sadiq was frantic, afraid of what might happen to them. There was something else: The girls had humiliated him, the police had trampled over him, he had lost face; he had not been in control.
Now, Sadiq, show what you are made of, a voice in his head said.
I am Sadiq, a man in charge of my family.
According to the Viber message about their “last meal in Europe,” the girls’ last known stop had been Adana. He could not sit around waiting for them to show up, for them to change their minds, or for the police to track them down. He had to stop them before it was too late.
Sara made the decision for him. “Go find them!” she commanded from the sofa.
He was suddenly in a hurry. He had found a direction. Now all he needed to do was plot a course.
Turkish Airlines operated daily departures from Oslo to Istanbul. He booked a ticket for the next day, threw some clothes in a bag, and borrowed money from a friend. At the airport he changed everything into dollars, taking a couple of thousand. His flight left just after noon.
* * *
Three days after his daughters left, he was traveling the same route.
Please turn off all electronic devices. For three hours he would not be checking his telephone every minute. He found himself alone with his thoughts.
It was just after the summer holidays that he had noticed Ayan change, become quieter, reticent, but it had occurred gradually. He had attributed her behavior to boy trouble.
Sara had brushed it aside. “She’s a teenager, it’ll pass. Leave her be.” Sara was usually the strict one. She had put her foot down when Ayan developed a crush on a boy she had met at Islam Net a couple of years ago. He was Somali like her, and one day Ayan had announced that she wanted to get engaged. Sara had reluctantly agreed for them to meet but still maintained they were way too young to marry.
“I don’t care, I’ll do what I want,” Ayan had responded. Ismael had been impressed. He would never have dared take that tone with his mother. Once Ayan was granted permission to spend time with the boy, the fantasy shattered and she lost interest.
Could it have been some new flame who had gotten his daughter mixed up in this?
* * *
The first time he had seen the girls dabble in fundamentalism had been about two years earlier. Leila was fourteen years old and Ayan was seventeen.
“We’re going into Oslo with some friends, but we’re broke,” Ayan had said.
Sadiq usually
