MOTHERS OF ISIS RECRUITED CHILDREN SPEAK OUT
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mothers-of-isis/
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Calgary, between the soccer practices and the hours at her accounting job and the potlucks with the neighbors, Christianne Boudreau spent every spare minute watching Islamic State videos, her nose pressed up against the computer screen.
Christianne Boudreau
Damian
She sat in the basement of her middle-class home in her middle-class suburb, a bare room that once belonged to her eldest son, Damian, and watched men posturing with big guns like teenagers. She watched firefights. She watched executions. But Boudreau barely registered any of the bloodshed. She was focused on the faces behind the balaclavas, trying to spot her son’s eyes.
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Karolina Dam
Lukas
In Copenhagen, Karolina Dam was wild with fear. Her son Lukas had been in Syria for seven months. Three days earlier, she received word that he had been injured outside Aleppo, but she was convinced that he was dead. Sitting alone that evening, nervously puffing on a vaporizer, she couldn’t stop herself from sending a Viber message into the ether. “Lukas,” she wrote, “I love you so much my beloved son. I miss you and want to hug and smell you. Hold your soft hands in mine and smile at you.”
There was no reply. A month later, someone wrote back to her. It wasn’t Lukas.
Dam had no idea who might have gained access to her son’s phone or Viber account, but she was desperate for information. Trying to stay calm, she wrote back: “Also yours, sweetie, but mostly Lukas’s.”
The person asked, “Can you handle some news?”
“Yeah, honey,” Dam wrote. A few seconds, and then the response.
“Your son is in bits and pieces.”
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Torill
Thom Alexander
In Norway, Torill, who asked that her last name not be used, learned of the death of her son, Thom Alexander, from the recruiter who had sent him to Syria to fight. She wanted proof, so her daughters, Sabeen and Sara (not their real names), met the recruiter in the Oslo train station. He casually flipped through some photos on his iPad until he arrived at the image meant for them: a photo of Thom Alexander shot in the head with one eyeball hanging out of its socket.
When she got the news, Torill simply lay down. She hardly moved for a week. When she finally summoned the strength to take a shower, she removed her clothes and faced her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She found that she looked exactly the way she felt: “Broken, like a vase.”
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Saliha Ben Ali
Sabri Ben Ali
In Brussels, Saliha Ben Ali, the modern, European-born daughter of Moroccan and Tunisian immigrants, was at a humanitarian aid conference when she began to feel wrenching pains in her stomach. She hadn’t felt that kind of pain in years. “It was like when you have a baby and this baby has to come out,” she says. She went home early and cried through the night.
Three days later, her husband received a phone call from a Syrian number. A man told them that their 19-year-old son Sabri, their boy who loved reggae and chatting with his mother about world events, had died on the same day Ben Ali had fallen ill. She realized those pains in her stomach were the inverse of giving birth to Sabri: They were her body telling her that her child was dying.
These women are just four of thousands who have lost a child to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions. Over 3,000 are from Western countries. While some go with their families’ blessing, most leave in secret, taking all sense of normalcy with them. After they’ve gone, their parents are left with a form of grief that is surreal in its specificity. It is sorrow at the loss of a child, it is guilt at what he or she may have done, it is shame in the face of hostility from friends and neighbors, and it is doubt about all the things they realize they did not know about the person whom they brought into the world. Over the last year, dozens of these mothers from around the world have found each other, weaving a strange alliance from their loss. What they want, more than anything, is to make sense of the senselessness of what happened to their children—and, perhaps, for something meaningful to come from their deaths.
In April, I visited Christianne Boudreau in Calgary, and she told me how hopeful she had been when Damian discovered Islam. At 46, Boudreau is still vaguely girlish, with a slender nose and bright, probing brown eyes. Her first husband left the family when Damian was ten, and the boy retreated into his computer from a world that exasperated and excluded him. When he was 17, he tried to commit suicide by drinking antifreeze.
Shortly after his release from the hospital, Damian told his mother that he had discovered the Quran. Although Boudreau had raised him Christian, she welcomed his conversion. He got a job and became more social. “It grounded him, made him a better person,” she recalls. But by 2011, Boudreau noticed a change in her son. If he was visiting and his new friends called, he would only answer the phone outside. He wouldn’t eat with the family if there was wine on the table. He told his mother that women should be taken care of by men and that it was acceptable to have more than one wife. He spoke of justified killings. In the summer of 2012, he moved into an apartment with some new Muslim friends right above the mosque in downtown Calgary where they all prayed. He became a regular at the gym and went hiking with his roommates in the wilderness around the city. At the time, the conflict in Syria was in its infancy, and all Boudreau saw was her often-troubled son going through another phase, one she hoped he would outgrow. In November, Damian left Canada, telling his mother that he was moving to Egypt to study Arabic and become an imam. To Boudreau’s distress, he quickly fell out of touch.
Damian, with his grandfather. Photo courtesy of Christianne Boudreau.
On January 23, 2013, Boudreau was home from work nursing a bad back when two men knocked on her door. They told her they were Canadian intelligence agents. Damian was not in Egypt. He had traveled to Syria with his roommates and joined the local branch of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra. After the agents left, Boudreau says, “I was physically ill.” In the days and weeks afterwards, the only thing she could think to do was to scrounge around jihadist websites, searching for her son. “How sick and twisted is that?” she says.
Most young people who run away to join radical groups in Syria maketakfir—that is, they sever all ties with non-believers, including their parents, who stand in the way of their jihad. But, starting in February, Damian called his mother every two or three days, often while he was on watch. “You can hear all the noises in the background,” Boudreau says. “You can hear people yelling at each other in Arabic.” Once, Damian told her there were planes flying low, which he said meant that they were about to drop bombs. He began to run while Boudreau was still on the phone. Mostly, though, Damian was careful about what he told his mother, and she still doesn’t really know what he was doing there. Every possible scenario turns her stomach.
By spring 2013, their conversations had become excruciating. “You try to convince them to come home and you beg and you plead, then you try to have some normal conversation,” Boudreau recalls. “Then you start begging and pleading again.” She asked Damian how he would feel if his half-brother Luke, who was nine at the time and loved Damian like a father, went to Syria. Damian replied that he would be proud. “That’s when I realized that my son disappeared, that there was somebody new that’s in his body,” Boudreau says. She tried putting Luke on the phone, but he would only rock back and forth and cry, asking, “When are you coming home?” until Damian became enraged. Eventually, Boudreau says, “The ‘I love yous’ stopped, the ‘I miss yous’ stopped.’” And then, so did the calls. She would later learn that around this time, the Islamic State had broken away from al-Nusra and Damian had gone with ISIS.
They last corresponded in August, when Damian contacted Boudreau using a new Facebook account. In their exchange, she is pleading and tentative; Damian is formal, condescending, and painfully adolescent.
On the evening of January 14, 2014, a reporter called Boudreau, alerting her to a tweet that said Damian had been executed by the Free Syrian Army in Haritan, just outside Aleppo. As everything began to blur around her, Boudreau held on to one concrete task: She needed to tell Luke before he saw it on TV. She took him
After Damian’s death, Boudreau felt that she was constantly on the verge of losing her mind. She cried all the time; she couldn’t sleep. “Every time I closed my eyes, it was just too quiet,” she says. She had to hold herself together for Luke, Damian’s half-sister Hope, and her stepdaughter Paige, but, she says, “I felt so lonely and dark.”
There was only one person who seemed to know what she was experiencing. Shortly before Damian died, Boudreau had made contact with Daniel Koehler, a German expert on deradicalization. Koehler, who is based in Berlin, used to focus on helping people leave the neo-Nazi movement, but in recent years he had also started working with Muslim radicals and their families. After Damian’s death, Koehler stayed in close touch with Boudreau, trying to help her understand what had happened to her son.
What Boudreau had witnessed was a classic radicalization process, Koehler told me. Its phases are remarkably similar whether the person is joining a sect of religious extremists or a group of neo-Nazis. First, the recruit is euphoric because he has finally found a way to make sense of the world. He tries to convert those around him—and, in the case of radicalized Muslims in recent years, to make them care about the suffering of Syrians. The second, more frustrating stage comes when the convert realizes that his loved ones aren’t receptive to his message. This is when the family conflicts begin: arguments over clothing, alcohol, music. At this point, the convert begins to consider advice from his cohorts that perhaps the only way to be true to his beliefs is to leave home for a Muslim country. In the final stage, the person sells his possessions and often pursues physical fitness or some kind of martial training. As his frustration mounts, his desire to act becomes overwhelming, until he starts to see violence as the only solution.
Six months after Damian’s death, Boudreau visited Koehler in Berlin, and he introduced her to three other mothers whose children had been killed after joining extremist groups in Syria. They had all brought photo albums and shared memories of their sons. They discovered similarities in the stories of how their children had been radicalized. One of the women’s sons, Boudreau learned, had been killed in the same town as Damian. Talking with the other mothers made Boudreau feel “like this black cloud finally started disappearing,” she says. Koehler told me he had wanted these women to see that “it’s not a unique thing in the universe that struck them down, that they couldn’t have done anything.”
After she returned home, Boudreau threw herself into activism. If what had befallen her family was possible, she realized, it could happen to anyone else. With Koehler’s help, she founded two organizations—Hayat Canada and Mothers for Life—to help the parents of radicalized youth. She travels around Canada speaking to teachers, students, and police departments about how to spot signs of radicalism in one’s friends and relatives, and what to do about it. She is a constant presence in the media. “We’re not educating our kids,” Boudreau said as we sat in her kitchen, her smoker’s voice raspy and urgent. “We educate our kids about drugs, sex, alcohol, bullying —all these other topics and how to cope with it, but we’re not educating them about this.”
Koehler told me that there are usually two groups of people who are good at getting through to young radicals and starting them on a path to reform: former radicals and mothers. “The mother is extremely important in jihadist Islam,” he explained. “Mohammed said ‘Paradise lies at the feet of mothers.’ You have to ask her permission to go on jihad or to say goodbye.” He says he has dealt with fighters who desperately try to set up one last Skype call with their mothers—either to say farewell or to convert her so that they can meet in paradise. An Austrian NGO called Women Without Borders is starting “mothers’ schools” in countries battered by Islamist extremism, like Pakistan and Indonesia, to teach mothers how to keep their children from being radicalized. The group is now building five more mothers’ schools in Europe.
And, with a few exceptions, mothers are the ones doing this work. In the families of children like Damian who convert to Islam, the father is often not in the picture. In the families of Muslim immigrants to the West, the fathers are often present but unengaged. Magnus Ranstorp, a Swedish expert who co-chairs the Radicalization Awareness Network, a European Union working group, says that Muslim men often feel emasculated by Western society and fade into the background. “The mother is the pivot,” he says.
The experts that I spoke with also noted that mothers and fathers who lose children to jihadist movements tend to deal with their grief in very different ways. The fathers often withdraw into feelings of guilt and shame: They have a hard time admitting to outsiders that their parenting was in any way lacking. The mothers do the opposite. They are hungry to share their sorrow with others, to plunge themselves into the world their child inhabited, to gather as much information as they can. It is their way of gaining a tiny measure of control over the unfathomable. “They immerse themselves,” Koehler told me.
When I visited her, Boudreau took me along to a local Catholic high school where most of the students were refugees. She showed them a video she had made about Damian. It ends with a close-up of Boudreau’s tear-streaked face, addressing her dead son. “When those final moments came, were you scared?” she asks. “Did you want me to hold your hand?” And, in a calmer, almost scolding voice: “What did all of this have to do with God?”
There was a stunned silence in the auditorium as the lights came back up. Before climbing onto the stage and fielding the students’ questions with an assurance she has acquired after dozens of presentations, Boudreau took a moment to compose herself. Though she had seen the film countless times, she had been crying in the dark……..
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