ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the U.S. in the post-9/11 war-on-terror era, transformed the entire Middle East. For many people in the region, the war was defined by the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the conflict and by the accounts of shocking mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners held in U.S. detention. That anger helped give rise to an extremist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS. ISIS recruited fighters from around the world, including the U.S. and Canada. NPR's Tom Bowman sat down with some of those who were radicalized in North America and left their homes to join the fight in Syria and Iraq. Here's one of those stories.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you.
TOM BOWMAN, HOST:
Outside an apartment building in a city in western Canada, we meet a tall, smiling young woman dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans.
S: We can go upstairs.
BOWMAN: OK.
S: There's, like, a...
BOWMAN: She allowed us to record our interview with her, but under the condition we not use her name or home city, fearing repercussions because of her past. She agreed to let us use her first initial, S. Born in Pakistan to Somali parents and raised in Canada since the age of 2, S. was a teenager when her brother was shot and killed by an acquaintance high on drugs. It left her devastated, so she sought some kind of solace, some kind of peace.
S: I turned to religion and God. And my family comes from a Muslim background, so, you know, I started practicing my religion more.
BOWMAN: And going to mosque and so forth?
S: Yeah, and I started to become friends with other Muslim girls that were my age.
BOWMAN: She became more devout, trading her Western clothes for a veil, a hijab and a long dress, but it also made her a target for some.
S: My family was picking me up from the station, and I was attacked by some random group of people. My family saw what was happening, and they came to try to escort me. And they just sprayed us all with bear mace. It was a very horrific thing.
BOWMAN: And then another incident with two men on a train.
S: They were looking at me and making comments, saying, like, maybe we should get on the next train in case this one gets blown up, and things like that.
BOWMAN: S. left her local college and enrolled herself in a boarding school for Muslim women in eastern Canada. And it's there her life changed.
S: During that time, I started to make friends with some girls, and one of them was a returnee from Somalia, and she'd joined a terrorist organization called al-Shabaab.
BOWMAN: Al-Shabaab, a rebel group in Somalia with ties to al-Qaida. S. felt a growing sense of Islamophobia building all around her, and she began drifting from devout to radical.
S: I'm as Canadian as it gets, so to me, it was very frustrating and confusing. And then on the other hand, when I was hearing the Islamic scholar saying, leave the West - you're going to be targeted, you're going to be attacked; you know, Muslims are being targeted after 9/11 - it was doing something in my brain that made me feel like running away from here.
BOWMAN: With a goal of getting to a Muslim country. S. says she was coached by her al-Shabaab connection, but that brought unexpected attention.
S: The intelligence agencies in Canada started to approach me at my job. They came to my house. They were calling me on the phone. You know, they were investigating her, but they were putting pressure on me.
BOWMAN: In 2014, barely out of her teens, S. made a crucial decision. She left her home in Canada to join those fighting against the West.
S: I thought what I was doing was correct, according to my religion, which was to go to a Muslim country, aid the Muslims, help the Muslims, live amongst Islam and practicing my religion more freely.
BOWMAN: She traveled to Turkey, and from there, she hopped in a van with other ISIS recruits heading south into the darkness toward Syria.
S: We were driving and then abruptly stopped, and then they swung the doors open and told us to run. And they pointed to a house that was very far in the distance, and they said, go there.
BOWMAN: She was welcomed by the hosts, men with AK-47s, their pickup trucks armed with machine guns. Before long, S. and the others were loaded onto a caravan. It drove toward the city of Raqqa, the center of the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State and what she believed was a Muslim utopia until she was on the outskirts and peered out the window.
S: The armored vehicle had the ISIS flag, and then we were seeing the heads cut off and stuff. So that was right away our introduction to things.
BOWMAN: Around that time, ISIS began releasing videos of its beheadings, together with a warning to the West.
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UNIDENTIFIED ISIS MEMBER: Your strikes have caused casualties amongst Muslims. You are no longer fighting an insurgency. We are an Islamic army.
BOWMAN: They were taken to an overcrowded three-story home, a married couple in charge of managing the house of both Arab and Western women. They immediately urged her to take an ISIS husband of their choosing. She refused all four of them. The couple kept her in a room at times, threatened to beat her. So S. plotted her escape with a fellow Canadian, both of them now regretting having left their home country. They waited until the couple left the house.
S: She just left. She didn't care. So I just went with her, and then we got in a random taxi. And when we were leaving, they were coming back, and, like, the cars passed each other. And my heart stopped because I thought they were going to see us. But we just put our heads down and we went.
BOWMAN: Now living as a guest in the home of a Moroccan woman with al-Qaida ties, revered as a wife and mother of martyrs. The house had internet access, so for the first time, S. called her family, telling them she was in Syria. But they already were told that by Canadian authorities. According to S., her parents urged her to return home.
S: And they were just trying to convince me to come back and telling me nothing's going to happen. The Canadians told us nothing's going to happen. Just come back. It's not your fault, and...
BOWMAN: What was their demeanor?
S: They were honestly very shocked. They didn't really see that coming at all. They knew that I was practicing Islam, but they didn't understand this version of Islam that leads to that.
BOWMAN: What S. didn't realize - she had left the so-called safe house but was not safe in a world with few options.
S. ended up marrying a Moroccan man who worked at the house and seemed kind to her. She was soon pregnant, with bombs falling all around Raqqa from U.S. forces helping their Kurdish allies. The Kurds were hoping to carve out their own enclave.
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BOWMAN: I'm in the soccer stadium right...
I reported from there a year or two later and saw the devastation.
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BOWMAN: But what's curious is, the shops are open on the first floors of a lot of buildings. It's sort of a skeleton of a building and a lot of rubble just above these shops. And they say there are...
It was in one of those buildings she gave birth to her daughter. But her once-kind husband seemed to change as her daughter grew into a toddler. He became abusive at times, beating her and angry their child was allowed to watch cartoons. He claimed she was raising their daughter in Western ways.
S: I tried to leave him a few times and get a divorce, but when I went to the judge one time, they said to me, you think you're still a free woman, but you're not. You are a slave to your husband. So you have to obey him, and God is going to reward you for that.
BOWMAN: It was soon after that the U.S. bombing campaign escalated. Kurdish forces surrounded the city.
S: Once the siege of Raqqa started happening, they gave the option to stay and fight and die or to leave. I obviously chose to leave with my daughter.
BOWMAN: On the back of a motorcycle, the family of three fled the ISIS capital with a bag of flour crawling with bugs, along with some olives and dates. They were luckier than most.
S: People were literally eating grass, like, cutting grass and cooking it.
BOWMAN: She recalls a woman leaving her tent and approaching her, clutching an infant.
S: She came to me and she said, my baby died, 'cause she was starving and didn't have enough breast milk, so the baby died. They were pretty much asking us for help.
BOWMAN: S. says she gave them what she could, but she was also worried about her own daughter, now just two.
S: She was malnourished, but I was doing everything to keep her alive. So, you know, just rationing the food as much as I could.
BOWMAN: They lived in a makeshift camp up in the hills outside the city.
S: Eventually, there was a peace agreement between the Kurds and the Islamic state, and they said, the women and children and injured people can surrender themselves. At this point, nothing's going to happen to them. They're going to get taken to the camps.
BOWMAN: S., her daughter and a stream of ISIS families were loaded onto trucks heading toward the al-Hol Kurdish camps for women and children, thousands of them living in white tents provided by the Red Cross. S.'s husband continued to fight, and to this day, she doesn't know his fate. This one-time ISIS bride now decided to help the Kurdish fighters.
S: I was pretty much, like, in the lion's den. If these women were to ever suspect me of cooperating with Kurds, Americans, whoever, they would try to kill me. And they have done it in Camp Hol (ph). People were killed. The tents burned down within seconds.
BOWMAN: Now she was an informant. She dressed by night in military fatigues, her face covered in a balaclava. S. identified young girls disguised in burkas, that long, loose garment that covers the body from head to toe. They would be the next generation of ISIS.
PETER GALBRAITH: But I didn't want to see the children growing up in these prison camps.
BOWMAN: Former U.S. ambassador Peter Galbraith was among a group of diplomats, doctors and law enforcement seeking to remove children out of the war zone. He had close ties with the Kurds.
GALBRAITH: Initially, she had wanted a deal, whereby if she helped provide information, she would get out. I said, no deal, but she should provide the information anyhow, and she did.
BOWMAN: S. aided in the rescue of an American child, the product of ISIS father and a young woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was radicalized online. The little blonde girl named Amenah was wearing the burqa and being held by the Somali women. S. pointed to the tent, and the Kurds rushed in.
But there was good news. Her daughter would return to Canada with the help of Ambassador Galbraith. S.'s sister arrived in Irbil in Northern Iraq. We're not naming her to protect S.'s identity. The sister would not talk on tape but instead gave us a statement, read here by an NPR producer.
UNIDENTIFIED PRODUCER, BYLINE: (Reading) It felt surreal. I didn't think I would ever see her again after she left Canada. It was also so bittersweet meeting my niece for the first time. I felt relieved to be able to bring her home to safety in Canada.
BOWMAN: S. was heartbroken to part with her daughter, now 4 years old.
S: I told her, you're going to go first, and then Mommy is going to come after. So, you know, that was very emotional for me 'cause I didn't know if that was going to be real or true.
BOWMAN: It was true, but it took a year before S. made it back to her family, earning her way by helping authorities in Canada and the U.S. track down and convict ISIS fighters and their sympathizers.
PAUL CHAMP: She has provided information to authorities, both here and from other countries.
BOWMAN: That's her Canadian lawyer, Paul Champ (ph).
CHAMP: She sat down for extensive interviews with them and provided them with all the information that she knows. She's just focused on trying to get her life back on track.
BOWMAN: She's now 35 and helps clients with skin care. I asked S. if her daughter remembers the prison camps.
Does she talk about the camp that much?
S: No. Thankfully, she really doesn't remember much. She remembers her friends there, you know, and she asks me about her friends once in a while.
BOWMAN: So you could understand how some people, if they knew your background, would say, you seem like a nice person, but I really don't want to have anything to do with you.
S: I'm not associated to any of those things anymore. I don't keep in touch with anybody from that part of my life. I'm actually helping governments by cooperating and testifying in courts and helping them rescue children and all of those things. So, you know, if somebody hears my story and they still view me in a bad light, they're free to do that, but I wouldn't mind if they didn't want to be associated with me.
BOWMAN: S. doesn't share her story with friends or even co-workers as she tries to move forward.
S: Hi.
BOWMAN: Hi. Hi there. What's your name?
S: Hi.
BOWMAN: My name's Tom.
As we were speaking, her daughter, now a fourth grader, came bouncing into the room, wearing a pale blue ball cap and socks with hearts stitched on them.
You want to be a scientist when you grow up?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Or an astronaut.
BOWMAN: As we leave, we pass S.'s daughter on the sidewalk, a typical 9-year-old, smiling and chatting with one of her classmates. Tom Bowman, NPR News.
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NADWORNY: NPR's Gabriel Sanchez produced this story. For more, including photos from the team's reporting, go to npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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