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French jihadiste will regretfully back from "hell" of IS
Full of remorse is Sophie Kasiki. The 34-year-old Frenchwoman left in February last year with her four year old son to the caliphate and ended up there "in hell," she says in an interview with British newspaper The Observer.
Kasiki is one of the few Western women who have returned after staying in the caliphate. About her adventure, which lasted two months, she wrote the book Dans la Nuit de Daech (In the IS night). Kasiki is not her real name for fear of repercussions do not want in the picture.
With tears in her eyes she looks at a photograph of an English boy wearing a camouflage suit and wears a headband bearing the Arabic call to kill infidels. "That could have been my son," she says, "but I'd rather slain both of us that I had sent him a murderer or had let him into the clutches of these monsters fall."
Horror Story
Kasiki: "Yes, I was naive, confused and vulnerable, but how some ordinary, not too smart guys have managed to brainwash me, is a question that I still have no answer to." Kasiki was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and on its ninth, after the death of her mother, sent to Paris where she grew up in the suburbs with her older sister and was raised Catholic.
Then afterwards also died her sister, she was so grieved that she sought comfort in Islam. She converted without it against her atheist husband say, and came into contact with three young Muslim men who are ten years younger than she was. She had the impression of being a sort of mother figure for the boys and kept daily contact with keeping them when the three disappeared in September 2014 and later turned up in Syria.
But gradually began to spin the reels. Kasiki "I thought I was the one that the situation was the boss, but I realize now that they were probably trained to recruit people like me."
Canaries
February last year Kasiki told her husband that she was a few weeks working in an orphanage in Istanbul and they took their son, but they went through Turkey to Syria. Once in Raqqa, the capital of the caliphate Kasiki was housed in an apartment of a Syrian refugee family. There, she soon became clear that the fate of the canaries that were left in their cages, not much different from that of herself and her son.
The first weeks Kasiki worked in a women's clinic run by IS. She was shocked by the filth in the clinic, the indifference of the medical staff and the hierarchy in the city where "arrogant foreign fighters" at the top and at the bottom Syrians.
When they feel after a crippling apathy 'of ten days and after desperate emails from her husband realized she had made a terrible mistake and every day asked if she could go home, the threats started. "They said I would be stoned or slain when I tried to go away."
Uteri
It was for her really completely wrong when a French jihadist wanted to take her son to the mosque. She refused and got a punch in the face. They were taken to a madaffa "a home where dozens of foreign women with their young children in fact trapped. Kasiki did not know what she saw when she saw the children watching beheadings on TV while their mothers cheered.
Kasiki: "For those women was an IS-warrior prince on the white horse, one who was strong and would protect them only by marrying you could get out of the madaffa In fact, the Western women nothing more than wombs for IS.. -baby's. " The next day, during a wedding of one of the women, Kasiki discovered that one of the doors was not locked and she walked with her son outside.
"Kasiki is one of over 200 French women who suspected they were at IS intervene in Iraq and Syria. Two years ago, only one in ten French jihadists a woman, now it already involves over one in three."
Her escape from Raqqa, according to the journalist from The Observer, a true thriller. Her husband arranged from Paris for her contact with the Syrian opposition and a young Syrian took her and her son, hidden beneath her niqab, back on his moped along to the Turkish border.
Back in France was Kasiki two months, put in prison and extensively interrogated by members of the secret service. All that time she was allowed to have any contact with her family.
Photo
Kasiki that most struggles and what they can not forgive themselves, is that she took her son. Just like the English boy has IS, without her knowing it, her son took a picture: with an automatic weapon in his hands. That photo was emailed to her husband.
Kasiki is now back at her husband, but it still awaits a possible prosecution for kidnapping her own child. Kasiki: "Now I try to avoid other people get caught up in this nightmare What can I say do not go.?."
NOS.nl/ © Reuters