An American in the Islamic State
BEHIND THE FENCE of a refugee camp in the green plains of northeastern Syria, a white woman approaches from the sea of tents. Her long brown hair spills out of a beanie, and there is a black tattoo of a kiss on her neck. She tells me she’d like to talk, and we sit down in a prefabricated office on the edge of the camp. An intelligence officer from the Kurdish women’s militia listens in to our conversation. Samantha Elhassani tells me she’s an American and a Christian and that she’d come from Indiana to Syria with her young son and daughter after her husband decided to join ISIS without telling her. “I was not aware we were coming to Syria,” she says. She lived under control of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria for three years in Raqqa, where she had two more children. She survived the American-led assault on the city, escaped ISIS, and now wants to go home.
Samantha says her Syrian saga started around 2014. She was living near South Bend, Indiana, with her husband, Moussa, who had immigrated to the United States from Morocco about a decade earlier. “He was very American, nothing abnormal about him,” Samantha tells me. “He’s Muslim, I’m Christian. He never had a problem with anything I did. He drove a Porsche.” He wasn’t religious, she says. “He didn’t even grow a beard.”
When she couldn’t afford to get knee surgery, she says that Moussa suggested she get it done in Morocco. He also mentioned that houses were cheap and they should consider moving there. Samantha says she traveled to a pretty coastal town in Morocco where she found luxury apartments for sale for $30,000. She could imagine raising her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter and her seven-year-old son from a previous relationship there. By the time she got back to Indiana, she says, Moussa had put their cars up for sale and had sold their washer and dryer.
From here, Samantha’s story gets more bizarre. She says that as her family prepared to move, she made trips to Hong Kong, where she deposited cash in a safe deposit box to “evade taxes.” Then the family flew to Turkey—after stopping in Hong Kong to pick up their money. When they arrived in Turkey, Samantha was surprised to find one of Moussa’s brothers, Abdelhadi, waiting for them. Samantha says they traveled together to Sanliurfa, a city near the Syrian border, to visit a Muslim pilgrimage site.
When they got there, Samantha says, Moussa began acting strangely. He would go off with his brother all day, telling her to stay in their hotel room. After a week, Moussa told her to gather her things. The family got into a white van. Samantha says she soon realized they weren’t heading to the airport to go to Morocco. They stopped in the middle of nowhere, near a stretch of the Syrian border with heavy ISIS presence. Moussa grabbed their daughter and Samantha’s handbag, which held her passport and their cash. Then he walked toward the frontier. “Do I go or do I stay?” she asked herself. She grabbed her son, got out of
