A window into radicalization
In her new book, Asne Seirestad covers one father’s pain, resolve to bring his daughters home
One October day in 2013, the two Juma sisters didn’t come home for dinner. Their Somali-born parents, who had moved to suburban Norway to raise their five children, weren’t too concerned — until they received an email. “We love you both sooo much,” the teens wrote, but “Muslims are under attack from all quarters, and … we have decided to travel to Syria and help down there as best we can.”
The parents, Sadiq and Sara, were stunned and horrified. How could this happen?
Taking his meagre savings, Sadiq followed the trail to Turkey, missing the girls by one day. With the help of a local smuggler, he made his way into Syria, where he dealt with imprisonment, torture, a botched kidnapping and a father’s pain.
Norwegian war correspondent and author Asne Seierstad (“The Bookseller of Kabul”) recounts this true, revealing story in “Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad.”
Ayan, 19, and Leila, 16, were conventional Western teens with their skinny jeans and boy crushes, until encountering a Muslim youth organization that began as a Facebook page. Why be a second-class Norwegian when you could be a first-class Muslim? Your pure and true life was waiting for you in Daesh country.
Stirred up by the passion of fundamentalist rallies, the sisters stopped wearing makeup, refused to eat food with additives and donned niqabs and long cloaks until their angry parents ordered them to take them off.
Surely it was a phase. After all, their teenage brother had gone to the opposite extreme, saying, “I believe in Allah about as much as I believe in the spaghetti monster.”
But the sisters weren’t coming home.
Through extensive interviews, texts and online conversations, Seierstad expertly reveals the horrors of radicalization. Ayan, transforming from burgeoning feminist to jihadi bride, defends the rape of Yazidi and Kurdish women: “The fighters need sexual release. They’re men, after all.”
To her brother, she writes, “We get money without working here btw. Tee hee.”
With Seierstad’s brilliant investigative skills (and Sean Kinsella’s superb translation), “Two Sisters” begins and ends as a thriller, with a slower, denser middle as she develops the context for her harrowing narrative.
Mostly, “Two Sisters” is a valuable window into the reasons for radicalization among Muslim youth in countries very like our own.
Says Sadiq Juma, who wanted his family’s story told: “I want people to recognize the danger signs. We were blind. Now we know better.”