The true, if unfinished, story of two sisters who left Norway to become jihadi brides

In October 2103, Norwegian-Somali teenagers Ayan and Leila Juma left their home near Oslo to travel to Syria. They wanted, they later told their parents in an email, to “help down there” as best they could.

The sisters’ departure and the subsequent revelations about the extent of their radicalisation shocked their mother and father, Sara and Sadiq, who had come to Norway from Somalia 13 years before to make a better life.

In Two Sisters, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad uses her considerable investigative prowess to trace how Ayan and Leila came to embrace the ideology of Isis.

As well as examining the sisters’ friendships and experiences in the school system, Seierstad

(right) zooms in on developments that may have led to their journey to Syria.

Ayan became heavily involved with authoritarian Muslim youth organisation Islam Net and was influenced by the teachings of a Koran tutor hired by a group of Somali mothers — including Sara. Ayan, in turn, seems to have influenced Leila, though Seierstad does not present either sister as naive, or a victim of brainwashing; rather, they seem to have sought out others who agreed with their evolving beliefs.

It’s a complicated, expansive story with multiple locations and a large cast of characters. Seierstad does an excellent job of weaving the different strands of her narrative together, moving backwards and forwards in time and jumping between Oslo, Somalia and Syria so cohesively and so strategically that the book often reads like a thriller.

Determined to get his daughters back, Sadiq travels to the Turkish-Syrian border and, with the help of a middleman, makes it into Syria. The sisters are tracked down and he is allowed five minutes with Ayan, who is already married to an Isis fighter. Sadiq asks her to come home; she refuses. He is imprisoned, interrogated and tortured, cellmate after cellmate is taken away, but he gets out.

The story can’t really end. By necessity, several questions are left unanswered. Do the sisters still endorse Isis? What will happen to them and their young children? Seierstad goes as far as she can to get at the truth, but despite her exhaustive efforts to understand the sisters’ departure, it’s still not fully clear why they went.