Family nightmare of Jihadi Janes
If I have issues with the book, they involve Seierstad’s journalistic decisions. It turns out that Ayan and Leila are not the Juma girls’ real names, but Seierstad chooses to tell readers that in the final pages of the book.
Finding this out so late – after Seierstad convinced me that I understood the sisters so well – made me feel a little snookered.
Seierstad also waits until the end to reveal that the account of Sadiq Juma’s experiences in Syria is based almost solely on his version of events.
Seierstad writes that she went over his story painstakingly to find any flaws in his recounting, but even so I couldn’t help thinking that may not have been enough. Throughout the book we learn that Juma misleads people to get what he wants. I wondered if he misled Seierstad, too.
But these are quibbles. Two Sisters provides an immense contribution to our understanding of how the Islamic State is able to persuade so many young people to abandon their comfortable lives in the West to join its cause in Syria.
Ayan and Leila’s journey isn’t unusual; it is the norm.
Just a year after the two sisters left Norway, I reported on three schoolgirls from a suburb of Denver who tried to travel to Syria. They, too, had fallen in love with some Islamic State fighters they had met online. Two of the young women were Somali sisters, aged 15 and 17, who had spent most of their lives in the US.
The Denver girls were intercepted by authorities during a layover in Germany and returned to their parents. It is an ending anyone reading Seierstad’s book would have preferred. – The Washington Post