Sophie Kasiki, one of the few Western women to have seen the Islamic
State group’s harsh “caliphate” in Syria and escaped, recounts her life
in the jihadists’ stronghold Raqqa with detached calm and inner rage.
Born to a Catholic family in Cameroon and living in Paris since the age
of 9, she converted to Islam as an adult. She traveled with her
4-year-old son to Syria in February 2015, to join three friends who had
left for jihad a few months before.
About 220 French women have answered the Islamic State’s call to join
the radical Muslim movement and provide support and offspring for the
cause.
Kasiki could have been just another statistic.
But she rebelled, returned home and has written a nail-biting account
of her experiences in her book “Dans la Nuit de Daech (In the Night of
Daesh),” co-written with novelist Pauline Guéna and published in France
in January. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
“I had to write this for myself and for others,” Kasiki, 34, said at a
rare meeting with a few journalists in Paris. Sophie Kasiki is not her
real name, nor are most other names in the book. Unlike other authors,
she avoids interviews and will not let her face be photographed.
The book’s back cover says clearly: “She has decided to tell her story
to prevent others like herself from falling for the Islamic State’s
culture of death.”
Her story begins in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, where she was
born in 1982. Orphaned at 9, she was taken in by an older sister in
Paris. The abrupt move was difficult, but she thinks she adapted well.
After her studies, she became a social worker and grew close to several
families she was helping. Among them were the “little ones,” as she
called them, three men in their early 20s she names Idriss, Mohammed and
Souleymane.
When they unexpectedly left for Syria in September 2014, Kasiki tried to console their mothers.
Shortly after that, Idriss contacted her by Skype and she became the go-between for the “little ones” and their families.
The men spoke to her often, urging her to come out to help people
there. Kasiki, who worked mostly with Muslims, had converted to Islam
shortly before that.
“I left my mother’s religion in Yaounde (the capital of Cameroon) and
since then, maybe, a space inside me was empty. It was Islam that would
take it,” she writes.
Her conversion was so private she did not even reveal it to her husband, who like many French has little time for religion.
When she left, she told him she was going to do humanitarian work in
Turkey. In fact, she planned to help out for a month at a maternity ward
in Raqqa. She knew about the Islamic State group but was not going to
support it. It was to help the “little ones.”
Kasiki was quickly confronted with the harsh rules of ISIS’ radical
interpretation of Islam. In Raqqa, she was given the apartment of a rich
family that had fled abroad, and she was supplied with a niqab, abaya
and black gloves to wear when she went outside.
“Mommy’s dressing up as Batman! Can I get a disguise too?” her son said with a laugh when she first covered up.
Her impression of day turning into night when she donned the full face veil inspired the title of the book.
The maternity ward turned out to be what she called a “baby factory”
run by untrained foreign Muslims who looked down on the local women who
gave birth there. All births are by Caesarean section, by orders of the
Islamic State.
After about two weeks and telephone contact with her husband, Kasiki
stopped working and said she wanted to leave. The “little ones” dropped
their friendly masks and began pressuring her to stay. They also tried
to take her son to the mosque, but she forbade it.
Soon she was put in the “madafa,” an enclosed home for women whose
husbands were off fighting, or who were waiting to marry a jihadi or
who, like her, were rebellious. “It wasn’t exactly a prison, more like a
kennel,” she wrote.
There were several foreign women there, some listlessly waiting for
their husbands to return or become “martyrs” and some dreaming of
marrying a fighter. In the common room, the television showed ISIS
decapitation videos and children’s cartoons about Islam in Arabic.
When a fighter came one day to marry a young Belgian woman, Kasiki and
her son slipped out amid the confusion and hid with a Syrian family.
Contacted by her husband, the opposition Free Syrian Army soon smuggled
her out to Turkey in late April 2015 at a price of 30,000 euros
($34,000). When she returned to Paris, French police arrested her for
endangering a child and she endured two months of prison before finally
being freed to restart her life.
Although eloquent and determined, Kasiki struggled to explain how she
could have been lured by the “little ones” to go to Raqqa when she knew
what was happening there and was not drawn by any kind of Muslim
solidarity.
“I’m angry with myself because I trusted them,” she said. “I was going
through a difficult phase and was thinking of going to work for a
humanitarian organization. They told me about the maternity wards there
that needed help and convinced me to come.”
Religion played almost no role in her decision. “I didn’t even say my
five prayers a day in France, and I said even fewer there. They
considered me an infidel,” she said.
It seemed to her that her friends didn’t go there for Islam, either.
“They felt rejected here in France, they were searching for something
and found this extremism,” she said. “There they could be men, fighting
with real weapons. They found their place.”
In the last paragraph of the book, Kasiki wrote that Idriss and
Mohammed were later killed in battle. “There has been no news about
Souleymane,” she added.
On her return, Kasiki vowed to restart her life “clean of all
religion.” She has discussed faith with an imam and a priest but has not
returned to any organized form of worship.
“I’ve had an intimate relationship with religion since I was a child
and there’s still something there,” she said, but added: “I’ve taken a
distance without rejecting religion.”
Adapting to life back in Paris has been difficult. She is back with her
husband but they are moving because she has received threats after the
book’s publication. It’s too early to start work again and she said she
doesn’t get out much.
Her son seems to be doing better. Kasiki said she often played with him
in Raqqa and explained their effort to evade the ISIS religious police
as if it were a child’s game of running away from “the naughty uncles.”
A child psychologist who examined him on return told Kasiki she had protected him well.
Despite her anger at the Islamic State and its enforcement of an
extreme form of Islam, Kasiki said she would not play the role of
turncoat against her adopted faith that many secular French might want
to see.
“I don’t want to stigmatize Islam,” she said. “What I saw there was not Islam.”
Tom Heneghan is a correspondent based in Paris
Courtesy: Religion News Service
Photo: A Free Syrian Army fighter carries his weapon as he stands
in front of graffiti that reads “Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant ) down” at Masaken Hanano neighborhood in Aleppo, Syria, on Jan.
7, 2014.
Photo courtesy: REUTERS/Jalal Alhalabi
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