Sophie Kasiki — not her real name — was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then “raised in a fervently Catholic and comfortable household of strong, independent women,” but moved to Paris to live with her sister when their mother died.
While employed as a social worker helping immigrant families, she converted to Islam — without telling her atheist husband:
Her new faith brought only temporary psychological comfort, but introduced her to three Muslim men, 10 years her junior, whom she nicknamed Les Petits (the little ones) and teased like younger brothers.
In September 2014, the three disappeared, later turning up in Syria, from where they maintained daily contact with Kasiki. She saw herself as a conduit between three lost boys, who simply needed to know their mothers were missing them to catch the next plane home, and their distraught families. Slowly the roles reversed. “I thought I was in control of the situation, but I realise now they were probably trained to recruit people like me,” she said. “Little by little they played on my weaknesses. They knew I was an orphan and I had converted to Islam, they knew I was insecure …”
On 20 February 2015, Kasiki told her husband she was travelling to work in an orphanage in Istanbul for a few weeks and taking their son. Instead she took the well-worn jihadi route to southern Turkey and into Syria.
Installed in the Isis stronghold of Raqqa, the reality of daily life was predictably different from the “paradise” painted by her hometown friends. Kasiki was ordered not to go out alone and only then covered from head to toe, to hand over her passport, and to limit communications with her family in France.
At the city’s Isis-run maternity hospital, where she was to work, she was shocked by the squalid conditions, staff indifference to patients’ suffering, and a hierarchy in the city that put “arrogant foreign fighters” at the top of the social heap and Syrians at the bottom. The family apartment Kasiki was allocated had been hastily abandoned by its Syrian owners and their caged canaries served as an increasingly potent metaphor for her and her son’s confinement.
[...]
The Frenchmen took Kasiki and her son to the madaffa (guest house), a prison in all but name and home to dozens of foreign women, where she was shocked to see young children watching Isis decapitations and killings on television while their mothers cheered and clapped. “The women saw Isis fighters as their Prince Charming, someone who was strong, powerful and would protect them. The only way out of the madaffa was to marry one. In reality, these western women were just wombs to make babies for Daesh.”