Mothers of ISIS
Their children abandoned them to join the worst terror orgnaization on earth. Now all they have is each other.
In Calgary, between the soccer practices and the hours at her accounting job and the potlucks with the neighbors, Christianne Boudreau spent every spare minute watching Islamic State videos, her nose pressed up against the computer screen.
She sat in the basement of her middle-class home in her middle-class suburb, a bare room that once belonged to her eldest son, Damian, and watched men posturing with big guns like teenagers. She watched firefights. She watched executions. But Boudreau barely registered any of the bloodshed. She was focused on the faces behind the balaclavas, trying to spot her son’s eyes.
In Copenhagen, Karolina Dam was wild with fear. Her son Lukas had been in Syria for seven months. Three days earlier, she received word that he had been injured outside Aleppo, but she was convinced that he was dead. Sitting alone that evening, nervously puffing on a vaporizer, she couldn’t stop herself from sending a Viber message into the ether. “Lukas,” she wrote, “I love you so much my beloved son. I miss you and want to hug and smell you. Hold your soft hands in mine and smile at you.”
There was no reply. A month later, someone wrote back to her. It wasn’t Lukas.
"What about my hands hehe"
Dam had no idea who might have gained access to her son’s phone or Viber account, but she was desperate for information. Trying to stay calm, she wrote back: “Also yours, sweetie, but mostly Lukas’s.”
All chats and messages in this story have been reproduced with original spelling and punctuation.
The person asked, “Can you handle some news?”
“Yeah, honey,” Dam wrote. A few seconds, and then the response.
“Your son is in bits and pieces.”
These women are just four of thousands who have lost a child to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions.
Exit
From Top: Alex Belomlinsky; Associated Press; Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images;
Click here to read the full story.
Todd Korol