Mother who took son, four, to ISIS-held Syria tells of escaping false 'paradise' full of 'monsters'
A mother who took her four-year-old son to the Islamic State has returned to France after a brief, but disturbing, "journey into hell".
In February 2015, Sophie Kasiki told her husband she was heading to Istanbul to work in an orphanage for a few weeks.
Instead, she took her boy and together they followed the Islamists' trail from Turkey into Syria, to the ISIS-held territories so many militants hell-bent on martyrdom had trodden before her.
It took her just 10 days to realise her mistake and suddenly she woke from a "paralysing torpor".
The 34-year-old has told her story in a new book The Observer reports reads like a thriller.
Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and raised Catholic, Mrs Kasiki converted to Islam while doing social work with migrant families in the suburbs of Paris. She believed the conversion would fill a "hole in her heart" neither her marriage nor her son had.
In her work, Mrs Kasiki befriended three young Muslim boys in Paris who she adored like little brothers. In September 2014 Les Petits ("the little ones") disappeared before popping up in Syria. Mrs Kasiki maintained contact with the boys before she decided to follow them to the "paradise" they described.
With her boy in tow, Mrs Kasiki started working in the maternity hospital in the ISIS stronghold Raqqa where the veil of the Islamic utopia was soon removed.
Working in squalid conditions, Mrs Kasiki witnessed "arrogant foreign fighters" who treated the Syrian population with indifference.
Her husband emailed family photos to her daily in the hope of changing her mind. She soon resolved to leave.
When a Frenchman tried to indoctrinate her son, she snapped. "Keep your hands off my boy," she said. She was punched in the face. The pain was nothing compared to the hellish path her son would be dragged along.
She had seen the ISIS education centres where young children were forced to watch executions and decapitations while their mothers clapped and cheered behind them.
"I asked to go home," she recalled, but her pleas were met with excuses, then threats.
"They said I was a woman alone with a child and I couldn't go anywhere, and if I tried to leave I would be stoned or killed."
When she was to be forced into a marriage, the wayward mother found an unlocked door and she took her son and her chance to escape.
When she returned to France she was imprisoned and interrogated by intelligence officers for two months. She has since reconciled with her husband but may face kidnapping charges.
More than 200 Frenchwomen are currently living in the ISIS territories, French intelligence services believe. In the past two years the proportion of French nationals heading to the region that are women as gone from 10 per cent to 35 per cent.
With young men appearing in new ISIS propaganda videos all the time, calling for others to join their jihad, the tragically enlightened mother reflects how easily "That could have been my son".
"I would have killed us both rather than let him become a killer, rather than let him fall into the claws of those monsters," she said.
News break – January 11
