JOSH BAKER: Before we begin, I just want to flag that there are some descriptions of violence in this episode.
SAM: My story, oh yeah, absolutely it is very difficult to believe… I’m not a bad person, I’m not a monster.
JENNY: And here’s this blonde haired, blue-eyed girl with frickin’ tattoos on her neck like going to Syria, like come on, she had to have known like, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m so torn with it, I’m just so torn with it, I don’t know, I don’t…
SAM: I ended up in a torture prison in Raqqa… The beatings started, eltrocution, sexual abuse…
JENNY: She had confided in us that Moussa was wanting to I think she said like join the holy war, something like that.
BAKER: Did you, did you make a decision to go to ISIS though Sam?
SAM: I, I can’t really answer that because it has to do with the case. I made the decision, I made the decision to…
BAKER: Visitation has ended! That’s it. Great.
I’m Josh Baker. From BBC Panorama and Frontline PBS this is “I’m Not A Monster”
Episode 8: “I take my book back”
BAKER: I’m in a music shop in northeastern Syria. Five minutes ago, I was walking down the street looking for a cafe; a left turn down some steps into a basement full of shops, and I was accosted by a man who was so excited by the sight of our microphone, he’d leapt out of a barber’s chair — mid-haircut — and shuffled me into his shop.
Now, surrounded by cabinets stuffed full of guitars and violins — I’ve got a front row seat to a live performance, by a man with half a haircut and a splodge of shaving foam on his cheek.
JOSH: That was great.
NEWSREEL: The final push to eliminate ISIS forces from Syria has begun… After a final night of heavy bombardment, this is where the so-called caliphate ended… After nearly five years of fighting in Iraq and Syria ISIS no longer controls any territory in either country… We have liberated virtually all of the territory from the grip of these blood-thirsty monsters…
BAKER: It’s August 2019 — about five months since the Islamic State group’s last made its last stand in Syria.
NEWSREEL: ISIS months ago morphed into an effective and deadly insurgency group. That is the next phase for them…
BAKER: ISIS sleeper cells are still a threat, but their so-called caliphate has gone. Moving around this part of Syria is much easier now.
BAKER: That’s a really reassuring creak as you go along over that bridge…
BAKER: The homemade boat that had gotten me into the country last time has been replaced by a minibus ride on a pontoon bridge over the same stretch of the Tigris River.
BAKER: Ah, hey man.
MUSTAFA AL-ALI: Hey Josh.
BAKER: How you doing?
MUSTAFA: Yeah man.
BAKER: It’s nice to meet you.
TAFF: Hi, Taff.
BAKER: This is Joe.
JOE KENT: Hi.
BAKER: I’m here with producer Joe, and Taff, a medic who’s ex-military.
MUSTAFA: I’m Mustafa. Nice to meet you man.
BAKER: And we’re working with a local journalist, Mustafa. When ISIS attacked his hometown, Kobane, in 2014 he says he had three choices: flee — and become a refugee, pick up a gun and join the fight or grab a pen and start to document what was happening.
BAKER: Your friends, imagine lots of them left.
MUSTAFA: Yeah of course.
BAKER: Lots of them were killed.
MUSTAFA: Of course yeah.
BAKER: Well I admire you for staying in Kobane.
MUSTAFA: I was convinced that the media is the best way to save Kobane actually.
BAKER: I think that’s crazy brave.
MUSTAFA: It was not only me actually I had friends who were doing the same job of mine. I mean we were convinced and believing in what we were doing actually.
BAKER: Since then he’s interviewed scores of people who’ve been with ISIS. I’ve given him an outline of what Sams told me and as we pile into a minivan heading into Syria Mustafa wants to know more.
BAKER: She finds out that they want to join ISIS. She’s like, ‘You’re crazy, this is ridiculous, we’re not doing it.’
MUSTAFA: Ok…
BAKER: They decide to have some time in Turkey on Holiday.
MUSTAFA: I think she’s lying.
BAKER: You think she’s lying? Why do you think she’s lying?
MUSTAFA: It’s just ridiculous. Like, come on, like are you going to believe that? Somebody saying, ‘I’m cheated from the US to Syria’ — Like it’s not true.
BAKER: Mustafa says nearly all the wives of ISIS fighters he’s ever met claim they were tricked or deceived.
BAKER: So you think this is the same old story.
MUSTAFA: Yeah man.
BAKER: So much of what Sam’s told me about her life in America and how she ended up with the Islamic State group — just doesn't add up. She’s misled or lied to the FBI, to Matthew’s father, her best friends and it looks like she’s been lying to me too.
In Syria she painted a picture of herself as someone who didn't want anything to do with ISIS, who tried to escape and was even tortured by the group. But I don't know if these are just more lies.
So I’ve come back, and with Mustafa’s help, I want to try and find out the truth. Most of all, I want to know if she was actually an ISIS supporter.
BAKER: This is where I first met Sam. In this building up here. And there was loads of security…
BAKER: In December 2017, it had taken 10 days of searching, tea drinking and tapping all the contacts I had to find Sam on this Kurdish military base.
BAKER: All of where we are now was surrounded by soldiers with guns and it was really hard to get here.
BAKER: Now, there’s an office where you can pop in and apply to meet ISIS prisoners. I’m starting here, and ask to talk to foreigners who were living in Raqqa at the same time as Sam.
BAKER: Hello, hello.
BAKER: After only one cup of tea and just 24 hours after crossing into Syria, I'm waiting for a prisoner to be brought in for an interview. Like Sam’s husband Moussa, I’m told he’s Moroccan, was a member of ISIS, and lived in Raqqa.
BAKER: [Arabic] Do you speak English? Arabic?
BAKER: Mohamed arrives blindfolded and shackled. His clothes are fraying at the edges and are way too big for him. He looks gaunt.
BAKER: Ok. My name is Josh. Your name?
MOHAMED: Mohamed.
BAKER: I’m told he’s agreed to talk to us but interviews like this are never straightforward. Although I’ve had ISIS prisoners refuse to meet me before. When they do agree, you can’t be 100% sure that it’s their choice to talk to you. With Mustafa translating, I explain what we are doing and ask if he is happy for us to record. Then we begin.
BAKER: Were you ever a fighter with ISIS?
MOHAMED: [Arabic]
BAKER: Like Sam and her family, Mohammed says he arrived in Raqqa in 2015. He has a big scar on his head that he says is from a gunshot wound, but insists he was an ISIS mechanic. Not a fighter.
BAKER: Have you ever seen this man? This is in Raqqa.
BAKER: I show him a picture of Moussa and then one of his brother Abdelhaadi. He says he doesn't know them.
BAKER: How long did you spend in Raqqa?
BAKER: I ask him about life in Raqqa with ISIS. He gives a very long, very confusing answer that seems to all be about distancing himself from the group.
MUSTAFA: So probably yeah. He’s not saying the truth actually.
BAKER: Did you ever hear about a woman called Um Yusef?
BAKER: When I mention Um Yusef — the name Sam was known by when she was with ISIS — he starts to open up.
MUSTAFA: Yea he said like everybody heard the story and that there was one Um Yusef who got tortured — ISIS were accusing her like you should tell us that you are a spy. She went through a big torture by ISIS. But at the end she was innocent.
BAKER: Mohamed says he’d heard about a woman called Um Yusef, a Westerner who was accused of being a spy, but somehow managed to get out alive. He says the story was well known in Raqqa.
And I’ve come across another mention of an Um Yusef who was tortured. It’s in a letter I found online, written by someone who claims to be a longtime ISIS member. It’s addressed to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who was the group's leader. There’s a paragraph that stands out. It reads…
‘Do you not know what is happening in the prison cells and hallways of opression from whippings, beatings, being hung, suspended by bound wrists, humiliation, insults, harassment and killing.’
The letter says news was spreading about what ISIS interrogators had done to a woman called Um Yusef al-Amrikiya — Um Yusef the American. So it looks like someone with the same name as Sam was tortured. But was it Sam? I’ve heard there was another woman who went by Um Yusef al-Amrikiya.
MOHAMED: [Arabic]
BAKER: Mohamed and I talk for about an hour.
MUSTAFA: So yeah the time is over….
BAKER: But I learn little else. He’s taken back to prison. We leave heading for Raqqa.
MUSTAFA: Ok guys…
BAKER: Sam?
SAM: Oh hello how are you?
BAKER: How are you?
SAM: I’m doing ok.
BAKER: I’ve spent months making video calls to Sam in jail, trying to get her to reveal details about her life in Raqqa that I might be able to check.
SAM: You know what, to the south… Yeah move it a little bit towards where the marker is.
BAKER: I even try the very scientific method of holding a map of Raqqa up to the camera on my laptop.
SAM: Ok yeah to the south, right where your finger is. This little dog leg road.
BAKER: Yeah.
SAM: Road. You see it? Look right around there. Ok right where your finger is. Don’t move your finger!
BAKER: I’m trying to get Sam to show me where she spent most of her time.
BAKER: Right there?
SAM: Yes. Right there.
BAKER: There?
SAM: Yes. It’s where everything significant happened I guess.
BAKER: It’s a bit of a change of pace now, so you want to make sure you’ve got your body armor near you. It’s going to be a slightly different atmosphere to where we’ve been.
BAKER: With a list of locations to find, we’re approaching Raqqa. I’ve been there before and I know there are still booby traps, unexploded bombs and ISIS sleeper cells.
BAKER: In the fight to get to Raqqa to even begin the battle for Raqqa, these were heavily contested areas. Up here this whole little town’s completely destroyed. I mean you have to imagine that you’d be driving in here and this would be roundabouts with ISIS flags everywhere, there’d be ISIS guards, there’d be people walking about dressed in black, there wouldn’t be this level of destruction.
AHMED: Hi, how are you?
TAFF: Nice to meet you.
JOE: Hello.
BAKER: Hey man how are you?
MUSTAFA: Guys this is Ahmed. So he will be helping us with the project…
BAKER: Ahmed survived years of ISIS rule, then he joined the fight to defeat them and he’s still part of the militia protecting Raqqa. Today he’s our guide to the city. We head to a hospital where I think Sam may have given birth to one of the two children she had in Syria.
BAKER: So this was a hospital?
AHMED: Yeah.
BAKER: I don’t think there’s much left for us to see here. Destroyed… Ok, hold on.
JOE: What have you seen?
BAKER: It’s a bomb belt. Be really careful. There’s a bomb belt there Taff. It’s detonated though… What’s upstairs? I’m just, Joe, I’m going to keep my feet in these hard sections.
JOE: In the center where other people have walked.
TAFF: Yeah exactly.
BAKER: Joe, Taff and I make our way past a red triangle that’s been sprayed on the side of the building. A sign it’s been cleared of I.E.D.s — homemade bombs left by ISIS.
BAKER: There’s just rubble everywhere.
JOE: This was destroyed from the outside or the inside?
MUSTAFA: From everywhere actually because this was one of the really hard fighting positions during the battle.
BAKER: This was?
MUSTAFA: Yeah. Like you know the cement is very strong so ISIS were holding it for a very long time actually.
BAKER: It was a longshot, but I’d hoped the hospital might still be open and someone would remember Sam or there’d be record of her being here — I know ISIS was meticulous with its paperwork.
BAKER: There’s something sticking out of the ground just behind you. I think we’ve probably come in far enough to be honest with you. What’s that Taff?
TAFF: Detonator.
BAKER: Are you serious?
TAFF: Bear in mind electronic detonator, electronic gadgets.
BAKER: Yeah, shall we go? And actually, just down there looks like what could be another bomb belt. Yeah, if that’s what we’re finding in here this isn’t cleared and we should leave. Let’s be really careful walking out.
BAKER: Our next stop is the torture prison — where Sam says she was held.
JOE: Here you go.
BAKER: This is the stadium.
BAKER: It’s part of a football stadium that once hosted thousands of fans. Underneath the main stand are stairs leading down to a basement where the prison is. But they’re behind a locked gate. And another entrance has been bricked up. Across Raqqa, signs of ISIS are being slowly erased, their flags are gone, their logos painted over. But not here. What went on in the stadium’s basement, has been left, frozen in time.
BAKER: Where do you want me to go this way?
AHMED: Yeah, yeah.
BAKER: Our guide Ahmed has arranged permission for us to enter. He peels back a sheet of metal and points to a narrow slit in the wall — this is the only way in.
JOE: Wow. Through there?
BAKER: Let me have a look.
BAKER: We crawl through an air vent, into the darkness and end up standing on a metal platform about 10 feet above the floor. We’re on top of a row of cells — cages really. The atmosphere instantly feels different, heavier. The air is thick with dust and musty and stale.
BAKER: Right, I’m going to go down… What does this say?
MUSTAFA: It’s not allowed, like to enter the jail area. If you do like you will have your responsibility.
BAKER: ‘Enter at your own risk.’
BAKER: What’s that? There’s loads of bullet casings on the floor
BAKER: A long corridor splits the basement in two. There are rooms on either side that were used as cells. Words are written in Arabic above some of the doors: women’s area, men’s area.
BAKER: Shower blocks. If you look in here as well, somebody’s had an exercise routine. And I’m guessing they were English because it’s written in English. But they’ve got legs 50 at five reps, push ups 50 at five, abs 50 at five.
MUSTAFA: Abu Mohamed.
JOE: Abu Mohamed
MUSTAFA: Yes.
BAKER: Abu Mohamed did his exercise.
JOE: There’s a bit more there?
MUSTAFA: Days.
JOE: Four days in this room.
BAKER: Oh wow Look at this.
JOE: So, not just 4 days.
BAKER: Five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 100. A hundred days in a box that’s about a meter wide, with a toilet at the end of it.
JOE: And what are they there?
BAKER: These are little rooms that people were held in. There’s a little shaft down here. ISIS tunnel? Oh, cage?
MUSTAFA: Mhm.
BAKER: So there’s a sort of shaft in the ground and it’s full of water and there’s a rusty cage in it so I’m guessing people were lowered into the water, yeah? In the cage so there’s probably bodies in there. Maybe.
MUSTAFA: Yes.
BAKER: There are? Ok, great. So beneath me is… It’s pretty hard to describe. If you look on the walls, people were tortured in here and there’s two bloody hand marks where somebody’s put their hand on the wall and slid down.
JOE: Smears.
BAKER: Yep. Smears of blood. We’re basically walking around a graveyard. It’s horrible. I get this really tight feeling in my tummy when I’m in places like this. I really don’t like it.
SAM: Well I mean it’s terrifying. I don’t think about it a lot so whenever I think back in details about the way I was feeling when I was being led away and I’m blindfolded and I’m listening to people around me, it’s just absolutely terrifying because you just don’t know what these people are capable of.
BAKER: My calls to Sam start to run through my mind as I start to look for anything that might confirm she was held here.
BAKER: Did you ever write anything on the walls, did you ever mark the walls in your cell?
SAM: Yes. Like I remember in the prison cell I stayed in for two weeks, there was somebody that had written a calendar on the wall and because of that calendar I used it to practice my Arabic numbers on the wall.
BAKER: There’s a calendar.
JOE: Calendar?
BAKER: Yeah it's not quite what we’re after though. Ok… oh god there’s tons of dates. I mean I'd need to study this for a week, there's so much writing…
BAKER: The calendar cell, shall we call it that? Where was that?
SAM: That one, you walk down, down the stairs maybe 50 steps and turn left
BAKER: One, two, three…
SAM: It was literally like a square calendar with Arabic numbers. I used the opposite wall to write my Arabic numbers over and over and over again.
BAKER: 16 ,17, look at all the bullet marks, 18, 19, 20. Ok let me check these because these are much smaller cells… Ok, there’s nothing on the wall in there. I think where we want to go is further down.
SAM: The area opens up louder, like it’s more like it echoes a little bit so it’s like a larger room.
JOE: If you just stop and listen though Josh, do you notice how the sound has changed? If you were blindfolded and got to this room the echoes, you can hear how we’re talking the echoes changed. The acoustics have changed.
SAM: I say that because I can hear a lot of people in this area and it's more like it echoes a little bit and then typically do beatings and things like that there so other prisoners can listen.
BAKER: 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50… So that doesn’t make sense this end but maybe if they came from the other entrance.
BAKER: About 50 steps from another entrance to the prison, Mustafa and Ahmed find a room.
AHMED: That means women. So here — Anwar, Bashia, Nuran, Manal…
BAKER: So these were women in here?
MUSTAFA: Probably yeah because they are women’s names here actually.
BAKER: There are women's names carved into the wall. And it’s in roughly the distance Sam says she walked. There’s a small window that allows a beam of light to penetrate the dust. To one side are toilets and a shower area. I use my torch light to search the walls.
BAKER: Calendar there as well.
JOE: Calendar here, calendar here.
BAKER: Can you see any arabic numbers?
AHMED: Yes, look. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
MUSTAFA: Yeah.
BAKER: This might be the calendar Sam’s talking about. But there are a lot of calendars.
AHMED: [Arabic]
BAKER: Inglese?
AHMED: Yeah.
BAKER: So above the names they have the numbers in English and then Arabic?
MUSTAFA: Yeah, the names are in English and the numbers are in Arabic.
JOE: Do you reckon this is the room?
BAKER: I reckon this might be. I mean as well here Joe there could have been something on the wall but the wallpaper’s come off. So I guess there are things that Sam’s described but it's hard to know. Let’s just have a very delicate little walk through this area because the walls are coming down.
BAKER: Sam told me a bomb hit the stadium near where she was being held. Next door we find a huge hole in the ceiling.
BAKER: I don’t know, god knows how many people were kept in here but the thing is it’s been hit by an airstrike so there are just railings and debris everywhere. I can’t really go any further this way.
BAKER: The airstrike, the calendar, and the roughly 50 steps from the door to the cell — we might have found the room where Sam says she was held. But we can’t be certain.
BAKER: There’s plenty more rooms to check
BAKER: Sam had also told me about another room.
SAM: The prison cell that I spent the most ridiculous amount of time in it’s very, very small. Um, yeah, very small, like I couldn’t even lay down all the way.
BAKER: About 20 meters down the corridor, I find more cells. These are much smaller, big enough for one person at best.
SAM: And then there was a lot of markings like I remember it had the name ‘Samuel’ which I thought was odd. And then it said ‘PKK’ below it.
BAKER: What does that say?
JOE: PKK.
BAKER: What was the name?
JOE: Samuel... What does this one here say? S P Y…
MUSTAFA: Probably just Russian.
JOE: Russian?
MUSTAFA: Yeah.
BAKER: We find the letters PKK, but no Samuel.
BAKER: Let’s try these rooms, let me just get in behind you.
JOE: Tell me what you’re looking at. Tell me what you’re walking past.
BAKER: If you look to your right there’s a hole in the wall and there’s two metal bed frames and they’ve run wire across the bed frames and they would plug these bed frames into the main’s power and they would make people lie on them and they would electrocute them. So you’ve got a chain coming down from a concrete beam with a hook in it and over in the corner you’ve got rope where they would tie people up and dangle them and hang them.
SAM: They hung me up from the ceiling by my wrists with handcuffs. They stripped my clothes, they beat me, they electrocuted me in my stomach.
BAKER: Oh. How on earth, there's so much writing on this wall. I don't even know where to begin.
BAKER: The more I see, the more I start to think of all the people who were held here, there are thousands of words carved into the plaster. And drawings.
BAKER: Picture of a grenade. Allahu akbar, allahu akbar, allahu akbar and a picture of a speaker. Lots of guns.
JOE: You’ve got an ISIS flag behind you and some more writing.
BAKER: Arabic numbers, Russian.
JOE: And what does this say?
AHMED: Maybe Turkish.
MUSTAFA: And probably that’s like French actually.
BAKER: In English, someone’s written: ‘finally the end.’ As we keep searching, Ahmed, our guide, stops outside another room. At first I think he’s reading something on the wall.
MUSTAFA: So Ahmed was jailed here.
BAKER: You were jailed here?
AHMED: Yeah for seven days.
BAKER: What was it like to be jailed here?
AHMED: [Arabic]
MUSTAFA: [Translating] So we were here like 47 people.
BAKER: 47 people??
AHMED: Yes.
BAKER: In this room? This room is what — four meters wide?
AHMED: Yes.
BAKER: He’s kneeling in the corner of the room. You were just sat here, all of you? Why did you end up in here?
BAKER: Ahmed says he was walking down the street with his wife. Her lace came undone. So she raised her veil ever so slightly, to see her shoes and it exposed some skin. And for that he says, he was imprisoned for ‘not controlling his wife.’
BAKER: I mean it’s just — it’s hot and it’s dusty and there’s five of us.
JOE: And we’re not being tortured. And we’re not prisoners.
BAKER: Are you ok being back here?
AHMED: Yeah…
BAKER: Ahmed tells me the first time he came back he cried. But, in his words, it’s ‘fine’ now. I can’t imagine what he must have gone through in a place like this. As we walk back down the corridor towards the hole that we crawled in through, I stop to check one final room.
BAKER: There’s somebody’s beard hair there, yeah. Beard hair, yeah. When the city was about to be overrun a lot of the ISIS guys shaved their beards to make themselves look less ISIS.
BAKER: What’s this?
AHMED: The Qur’an.
BAKER: In the corner, on top of a wall, is a dusty Qur’an, presumably left behind by an ISIS fighter. Ahmed walks over, picks it up, and with a deep breath, blows the soot off. He puts it to his head, says a short prayer and then turns to me and says, ‘I take my book back.’ Then we leave.
BAKER: Out through this tiny, tiny gap in the wall. It's about the width of my shoulders. Ok.
BAKER: I’m glad to be out. The Black Stadium is truly a horrific place. The details Sam’s given me suggest she’s familiar with what it’s like inside. The layout she described is fairly accurate. The writing and calendars on the walls in some of the cells are close to what she’s told me, though not exact. The kinds of torture she says she was subjected to, did go on here. But none of that proves she was a prisoner. I have to consider other possibilities. She could have learnt all this from someone else, or even been there because she worked for ISIS.
There’s another person I’m able to talk to in Syria. She doesn’t want me to reveal much about who she is — she’s scared of reprisals because she was a member of ISIS. So I’m going to call her Tamimi. She came here to join ISIS, but says she ended up in the cell next to Sam. Her words are spoken by an actor.
BAKER: I just want to talk about Samantha’s time in the stadium… What happened to Samantha there because she has told me some things, but I just need to… I’m curious to know what you saw happen to Samantha there.
TAMIMI: When she was in the prison, they really tortured her so badly and we always heard her screaming. We heard them beating her so badly, she's screaming ‘I’m pregnant.’ They’re beating her, they’re tugging her by her hair and trying to move her from one room to another. I saw her mouth and her nose, a lot of blood coming out. I saw her with chains on her hand and on her legs. They’re speaking so loudly I can hear what they say. ‘We know that you are working with FBI, you are not Muslim, you are not from our religion, why you come here? You’re Christian.’ We heard her, she's screaming ‘I come for my kids, I came because of my daughter. I don't come to stay, I don't want to stay here.’
BAKER: This is all very similar to what Sam’s told me. One thing Sam’s never given me a straight to answer is how she got out of the prison. One time she said she was just released and dropped by the side of the road in the middle of the night. Another, she said she escaped after an airstrike. Tamimi says she saw Sam again after prison and Sam told her it was all down to Moussa.
TAMIMI: He’s famous. He’s a commander. He's very, very well known.
BAKER: She says Moussa was part of a notorious unit of ISIS fighters.
TAMIMI: Not anyone can join this group and not anyone can speak with them or have contact with them.
BAKER: Do you know who his boss was?
TAMIMI: Adnani. Abu Muhammad al-Adnani.
BAKER: Before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in August 2016, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was the ISIS spokesperson. He ran their external operations and was considered the group's second in command. He also controlled fighters in Syria, and Tamimi says Moussa was one of his men.
TAMIMI: Her husband drive long time to meet his boss, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, and he told him the story and what had happened. He helped him to take her out from the prison.
BAKER: If Tamimi is right, the reason Sam is alive is because of her husband's connections within ISIS, though I have no way to verify what she says.
BAKER: So there’s a house just over here that was Sam’s.
MUSTAFA: Ok.
BAKER: What do you think, Joe, go to the one that’s near?
JOE: Yeah.
BAKER: There are two houses I want to find where I think Sam lived.
SAM: We had a, like a small house in the middle of the city, nobody was living there because it was very dangerous. Everybody was living in apartment buildings because honestly it was more safe but I didn’t want to live with neighbours because I was afraid it would get bombed.
BAKER: Using details Sam’s given me and satellite images of Raqqa, I manage to locate a house that I think Sam’s talking about.
BAKER: The street we are on now is about 500 meters from the Black Stadium and it seems like a woman has moved back into the house. Are they going to let us in? Salamu alaykum.
BAKER: I’ve seen a photo of Matthew and his sister, she’s holding this scrawny cat. It’s taken after a bombing. I think it was here. It shows them covered in dust and staring blankly into the camera. In the background, there’s a fountain.
BAKER: Do you have a water fountain?
MUSTAFA: [Translating]
WOMAN: [Arabic]
BAKER: That there..
WOMAN: [Arabic]
MUSTAFA: Yeah it's a kind of…
BAKER: Hexagon?
MUSTAFA: Yeah yeah yeah.
BAKER: And then the picture was here. There’s the birdcage in the back. You see that blue in the wall, that’s there. The brick work is the same. It all matches. So Matthew was standing right here. If you look over here on this wall, you can see where they’ve patched up a hole. And so the wall came down and almost killed the kids. You know if Moussa was a commander this is exactly the kind of house I could see a commander living in. Big open courtyard, plants growing up the walls, plenty of rooms. It’s beautiful.
BAKER: This is definitely a house the family lived in, but the owner says she’s just moved back in after fleeing the fighting years ago and doesn’t know anything about Sam.
BAKER: Thank you for letting us into your home. Shukran.
BAKER: I’ve still not met anyone who can tell me whether Sam was an ISIS supporter. But we have one last address to try. On the way there, we pass a park that I recognize from other pictures of the family. When I met Suad, the woman who’d been bought by Sam as one of the family's slaves, she’d given me an old, broken phone. I sent it to a forensic data lab in the UK, where they removed the memory chip and managed to retrieve thousands of images. There are photos of the kids playing in this park. Matthew’s going down a slide, his sister’s on a swing. There’s also a picture of a baby in a pram being pushed by a woman who is completely covered; it might be Sam.
BAKER: Somewhere around here… Ok, ok. Maybe around here. Stop, stop.
SAM: I mean really where we spent most of our time which was at the house the near the river. If anybody’s back in that neighbourhood you just ask them, ‘where was the American woman living?’ And they’ll tell you exactly where I was living.
BAKER: Yeah let’s get out. Mustafa, can we ask some of the neighbors where the house of the American woman was?
MUSTAFA: Yeah, I’m trying to…
BAKER: As soon as we park by the river, I see a man smoking a cigarette. Mustafa walks over to talk to him.
MAN: [Arabic]
BAKER: Can you ask him to tell me what he’s told you?
MUSTAFA: So yeah Samantha asked him like to find a smuggler but he said like I mean like we were scared actually we were like really scared from everything and like he told her like it’s dangerous and he said like we suffered a lot from ISIS.
BAKER: By total chance the first man we speak to not only remembers Sam but he tells me she'd asked him about smugglers to help her escape ISIS. He tells me Sam used to sneak round to his house for a cigarette. His wife would see the bruises from where Moussa beat her and sometimes he’d hear Sam screaming at night.
BAKER: So these… There’s some children next to us who’ve just come up to us while we’ve been talking. Who are… Hello. Mahaba. So who are these people?
MAN: [Arabic]
CHILD: Yusef.
BAKER: Yusef?
CHILD: Abu Yusef.
BAKER: Abu Yusuf? We’ve just shown this young boy a picture of the family on a motorbike and he’s named each member of the family. So we’re definitely in the right place.
BAKER: We’re directed down a dirt track, towards the other house Sam’s told me about. As we walk we speak to other neighbors. They know the names of Sam’s children and other details about them.
BAKER: What was Abu Yusef like?
BAKER: I ask about Moussa, Known here as Abu Yusef.
MUSTAFA: He says like to be honest he never bothered anyone in the neighborhood but I mean he had ISIS mentality.
BAKER: And Abdelhadi, Moussa’s brother.
NEIGHBOR: Dog.
MUSTAFA: Dog.
BAKER: Dog?
MUSTAFA: Dog and yeah he’s a very, very bad man.
BAKER: And this is her house here?
BAKER: The house is much more modest than the last one. It’s a single story, with a few rooms around a small courtyard. It’s behind a gated wall. A neighbour points to a square of white paint — it’s covering what was an ISIS flag.
BAKER: All of the men are breaking out their cigarettes and smoking. There’s also bullet holes in her house.
BAKER: The neighbors say lots of ISIS members would show up here to see Moussa and his brother.
MUSTAFA: When ISIS used to come here nobody would come out like. Everybody would stay in their houses. They were like pretty important people.
BAKER: These guys were important?
MUSTAFA: Yes.
BAKER: So he was senior?
MUSTAFA: Yes.
BAKER: Let’s look in this house. Oh my god. I think this is the courtyard where Matthew did the AK video.
BAKER: One of the videos that started me on this entire journey showed Matthew being forced to take apart an AK-47 assault rifle. I want to check if I’m right and this really is the place. In the video, you can hear chickens in the background. So, to the complete bemusement of one neighbor I have a question.
BAKER: Mustafa, can you ask, did they have chicken? [chicken sound]
MUSTAFA: [Translating]
NEIGHBOR: [Arabic]
BAKER: They had them here?
MUSTAFA: Yeah.
BAKER: The neighbors say they saw Matthew being made to wear an ISIS uniform and parade around with weapons.
MUSTAFA: And they sometimes take him to the river and they will film him. And yeah he had a suicide belt too.
BAKER: You saw the suicide belt?
MUSTAFA: Yeah he used to walk in front of them.
BAKER: With the suicide belt?
NEIGHBOR: [Arabic]
MUSTAFA: Yeah he had like everything actually. Pistol, A.K., suicide belt. Everything.
BAKER: How did Sam, how did Um Yusef feel about Matthew? Did she ever say anything to him about all this?
MUSTAFA: She was unhappy with it all.
BAKER: Unhappy with it?
MUSTAFA: Yeah. So yeah he said like she was totally different from any ISIS actually. Like was nice to everyone actually, taking care of the kids. So he said I mean generally she was good she was good with everyone actually I mean everybody like her.
BAKER: Can I ask, can I ask, was Samantha ISIS? Did she want to be here with ISIS?
MUSTAFA: [Translating]
NEIGHBOR: [Arabic]
MUSTAFA: He says like no she never wanted to be ISIS.
BAKER: Another man approaches us.
MUSTAFA: He knows her too.
NEIGHBOR 2: No Daesh. No Daesh.
BAKER: He says Sam was not Daesh, which is another term for ISIS.
BAKER: So I mean we’ve been here, what, 10 minutes? And we’ve had one, two, three, four different people tell us they knew Sam and they’re all saying that she’s not ISIS but all of them are talking about how brutal the brothers were. What do you think people should understand about Sam?
NEIGHBOR 2: Sam?
MUSTAFA: She was a good person.
BAKER: Did you… What was she like compared to other Westerners who came here?
NEIGHBOR 2: [Arabic] Booo.
MUSTAFA: She was not like them at all. She was good.
NEIGHBOR 2: [Arabic] Excellent.
BAKER: Joe what do we need to do here to sort of contemplate this a bit more. We’ve obviously been directed to meet these people by Sam. I’m just trying to think of reasons or ways, further ways we could corroborate or…
JOE: I mean it’s pretty clear that she… this is the place, isn’t it.
BAKER: But it I mean, there’s no way these guys could be ISIS?
MUSTAFA: The way they are talking, they are local, they are not ISIS. They were smoking.
BAKER: So you don’t think…
MUSTAFA: Always there is a chance actually. For that option actually.
BAKER: I see. Is there anyone else in the neighborhood who knew Um Yusef?
BAKER: There isn’t. So after speaking to everyone we can find, we decide to leave.
BAKER: In my head I'm thinking ways, why would these people lie to me? Ok, Sam has pointed in this direction, that’s a problem with the information but, you know if they were ISIS, there are so many details that corroborate what Sam told us.
BAKER: On our last night in Syria, we sit down for dinner on a rooftop. In the distance you can see the lights of neighboring Iraq. As we tuck into a feast of local food and a can of beer each, my conversation with Mustafa turns to Sam.
MUSTAFA: Yeah like everybody was saying that she’s nice but we should not forget that like she was living with people that were killing people. They were killing the innocent people, they were doing like public executions. So it doesn’t mean that a local says she’s good that we should say that she’s nothing in ISIS.
BAKER: The Adhan, call to prayer has just started behind us.
MUSTAFA: Look like maybe she’s a good person like maybe she’s a successful mother maybe she’s like a really amazing person, but she came from the United States, she ended up in Syria and that I can’t forgive actually. For me personally I came from a city that had been destroyed totally by ISIS. And I lost so many friends, I lost so many relatives actually because of ISIS.
BAKER: It's sobering talking to Mustafa. For him, no matter what horrors Sam went through, the unavoidable truth is her presence and the presence of other foreigners like her gave the group strength and power. A group that commited genocide and ruined the lives of millions. Including Mustafa’s.
BAKER: Ok, so Sam’s now back in the USA, she’s about to go on tria. What do you think should happen to her?
MUSTAFA: She should be judged. She should be judged like, maybe she was tricked in a way but I mean to come to Syria, her being there, her being in Syria is a way to support the Islamic State. If there were no women in the Islamic State would not have lasted six years or seven years.
BAKER: It will be interesting to see what happens in her trial.
MUSTAFA: That’s very true. That's very true.
BAKER: As a parting gift, Mustafa gives me an ISIS coin he’d found after the group's last battle in Bagouz. It's a stark reminder that people came here to join a self-declared caliphate the size of Great Britain. Not just an ideology, but somewhere they wanted you to believe you could build a better life. There’s no doubt in my mind that Moussa and his brother wanted to be part of this.
But as for Sam, I came to Syria with questions:
Was she really imprisoned? I’ve been told she was.
Did she really want to escape ISIS? A neighbor told me she did.
And most of all I wanted to know, was Sam an ISIS member? Everyone I asked told me she wasn't.
And that’s why I’m completely stunned by what happens next.
NEWSREEL: An Elkhart woman has pleaded guilty to helping terrorists. Samantha Elhassani admitted in federal court to providing money to ISIS…
BAKER: Sam pleads guilty to terrorism charges.
END
