Woman Who Unknowingly Became an ISIS Bride Escapes Syria With Her Two Kids
A young Moroccan woman's dream of marrying an Afghan-British trader to live in Britain turned into a nightmare after her husband, who turned out to be a fighter for the Islamic State (ISIS), took her to Syria, where she had three husbands and two children for three years.
This was the traumatic experience of 23-year-old Islam Maytat. Her story began in early 2014 when she met Khalil Ahmed online. The guy was an Afghan businessman of British nationality who worked in Dubai. She married him two months later with the hope of studying fashion design in London.
Ahmed first took Maytat to Afghanistan to meet his family and stayed there for a month. The man proved to be a strict, controlling husband who didn't allow her to wear makeup and bright clothes. They went back to Morocco but only for a month and a half after which, they packed again.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Maytat thought they would go to Britain but Ahmed told her they would use Turkey as a jump off point to London. As soon as they landed in Istanbul, they drove to the southeastern city of Gaziantep, where they stayed at a house full of couples from different countries like Saudi Arabia, Algeria and France.
She realized that her dream of becoming a stylist would not be happening after learning that there were other women like her who were lured unknowingly into marrying jihadists to raise their children. That June, ISIS declared a "caliphate" across Syria and Iraq and the following month, they crossed the border and joined Ahmed's brother in Manbij, northern Syria.
By September, Maytat was pregnant with their first child and Ahmed was sent to a month-long training mission. On Oct. 8, 2014, she was informed that her husband was killed at the frontline in Kobane.
"I became more depressed. I said to myself, this is the only person I knew in this foreign land and now I'm alone here," she related.
Less than a year after being widowed, Maytat married her late husband's friend, also an Afghan, who took her to Raqqa, the caliphate's de facto capital.
"I couldn't deal with life there. He wouldn't let me leave the house so I asked him for a divorce two months later," she said.
She married for the third time to an Indian fighter with whom she had a daughter. But the third husband was also killed in battle 18 months later. By then, Maytat was allowed to live among Syrian civilians who helped her get out of Raqqa along with her 2-and-a-half-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter.
