Frontline, December 15, 2020: "Return from ISIS"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a quite interesting episode of the long-running PBS documentary series Frontline called “Return from ISIS,” reported, written and directed by Josh Baker (who I’m assuming is British from his accent), about a woman named Samantha Sally who grew up in rural Arkansas (we get to see the crudely constructed home of her parents where she spent her childhood) whose dad describes her as a thrill-seeker and what in the 1920’s would have been called a gold-digger. She had a long series of boyfriends and her dad recalled her dumping them in sequence if someone richer and with more money to spend on her came along. After a failed marriage, she had a rebound affair with a Latino named Juan in Colorado and had a son, Matthew. Then she fell in love with Moussa el-Hassani, who came from a well-to-do family in Morocco (not exactly known as a hotbed of terrorism or Islamic radicalism), whom she married and for all appearances led a normal suburban life with in South Bend, Indiana (while Pete Buttigieg was its mayor, by the way) with her husband, her son and their daughter. There are chillingly ordinary home videos of the kids playing and Moussa wearing a caricatured death’s-head on his T-shirt -- which becomes considerably more sinister when he’s seen later in that same T-shirt as an ISIS fighter posing in one of their recruitment and propaganda videos. So is Matthew, who’s shown assembling a suicide vest and in a curiously affect-less voice describing how he’s going to use it in case an American helicopter and its crew fly in and try to rescue him. Baker saw these videos online and was fascinated by the story, which turned out to be the sort of conversion narrative we’ve heard quite often before in which a man bored by his comfortable but unfulfilling existence at first drifts into bad habits (Sam recalled her husband left home for what turned out to be a three-day cocaine binge) and then discovers a group of people who have a commitment to a cause greater than themselves, which inspires him to clean up their act and join them. (It’s not that different from the conversion narrative of Malcolm X.)

Only the group that gave Moussa a sense of purpose higher than themselves was a gang of murderous terrorists with a desire to conquer the entire world -- or at least the former Islamic caliphate, which at its height stretched all the way from India to Spain -- for their highly strict brand of Islam. Sam joined her husband when he moved to ISIS Central in Raqqa, Syria (the location they were going to use as the capital of their caliphate until they captured the original caliphate’s capital, Baghdad) and they purchased two underage girls (underage by our standards, anyway) so Moussa could keep them as sex slaves. Sam protests in her interviews that she thought they were rescuing them, but these poor women got treated by Moussa exactly the same way they’d been by their previous owners. Sam was in regular, albeit sporadic, communication with her sister Lori back in South Bend via e-mail and whatever phone calls Sam could get a chance to make under ISIS control, and her messages conveyed a quite different picture of their life in Raqqa than what turned out to be true. The documents included a chilling video of Sam’s son Matthew delivering an Islamist diatribe in English to an ISIS videographer proclaiming his devotion to the cause of radical Islam and his warning to his fellow Americans that soon their blood would start flowing in the righteous cause of jihad. Eventually Raqqa fell and Sam -- whose husband by then was already dead, apparently killed in combat -- and the kids (both her own and the slave children they’d “bought”) were arrested and held in a detention camp run by the Iraqi Kurds who were the principal “boots on the ground” in the defeat of ISIS. (They were also the ones soon-to-be ex-President Donald Trump double-crossed by giving Turkisn president Recep Tayyip Erdogan the go-ahead to massacre them and withdrew the U.S,. forces that had protected the Kurds as they did the grunt work of decimating ISIS.)

They were held there for eight months before the U.S. was finally able to reclaim them and bring them back to Indiana -- where Sam was indicted for conspiracy to support a terrorist organization financially. The charges came about because on their way to Syria to join ISIS, Moussa and Sam had cashed out their home, their three cars (including a BMW and a Porsche) and everything else they owned, then gone to Hong Kong and converted the cash from these sales into gold for smuggling into Syria to add to the ISIS treasury. Sam portrayed herself in Baker’s live interview in the Kurdish detention camp (with two Kurdish guards standing in the doorway to supervise) and in later phone calls from prison as an innocent victim who followed her husband and was committed to keeping the marriage together even when her husband became a terrorist. It was ironic to be watching this the night after having seen an episode of the CBS fiction series Bull, in which a woman with a history of working as an FBI analyst gets put on trial because when she and her husband are married she signed tax documents reflecting the husband’s partnership with a drug dealer who, apparently unbeknownst to either of them, was using the restaurant to launder drug profits and thereby making it profitable for the first time. In this scripted show we were supposed to feel sympathy for the wife who was willing to put her capacity for due diligence on hold in order to save her marriage and her husband’s business; in the documentary it seems clear that Josh Baker himself lost much of his original sympathy for Sam Sally El-Hassani as he delved deeper into the case and realized just how much evidence the FBI had against her. One revelation that showed her involvement in ISIS was more intense and committed than he had realized was that when her son Matthew (who was called “Youssef” by his stepfather) shot that horrifying video in which he matter-of-factly explained the construction of his suicide bomb and how he was going to use it against any American helicopter crew that flew in thinking they were going to rescue him, it was Sam who held the camera and actually shot the video.

“Return from ISIS” (note the use of the word “Return” rather than something more sympathetic like “Escape” or “Rescue”) is a chilling (an adjective that keeps coming up) story about just how far loyalty to one’s spouse can take you, sometimes into a terrorist netherworld of utterly amoral people doing evil, genocidal things -- and just what your responsibility is in a situation like that. Baker shows us some of the video phone calls he’s placed to Sam in prison, noting that though she ultimately pleaded guilty to the charges and got a 6 ½-year sentence (though given how white-collar criminals are usually treated by the criminal justice system, I’d really be surprised if she serves more than about 3 ½ years of that) she still hasn’t accepted or come to grips with a full consciousness of her guilt. The show closes with an interview with Matthew, who was a skinny kid when he was with ISIS but really put on weight big-time after he left, who’s now staying with his real father in Colorado (dad is a heavy-set Latino with quite extensive tattoos, which we get to see because one shot of him with Matthew shows him sitting in a fishing boat wearing a body shirt and shorts) and expressing his relief that his life is “normal” again. (Sam’s other kids ended up with her parents back in Arkansas.) This is the sort of documentary you watch in sheer awe at the complexity of human nature and motivations -- it seems to be made to order for dramatization as a movie if you had a director, writer and star sensitive enough to the weird mix of motivations that must have driven Sam to follow her husband, not necessarily blindly but also (one gets the impression) not really aware -- or perhaps turning a blind eye to -- the horror of what her husband was doing and trying to get her and the kids to join him!