The epitome of an “all-American” girl, Samantha Marie Elhassani — a.k.a Samantha Sally, better known as Sam — was a Jehovah’s Witness from the blue-collar Indiana heartland who knocked on the door of ISIS and found hell on earth.
A mother of three who had been working in a low-paying warehouse job and formerly married to a US Army serviceman, Sam made headlines in 2015 when she accompanied her second husband to strife-torn Raqqa, in Syria, home to ISIS.
He was a Moroccan-American Muslim — radicalized by watching terrifying ISIS videos online while getting high.
There, the pair joined ISIS’ so-called Caliphate where beheadings and other mind-numbing atrocities were a way of life — he served as a fighter who would eventually be killed, and she as something of a propagandist and fundraiser.
Now 38, she’s serving time in a US prison, charged with conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State.
Sam grew up poor in rural Arkansas. As a Witness, she’d been taught that Armageddon could arrive at any time. As part of ISIS, she had witnessed first-hand what evil and the end of the world was really like.
While dozens of American young women had traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS, journalist Jessica Roy — who’d written about Sam for Elle magazine — has made a deep dive into her bizarre and shocking world with her new book, “American Girls: One Woman’s Journey into the Islamic State and Her Sister’s Fight to Bring Her Home” (Scribner).
“How do you grow up in the middle of the United States surrounded by Walmarts and happy hours and football games and end up living in Syria under a murderous militant group?” is the question Roy probes after conducting dozens of interviews and making extensive reporting trips to Iraq for her exhaustive forensic probe.
According to Roy, Sam and her younger sister Lori barely survived their parents’ strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. As revealed by Roy, both sisters had been raped by a family member while they were still attending elementary school.
And the siblings later fell into destructive relationships, multiple marriages including with each marrying brothers who were practicing Muslims, and who exhibited the same stark control over them as exercised by their parents’ faith.
“Depression, lack of trust, feelings of guilt and shame — manifested in the sisters’ lives in very different ways, leading them down two diverging paths,” Roy notes.
Sam stepped out at 16 into a violent and abusive marriage with the Army serviceman, while Lori was pregnant when she left a relationship with an ex-con.
Long before joining ISIS, Sam joined a gang with rape as the initiation ritual. Weed, painkillers, and mood swings also became a pattern in her life, Roy writes.
When Sam ultimately connected with her second husband Moussa Elhassani at their warehouse and shipping company, the two became inseparable.
While their jobs paid little, Moussa compensated by stealing goods and lavishing expensive gifts on Sam, who’d by then had bleached her hair rock star blonde and sported a nose ring. She wore 4-inch high heels and sported a heisted $4,000 Louis Vuitton handbag (not exactly standard ISIS garb).
Sam later claimed she didn’t recognize Moussa’s extremist views, or realize he was a member of the online jihadist community despite his continual watching of propaganda videos.
“While Sam would claim she knew nothing about the depths of Moussa’s radicalization until he dragged her to Syria, Lori would argue otherwise,” writes Roy.
In the summer of 2014, Moussa’s brother, Abdelhadi, who had married Lori, started showing him ISIS recruitment and propaganda videos on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and WhatsApp. All made empty promises about the wonderful life in Syria under ISIS, including lavish homes abandoned by rich Syrians, that could be theirs if willing to join and commit to jihad.
“Moussa confessed to Sam, ‘I want to go fight in the cause of Islam,’ ” writes the author, who observes that he was actually greedy for all the free sex ISIS advertised from female sex slaves they claimed were for sale. Moussa acquired several and raped them, Roy details, and Sam would later be accused of human trafficking but claimed she was merely acting as a surrogate mother for the victims.
In fact, Sam and her brainwashed husband had moved into what Roy asserts was a “gruesome theater of violence and hopelessness.”
In September 2017, Moussa was killed in Raqqa in a drone strike, and Sam was hauled off to the “Black Stadium” where she was stripped naked, handcuffed and strung up by her wrists from the ceiling, beaten and raped nightly.
Somehow, she contacted Lori back in the US, who would begin the process of helping her find her way home.
When Sam finally made it back to the States, the sisters rarely spoke to each other again, Roy reveals.
By November 2020, Sam had been sentenced to 78 months in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to financing terrorism. She was a woman “who turned her back on her country to support a terrorist organization,” Roy writes. Nonetheless, “American Girls” provides a rare look inside ISIS, which remains one of the most mysterious — and misunderstood — extremist ideologies of the early 21st century.
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