After ISIS

‘If you don’t follow me, I will kidnap our children,’ Arbenin Demolli told his wife, Amena, one night in late 2014. A few weeks later, Amena was on a plane from Skopje, Macedonia, to Turkey with her husband and their three children, the youngest of whom was six months old. She herself was only 19. They arrived at Istanbul’s airport, then caught a bus towards the Turkish-Syrian border. From there they were smuggled inside Syria.

Three months after arriving in the war zone, Amena’s husband was killed fighting for ISIS in Aleppo. The young widow was forced to marry another fighter, a Kosovar, with whom she had another child. From Aleppo, they moved to Hassakeh city, and from there to Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, where they stayed until it was liberated in 2017.

They were