do you like it
it's a dinosaur bicycle we've seen
americans speaking for isis before but
never a child the child saying he and
his mother moved to syria two years ago
nbc news has not verified the boy's
identity nationality or whereabouts so
this is the story of an american family
and a mother called sam who left middle
america and ended up at the heart of the
isis caliphate sam says she was tricked
into going by her husband musa but
what's the truth they can believe
whatever they want to believe but
they've never been put in a situation to
make a decision like that i kind of
pieced it together over four very long
years and the more i dived into the
story the more stuff started to make no
sense and sam seemingly revealed herself
to be both villain and victim
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my name is josh baker and i'm an
investigative journalist working in
print film and audio i was actually on
another story whereby
i was embedded with iraqi special forces
as they were trying to take the city of
mosul from isis
from the clearance of the east of the
city to the west the iraqi forces have
taken terrible casualties but now
they're finally closing in and during
that embed i ended up getting caught in
a suicide bombing broke my back but i
was very lucky to get away and i was
back in london recovering
and i get this text from a contact who
i hadn't heard from from a while so
about a week later i'm sat in a hotel
having tea and scones with this man and
he takes out his iphone and hits play on
a video it's a home video of a young
american boy called matthew who is in
raqqa syria
and he's trapped there and apparently
he's looking for a way out now i sort of
found myself in this weird parallel of
having been just lived through a suicide
bombing and now seeing a young boy being
forced to build a suicide battle and i
find out this video has been sent by sam
the boy's mother to her sister laurie in
the states i'm like okay i need to
authenticate this so i get on a plane to
south bend indiana
finally get to
laurie's house and i'm sort of taken in
she's very warm very welcoming and we
chat for a while and we get on and then
she
opens her laptop and brings up this
email that she's had from sam as laurie
starts reading this email she starts to
break down there are all sorts of like
harrowing lines in there hey lori i
really hope you can help me this could
be my last time online almost every day
five to ten bombs are dropped around us
the shock waves are insane it rains
shrapnel everything from rocks to metal
sheets to glass shards and she signs the
email off with
i love you i miss you i love you i miss
you and sam says in this email to show
how desperate the situation is she's
attached two videos one video is the
video i'd seen in london and then
there's another video where
in less than a minute under the
direction of his stepfather musa who's
got this very aggressive voice that you
can hear in the background he's being
forced to take apart and reassemble a
loaded ak-47 now this kid is about eight
or nine years old so
they're shocking just to watch but when
you're watching it with a family member
it's a whole other level of harrowing
and laurie is desperately trying to find
a way to help her family the united
nations called today for a humanitarian
pause in fighting in raqqa to allow
civilians to escape the city but it
acknowledged that isis is attempting to
use them as human shields which could
make escape impossible the american
government can't do anything you know
the family are in the heart of the isis
caliphate they can't just send special
forces in to get them after i met laurie
i then started trying to understand as
much about sam's life in america
pre-isis because i was like how on earth
does this girl from south bend indiana
end up at the heart of the isis
caliphate like that just doesn't fit
your stereotypical bill of a jihadist
you know sam is
a tattooed she's got lips tattooed onto
her neck she's she's
very like extrovert looking and i'd
speak to friends family the works trying
to piece together her life and i came
across these home videos of what seemed
to be a very happy
very financially successful family you
know we're talking fast cars
super bikes a nice house there's even
one video which kind of broke my heart a
little bit where you see matthew being
given a bike by musa the man who would
later force him to assemble a suicide
belt
in the meantime
through open source material through
contacts i have on the ground in syria i
just get to work on mapping where the
family might be looking at raqqa looking
at where the battle lines are looking at
where they could end up if they sort of
escaped looking where people who were
escaping were ending up in the hope that
if they did make it out of this
humongous battle i'd have a head start
on trying to find them and it sort of
went a little bit quiet until
i literally land on a video which has
just been put on twitter
and it shows
an american family
coming out of the ice's caliphate in the
back of a pickup truck and i'm staring
at it and i'm like that's matthew and
that's sam and so i'm suddenly like
oh wow okay so that they've escaped isis
and within a couple of days i know
exactly the compound they're in and i
know who's holding them and i have the
commander's name so we head to syria and
typically i get there
about two days after they've been moved
one night i'm sat in my hotel room about
to go to sleep and i get a knock on the
door and it's from a friend of mine
who's working with me and he's just had
a text
and it's from a commander of a local
militia we've got no idea who this guy
is and he's like i've heard you're
looking for this american family i
explain what i'm doing
it's really interesting because he says
this person is a good woman and she's a
victim here you need to understand that
and i'll just pause for a sec because
the next time i see him a couple of
months later he tells me this woman is a
snake and you can't trust her about 5-10
minutes go by
door open
matthew this young boy i'd seen in this
suicide bomb building video walks in
his sister walks in then sam walks in
and i literally jaw drops and i have no
idea what i'm gonna say
and i'm completely like stunned at what
sorry how has this come about i've been
looking for you for seven months the
problem is
as i start talking to stan for about 45
minutes we're being listened to
on every corner they misunderstand a
question and they suddenly think i'm
trying to smuggle sam out of syria i'm
taken into another room and told i need
to leave syria and then when i come back
i finally get to get her full account of
what's going on you happy for me to
start
the second time i meet her it's a very
different sound gold rings slick back
hair baseball cap puffer jacket so sam's
account of how she ended up in syria is
that her relationship with her partner
musa had started to get a bit stale
they decide they need a change and from
friends i've spoken to sam was quite it
seems like subservient to musa he kind
of drove the relationship
she did what he wanted a lot of the time
and the family decide they're going to
move to morocco which is moosa's family
home
on the way there they have a layover in
istanbul turkey is obviously a country
that borders syria
sam says she gets surprised by a
surprise holiday by muza so they have
this sort of 10-day holiday in turkey
and all the while they're sort of moving
from city to city and getting ever
closer to the syrian border and she says
one night
when she thought they were going back to
the airport within a short while
this van slams to a halt door flies open
and there's a masked man there musa
grabs her kids and goes out the van sam
doesn't know what's going on
she's like running after muza as they
run across this field and they're
heading towards the border of syria muza
goes through a fence
sam says she has no choice but to follow
him if she wants her kids back and she
goes and she ends up spending more than
two and a half years trapped in the isis
caliphate did you know you were in syria
yeah i know i was in syria so when you
are a newcomer to the isis caliphate
there's a couple of things that we know
consistently happen so women are
typically taken to a madafa or a woman's
house with their children meanwhile muza
is off kind of having some form of
military training and after a couple of
months in this madafa
musa comes to collect her the first time
i see him is in the middle of raqqa on
the side of the street
with a huge beard and carrying a gun and
i tell him the first thing i say to him
is you're crazy and i'm leaving he said
with a big smile on his face go ahead
you can try but you won't make it along
the way of this two and a half years
moses seemingly is getting more and more
successful within isis's military wing
but also more and more extreme and
undoubtedly more and more abusive
towards sam and her kids as time goes on
sam says that she tries to escape or
wants to escape
and somehow isis become aware of this
and she ends up in the black stadium
it's a notorious isis torture prison for
whatever better phrase it's the old
football stadium in the heart of the
city but it had these big underground
sort of basement gym area things like
that which had been converted into a
prison facility sam says she was taken
there in the dead of night and subjected
to severe torture i've done my best to
verify this i've been there twice i've
found somebody within isis that says she
was also held there i know that it
wasn't uncommon for westerners or those
who joined isis to end up in this
facility the methodologies of torture
that sam described that she experienced
i saw the implements in the rooms that
she described the layout kind of matches
what she describes to me
sam
sort of comes out of prison and sort of
sets about just trying to survive inside
the caliphate one day muza decides
you're lonely i want to get you some
friends why don't we buy you a girl
sam seems to think this is a good idea
and they go to a slave market and some
see suad she feels desperately sorry for
her so she pleads with muza to buy her
they buy sawad swad comes to live with
sam and the kids
sam says she tries to make a nice room
for suad and it seems to be true i've
seen pictures of this room but
ultimately suwad and another girl that
muza also buys
end up being raped repeatedly for
several years so sam has a complicity in
that there's no excusing that behaviour
what's strange or possibly unexpected
they're immensely grateful to her they
see sam as the rock that got them
through
life with isis and ultimately helped
them escape
all the while the battle for raqqa is
getting closer and closer the coalition
forces are squeezing the city
and squeezing isis into an ever smaller
pocket then really sadly
isis releases a propaganda video and it
shows matthew being forced to issue a
threat to then president trump this
battle is not going to end in raqqa or
mosul it's going to end in new orleans
by the world of allah will have victory
he issues this threat and it goes global
isis releasing a new video reportedly
using a 10 year old american boy today
it used a young child for propaganda to
threaten the us so sort of during the
death rows of the battle for raqqa muza
is killed allegedly in a drone strike
buried under a building
after raqqa sam matthew his sister and
the children that she's ended up giving
birth to while in raqqa end up in this
place called derazor and it's kind of
where isis is making its last stand in
syria in terms of its caliphate
so over these very many hours that i'm
interviewing sam we cover like a
plethora of subjects she tells me
about these videos that i'd seen that
had started this whole journey you know
matthew being forced to build a bomb
assembling ak but she leaves out that
she was actually the person behind the
camera which completely changed the
dynamic of how you understand her
relationship with her kids and the
caliphate perhaps one instance is that
she's in an abusive relationship she has
no choice but to film this otherwise
she'll come to physical harm or maybe
she's a winning participant it's
propaganda it's the way it's meant to
look sam touches down
in a military base in indiana
where her kids are taken into care and
she's arrested by the fbi and about a
month or two later more charges came out
against her and the fbi alleged that she
had
knowingly and willingly traveled to
syria with her husband and that she'd
been part of a conspiracy to provide
material support for terrorism she ended
up taking a plea deal
with the fbi
that would see her avoid a trial now i
think something like 95 of federal
prosecutions end in that manner so
that's not unusual
but it also meant
sam avoided having to go through a
lengthy thing where i think a lot of her
lies would have been exposed the judge
sentenced her and in his closing
arguments it was very interesting
because for him he felt conflicted he
felt like the charges that she'd agreed
to carried with a sort of minimum
sentence but they didn't really give him
the parameters of what he wanted for her
sentencing and he wrote in his closing
remarks there is no doubt in my mind
that if it wasn't for the actions of
your husband you wouldn't be here today
so even the judge found it very hard to
pin soul blame on sam for this situation
that said she is and was complicit in
transporting her kids to a war zone
where they would be subjected to
unimaginable abuse and harm and i think
that's very hard to excuse no matter
what you think of sam you accept that
the choices you made
put your children through some of the
worst experiences you could imagine for
a child to have
for you i expect i accept that i i
was unable to make the decisions to
protect them better i think the thing
that i'm most proud of is it became a
what is now 12 or 13 part audio series
called i'm not a monster where we were
able to really
go into the depth and nuance of this
story sam would be put into prison and
that's where she is today and the
children
have been able to be re-homed so matthew
is back living with his biological
father and i've spent a lot of time with
him what's the best thing about being
home everything
just everything like there's my best
part he walked me through his account of
what happened to him talking me through
everything he'd been through being open
about the things he didn't want to talk
about
and at 13 years old which is when i
finally interviewed him wanting people
to understand that no matter how bad
things get there's always hope and you
can always make it through
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