Aasha, 17, looked up from her hands and saw the faces of six of her closest friends staring back at her. They awkwardly sat in a circle in a small counselor’s office in their high school, reports Yahoo News.
“Why would you do something so stupid?” one of Aasha’s friends, Badra, finally asked.
“We just wanted to go over there to study,” Aasha replied.
“There’s a library right here,” Badra said. “You can study all you want.”
The girls grew up together in a dusty suburb of Denver called Aurora, attending the same mosque with their families on Parker Road. They were like sisters, sharing secrets, complaining about their strict immigrant parents and talking about boys since they were in elementary school.
Intense high school friendships end for all kinds of reasons — boys, social ambition, different schedules. But what this circle faced was far more dramatic — and more hurtful. They were torn apart by the Islamic State, whose recruiters quietly seduced three girls in their group online without any of the others even noticing. Now, the six girls faced down their former friend and weren’t sure they had ever really known her.
Just a week before this conclave at the counselor’s office, Aasha, her 15-year-old sister, Mariam, and her 16-year-old friend Leyla vanished without so much as a goodbye to their family or friends. (Yahoo News has changed the girls’ names to protect their identities because they were minors when they attempted to travel to Syria. Badra’s name has also been changed to protect her identity.) They skipped school one Friday, took a cab to the airport and boarded the first flight on their lengthy itinerary to the Middle East.
The girls were on their way to Syria to join the most feared terrorist organization in the world. They had been communicating with IS recruiters and sympathizers for months using secret online identities, and their views became more radical by the day. The girls were taken in by their new vague ideology. They believed Syria would be a utopian place of freedom and safety for them and their religion, instead of a brutal caliphate known for forcing women and girls into sexual slavery and beheading or burning alive its ideological opponents.
Now they were in the counselor’s office instead of the caliphate, facing a set of very teenage problems that they had hoped to escape by joining an adult group of foreign fighters. Their friends were angry that they had ditched them and had kept them in the dark about their plans. When the girls first were reported missing, their friends assumed they had been kidnapped — IS never even crossed their minds. It wasn’t until one of them noticed that Mariam had sent a Snapchat that looked like it was taken at the Denver airport’s Baskin-Robbins that they began to piece it together.
The girls were caught in Frankfurt, Germany, a day later, as they were changing planes to go to Turkey. Because they were all under 18, they were returned to their parents and not charged with any crime, according to two former FBI agents in Colorado who are familiar with the investigation. Their parents were given stern warnings to monitor and limit the girls’ Internet use.
