Series 1: 4. She’s Like My Mother

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Before we go any further, there are some descriptions of violence and some upsetting moments involving children in this episode.

My story? Oh yeah, absolutely. It is very hard to believe.

We live in a small city called Rock.

When he was walking around and all the rubble and everything, it's just disbelief and anger and a lot of anger towards Sam. I just felt like it was a script.

I s wish I was there.

Oh my sister knows how much I love her.

I'm not a bad person. I'm not a monster.

I'm Josh Baker.

BBC Panorama and Frontline PBS.

She's like my mother.

감사합니다.

Oh we do the fist bump as well. So hold on.

Mein Name ist Stay Hope.

Your English is amazing. Where did you learn your English?

And next one from Bemidji.

American family. Yeah.

That's Aham. He's eight years old and tells me he learned English from Salmoner children. He lived with them in Syria for more than a year. As we chat, he chews gum and plays with this bright pink camera.

I have camera just because no pathway in it.

It doesn't work, but it's his favorite toy. Do you want to see my camera?

Your camera is bigger than mine. Mine is really small.

Try this. Got it? Yeah. I've seen Aham before, first in the ISIS propaganda film with Matthew. Then in the video I'd found on Twitter, while standing on a ladder at my dad's salon, it showed him escaping ISIS with Sam and her children. Is this your uncle? An Iraqi friend of mine had managed to find Ahams. He's back living with his uncle, who gave me permission to record. Where did you learn this song?

I'm just finally unbreaking.

From the American family.

Aham's part of a religious minority in Iraq, the Yazidi. Earlier in the war, the Islamic State group killed thousands of them in what the UN has called a genocide.

Stranded on a barren mountaintop, thousands of Yazidis have spent ten days looking death in the face. Those that have made it to safety tell harrowing stories of men being slaughtered and young women taken away by the militants.

Other Yuzidis were kidnapped and enslaved, and sold between ISIS fighters. Aham was one of those slaves. His mother is still missing. Where are you taking me? Is this your home?

Yeah. Thank you.

Aham and his uncle live in a half built breeze block house. Rugs are hung over the windows and doors to keep the draught out. But it's still freezing cold. Should we go and sit over here in front of the light?

Yeah.

Now come to sit here.

What is this place? This is your living room. Hey Ham, I wanted to ask you. Can I show you a picture?

Yeah.

You're smiling. This big toothy grin appears on his face as I show him a picture of Sam. That's her. Do you want to go next to her? Do you remember the name of the American woman?

Amusive! Yeah, I'm uh I'm usually

Um Yusuf is the name Sam went by under Isis. He tells me Matthew was Yusuf and Sam, um Yusuf, which means mother of Yusuf. Isis forced Aham to become Abdullah, so Yusuf Um Yusuf Abdullah.

I am next to one.

So ISIS sold you to the American family? Yeah. When he was just six years old, Aham was bought by Sam and her husband Musa. Can you tell me a story of what it was like living with them? It was good.

Feel like my mother.

She's like my mother. It's hard to know what to make of this. Here's an eight-year-old boy who was snatched from his family in Iraq, forced into slavery, and taken by ISIS to live in Syria. And now he thinks of Sam, an American woman who travelled to the group. It's like his mum. Can you tell me about Yusuf?

What happened to him?

Yeah

You know what happened to him? He's like my brother.

What did you two do together in Raqqa?

Hãy subscribe cho kênh lalaschool Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn

Thank you.

I ask Aham about the ISIS propaganda film.

Go again.

He suddenly jumps up, runs across the room, pushes aside a rug that's hung over a doorway, and then disappears upstairs. He comes back with a phone and points to the screen. Video with you in YouTube.

Yeah.

There's not much about us now except the name.

No, sis. The video shows Matthew and Aham walking through streets that have been obliterated by fighting. Then there's a shot of Aham and Matthew's shoulders. The two of them are playing inside.

London in France.

Is it strange to watch this? Aham says Isis told him to say My name is Abdullah. Is that you?

Ya, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

He wants me to see this. He's excited to show. I feel uneasy, but as a journalist, I've been trained to let people who've gone through trauma tell their stories however they want.

This muscle broken. That is that not all the drives more fun that.

With his uncle looking on from the corner of the room, I ask if Sam was involved in making the film.

This woman I'm working she didn't want to make a video. She said no they put.

I know it's a little hard to understand Aha. It's much easier when you're face to face. He tells me Sam didn't want him and Matthew to be in the video. But he says that Isis gave her no choice.

Yeah.

Was it frightening making the video? He tells me that when they were filming, bombs were being dropped on Raka, and that it was a hard day. Then he pauses for a moment and points to his head.

They put the gun on here. If we don't talk, he's gonna kill us.

So when they were making the video they pointed a gun at you.

Yeah, one is making a video, one is printing the gun and me and me and Yusuf. If we don't talk, they're gonna kill us.

The last time he saw Salmon Matthew was on a military base in Syria, but he can't remember where it was.

My name is A. Hello.

to meet you.

Yeah.

Um

Unfortunately, I do not know where to sing them. that we can try to bring her and the children

I'm sitting here on a stone floor in a makeshift house in northern Iraq, listening to a young Yazidi boy talk to a woman he's never met in America, all because her sister owned him.

You are my son.

And then Lori starts to sing, a song her parents had sung to her and Sam when they were growing up.

ご視聴ありがとうございました

Other times she's saying other sign in English.

Did she sing to you before going to sleep at night?

Aham tells me Sam used to sing this song to him when they were being bombed. It was a way to calm him and the other kids. The singing is so similar that for a moment Aham thinks Lori is actually Sam.

I know we saw

Yeah.

たくさんは来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくるので、私が来てくる

A few hours and several games of indoor football later, I have to leave.

Bye.

Cheers!

As I drive away, it strikes me how clearly Aham feels bound to Sam, and how sad and complicated it is. The only mother figure he remembers Is the woman who owned him? I'd expect it to come away with a clearer idea of who Sam is. Instead, I'm more confused than ever.

Let me let me point this route to you. It's two weeks before Christmas twenty seventeen. I'm in Erbil, in northern Iraq. By this point it's been almost a year since I first heard about Salmonov family. I'm in my hotel room with my colleague Mao, finalising our plan to cross into neighbouring Syria to try to find them. We have two sources. Is great in one sense'cause they're no longer with ISIS, they're safe, but the chance that Kurdish intelligence will let us see them is is probably minimal.

Um there's also quite a lot of black looking on that map.

Maui's ex-military and knows Syria really well. The black on the map we're looking at are areas that are still controlled by ISIS.

Well it's just a list of the kind of things that we can we can possibly get killed by basically.

Death here, death also here. They're almost defeated but they're not defeated completely. There's also the Assad regime forces here and here, so it's there's a lot to navigate in terms of safety. So that we don't find ourselves getting kidnapped or or running into ISIS or a sad regime troops who probably don't want us there either.

Oh.

I think when you kind of stack it up like that it's uh you kind of th start think to yourself, oh god.

The Syrian war has been raging for almost seven years by this point. and has left the country devastated and divided, with areas controlled by a number of different groups, not just ISIS or the army of President Assad. Navigating it all is delicate. We think Sam and the family are being held by a US-backed Kurdish militia, but there's no formal procedure for gaining access to people they've detained who have been with ISIS. So it's not gonna be easy.

The next day.

Mao and I are on a homemade boat. It looks like a shipping container that's been cut in half and then had an engine hastily bolted onto the back. God, that is a serious current. It feels like a real achievement that the thing floats. let alone that it's successfully battling the Tigris River, which separates Iraq and Syria, After a trip of maybe only fifty meters, The driver revs the engine.

Thank you.

and slides the boat up a pebbly bank.

Спасибо.

There waiting for us is a local journalist, Naveen.

Navy. Um so In terms of finding sound

Now you want to talk we have the whole

But I'm so excited to talk about it.

I will I will tell you what I got.

Naveen is taking us to the Syrian town of Al-Hasikah, where we think Sam is being held. I'd sent her a picture of Matthew to show one of her contacts.

He said that, yeah, I recognize him, but he's also

Oh really?

But uh me that uh he was translating for his mother.

Oh really?

Yeah.

What, translating in Arabic?

Arabic to English.

'Cause it's pretty interesting. She tells me Matthew has learnt Arabic and is translating for his mom, and that other foreigners have also been visiting Sam.

Thank you.

Not journalists though.

Yeah, they said that the foreigners came and with them.

So maybe American intelligence.

Yeah.

Thank you.

It makes sense that American intelligence might have been visiting Zal. She's an American citizen, and the Kurdish militia she's been detained by work closely with the US military.

ご視聴ありがとうございました

Uh uh either camera?

We pull up to a military base in Al Hassica. Naveen warns me to keep our equipment out of sight. So this this might be the compound where Sam was kept.

We'll see.

We drive around a roadblock and past coils of razor wire. I've got our med kit, I've got a phone. Do you want to take one of the radios so we can communicate with the drivers? There are a couple of watchtowers and a guy with a mustache and an AK-47. He's guarding the entrance.

Thank you.

They don't tend to have random foreigners turning up to see ISIS prisoners. But Naveen asks if we can see the person in charge. We're told the base commander's not here, but we can wait inside. We're shown into a room where we end up spending a couple of hours chatting to a unit of all female fighters. At one point, someone comes to get me. I figure this is the moment that I'll get to meet the commander. I'm shown down a hallway and then up some stairs and into a corridor.

Thank you.

As I'm walking back to the car, one of the women pulls me aside and whispers to me. Sam and the kids were here.

So basically They were they were there. And they've been moved and one of the girls recognised them.

Yeah.

Okay.

Recognized him.

Okay.

Altyazı M.K.

That's frustrating. But there we go.

Your stroke, a resource.

We've just missed Sam and her children. They've been moved, and we don't know where to. The next few days follow a similar pattern. More basses, more chatting, more tea, and more dead ends. We look everywhere we can, but with no luck. People either have no idea who Sam is, or they don't want to talk to us. But then we get close, really close.

Peace.

I walk into yet another base. This time Mary waits outside with the cars.

Thank you.

Josh to my Yep. I'm in an office. uh inside with a man who has pictures of Sam and the kids on his phone. He's trying to work out if they're still here, but it's possible that they may be with the Americans now. We might have just missed them. But they also might be in town. I'm gonna be in here for a little bit longer The man explains that he's just transferred Sam and the children to another unit, about an hour and a half away.

I think it's finished.

It's so it's it's quite late. We've actually just jumped out of bed. It's the middle of the night and Mao has just come to my room. Um, we've just had the phone go off and they've just started messaging me right now. Through total luck, someone we know in England has just got in touch. They've been talking to a friend of theirs, someone they say is a powerful Syrian man, who's heard about an English journalist, me, turning up to bases looking for an American, Sam.

Thank you.

We're in Syria. There's a risk of kidnap, and up until now. People haven't really wanted us to meet Sam. But they seem to know an awful lot about Sam and Matthew, an awful lot about the the American intelligence involvements in this case and and where they are.

Amen.

We call Naveen and she talks to the man directly.

hotels.

Don't give him the address of the hotel. We don't know who this man is. It it could be security uh problems. So we need to meet him somewhere that's nearby that's safe and then maybe we can br come to the hotel or we can go somewhere else with him, but we need to meet him somewhere else first. Uh

Thank you.

After a long back and forth, lasting hours, we agree to meet him the next morning, at yet another military base.

I mean that's

Okay. We drive into the base past blast walls and more razor wire, and we're told to wait in our car. Eventually a man comes to get us. We follow him up some stairs, past one arm guard, then another, and another, and another. There's one on every floor in every corridor. I'm told this is the protection team for the man I'm meeting. Guards search me. I hand over my radar. Knife, satellite phone, all of my electronic items. Then I'm shown into a room and told to wait.

Yeah.

You've been listening to I'm Not a Monster? Please leave us a rating and review. It really does help other listeners find the show. And you can contact us directly. Email notamonster at bbc.com. If you know something that you think might help our investigation, please let us know. New episodes will be available every Monday on the BBC Sounds app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you.

It was written by me, Josh Baker, and Joe Kent, and we produced it together with Max Green. Emma Rippen is the podcast editor. Zoe Gelber and Janet Staples are our production coordinators. Lucy Sullivan is our production assistant. Additional production by James Edwards and Story Supervision for Frontline by James. And special thanks to Mary Gris for being my teammate for ten exhausting days.

Well, now to a very special person tonight. George Gibney. Thank you very much.

In the 1980s, George Gibney was a well-connected, internationally renowned Olympic swimming coach. You can't just go along with the wave if you want to make exceptional progress. By the mid-90s, Mr Gibney has denied the allegations of the

nothing about that man.

Hey, knock, knock, knock

There they are. Just keep your head down. Keep your head down. I retrace his steps across the US. I think George Gibney's in the front of that car. Okay, we ready to do it? Yeah. with an exclusive new episode on BBC Sounds.