To love a child who joined ISIS

Stockholm, Sweden and Northeast Syria - In late September 2014, Aaden*, a sociable, middle-aged father of five, got a call from two intelligence agents asking to meet with him.

The two casually-dressed women from the Swedish Security Service (Sapo) were polite and reassuring. They were responding to a panicked call Aaden had made to emergency services about a week earlier.

He had phoned for help after his son Damaal* called him from southern Turkiye to say he was about to cross the border into Syria to join ISIL, also known as ISIS.

"But you’ll die!" Aaden had pleaded with his son.

"Maybe. But I’m strong, thanks to you," came the response.

Frustrated, Aaden asked the Sapo agents to help him understand how Damaal was "radicalised".

They told him they were as surprised as he was. Damaal, unlike many other ISIL recruits, had never been flagged in their system.

Urging Aaden to contact them if he heard from Damaal, they said goodbye.

It would not be long before they spoke again.

It was Christmas Eve last year when the Somali Swedish mechanical engineer, now in his mid-60s, first invited Al Jazeera into the family’s spacious apartment overlooking an expanse of snow-covered forest.

He prepared an elaborate selection of cakes and desserts, cups of Turkish tea and very strong coffee.

Exuding a nervous energy, he fidgeted with the sofa cushions as he rushed to and from the kitchen to grab a sugar bowl, even though it was not needed.

Finally sitting down, he started talking about the flood of conflicting emotions that engulfed him still, even 10 years later.

He was intensely angry at his son for joining ISIL and traumatising the family.

He was also a father who loved his son unconditionally.

Eyes drifting to the large window looking out onto the forest, he relived that September day, the urge to reach into the phone and take his son in his arms, just as he had three days earlier when they last had dinner together.

For Aaden, ISIL represents everything he hates after similar armed groups, like al-Shabab, ruined much of his beloved homeland. After Somalia's 1991 civil war, his prestigious job with the United Nations no longer existed.

He managed to move to Sweden, where it took two years of bureaucratic wrangling to get his wife and two children to join him.

Taking any job he could find, even working as a cleaner, he supported them while studying every evening to master Swedish and earn his mechanical engineering degree.

The family soon expanded, with three more babies, and Aaden secured a well-paid job.

After years of struggle, Aaden had a stable home and financial security, and looked forward to a peaceful family life.

Picking up a photo album from the coffee table, he absently patted the photo of a graduating Damaal on the cover as he looked around.

He lives alone, having separated from his wife almost 20 years ago. The two remain such good friends, and are so often at each other's homes, that Aaden says many people assume they are still married.

Going from anger to despair, Aaden described talking to Damaal several times in the two days after that first call from Turkiye.

He tried desperately to persuade Damaal to come home, but his son was determined, repeating that he was going to help children injured by Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria.

In the midst of Aaden’s despair, Sapo kept calling to ask if he had any updates.

Wanting to do the right thing and believing that the agents had his family’s best interests at heart, Aaden would always oblige, patiently answering their string of follow-up questions.

By late 2014, Aaden had his own Sapo handlers who would visit him at work for "fikas" - a Swedish coffee break with cinnamon buns and small talk - in his office canteen.

He is still cautious when discussing the details of the calls and visits, but said he grew fond of his Sapo contacts.

Eventually, he was assigned a single handler, a well-spoken man in his 60s who would calm him down gently when Aaden became stressed or began fretting over who could have convinced his son to join ISIL.

They became close. He felt understood.

Damaal was a "scrawny" kid - a picky eater with a gentle disposition who always tried to resolve family arguments.

He was a good kid, Aaden said, patting the album on his lap.

He never had to tell Damaal off, and, other than nagging the boy to eat better, he never had to worry about him getting into trouble or messing up at school.

If I die, make sure to look after my children, Dad

Damaal grew up football-mad - a staunch Liverpool supporter.

He would pick up injured animals to nurse back to health and developed an interest in birds, begging his father to visit his favourite look-out spot and studiously learning their names from a birdwatcher's handbook Aaden bought him.

Remaining a very slim teenager, Damaal was rejected from compulsory military service when he graduated from high school.

But he started working out when he went to university, Aaden said, and began to bulk up.

Aaden opened the photo album and pointed to photos of Damaal at graduation. A smiling 18-year-old beamed up from the pages, with a perfectly groomed moustache and a sharp suit.

He is smiling, hugging friends and teachers, and spraying champagne. In his hand is a baby photo of himself that a relative printed onto a placard.

The photos were taken just 18 months before Damaal called his dad from Turkiye. He spent those months focusing on his medical studies at the university, living in a modest student apartment nearby that Aaden helped pay for.

But he came home regularly to eat his favourite homemade Somali meals and spend time with his family, who often gathered in Aaden’s apartment.

It is not clear how Damaal was recruited, but Aaden insisted that he was brainwashed, lured by ISIL recruiters who wanted Damaal’s medical skills and took advantage of the fact that he always wanted to heal the injured.

Damaal spoke calmly during those phone calls in September 2014. Most of the time, he seemed sure of his decision, but there were a few moments that had given Aaden hope - moments when Damaal seemed to hesitate.

Then, for a while, the calls abruptly stopped.

In January 2015, a still-calm Damaal called home and told his dad he was in northern Iraq, working in an ISIL-controlled hospital.

He kept calling, whenever he could, and updating his father about his life.

There were two marriages, the first a marriage of convenience to "protect" a woman he met in Syria from being "married off" to a fighter she did not want to wed.

By the time of the siege of Raqqa, she had smuggled herself out, unknowingly pregnant with a child she delivered months later.

Although she maintains good relations with Damaal’s family, she told Al Jazeera she prefers not to talk about her time in Syria.

Damaal then lived with his other wife, Aamiina. The couple eventually had three children.

By 2016, they were living in the Syrian city of Raqqa just as the United States-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) began to seize large chunks of territory from ISIL in a series of bloody battles.

Aaden implored his son to leave as Raqqa came under siege from the ground and the air in 2017.

"It’s too late for that," Damaal said.

"If I die, make sure to look after my children, Dad," he said anxiously during a particularly violent bombardment.

As the SDF closed in on Raqqa, Aaden's new handler - a polite and eager younger agent who had replaced his now-retired previous handler - called more frequently.

Just before Raqqa was seized by the SDF in 2017, Damaal and his family managed to flee to Baghouz, five hours along the road east, towards Iraq.

There, in ISIL's last stronghold, Aamiina gave birth to their third child, Damaal relayed in worried tones over the phone.

His friends were dying, he told Aaden in early 2019.

If I could survive the siege of Raqqa, I can survive anything

There was a band of Swedes who spent most of their time together. One of them, well-known ISIL recruiter Michael Skramo, had been shot in the neck as he was digging a ditch to shelter him and his seven children from air strikes.

The bullet went through Skramo's neck and out of his upper back, leaving him paralysed - details that were later confirmed to Al Jazeera by another witness.

Damaal tried to nurse the badly injured man. He told his father that Skramo would strain to whisper "v", which the Swedes eventually realised was him trying to say "vatten", Swedish for water.

Skramo, who had been his best friend, died two days later in Damaal’s arms.

On the phone, Damaal told his dad: "I see people dying, houses crumbling, but I’m standing here on the street, and I’m not even injured."

"Do you have death anxiety?" he asked his son.

"Yes, but if I could survive the siege of Raqqa, I can survive anything," Damaal replied.

Then, the phone calls stopped again.

Sapo’s calls had reached a crescendo in early 2019 as ISIL collapsed, losing all its territory.

After the collapse, Sapo fell silent too.

Damaal, his wife and their children had been arrested, but the family found out only when they spotted Damaal being lined up by SDF fighters in the background of a news report in March 2019.

Aaden desperately called his contacts at Sapo, but no one picked up or called him back.

Aaden needed to find his son. So began his desperate battle with Swedish authorities to find out what had happened to Damaal, his wife and children.

He called every relevant government department, demanding, then pleading, that someone tell him if his son was alive, where he was, and where his family was.

But he ran up against one brick wall after another - Sapo had gone silent, as had the Foreign Ministry, which only sent sporadic, generic email responses saying it could not help.

He also sought the help of Repatriate the Children Sweden (RTC), a rights organisation founded in 2020 that aims to raise awareness about the children detained in northeast Syria.

It was 2021 before he got proof of life, a short note from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that said his son was "safe and well".

Aaden had clung to those words for three years, he told Al Jazeera. But it was not enough. He needed to know how his son was doing.

After several conversations, Aaden agreed to facilitate a visit to Aamiina and the three children in Syria’s Roj detention camp, where they were being held.

But he also wanted someone to visit his son in prison to check on him.

Aamina spends her days confined, and managing her children’s confinement.

The 30-something-year-old feels lucky to have made friends in the Roj detention camp, a group of Somali-British detainees who taught her English and help her look after her children, a favour she reciprocates.

Their living arrangement is a bit better than others, too, thanks to the money her extended family sends her.

She used $150 to buy an additional tent, setting the two up to create a small inner courtyard where her seven-year-old son can run around and expend some of his boundless energy.

They also have a television, on which the children watch nature documentaries - a "window to the outside world" for children who have known nothing but detention camps their entire lives.

Whenever they see a new animal or landscape, the children are full of wonder and questions, and her eldest, a nine-year-old girl, picks up her colours to draw dramatic and abstract interpretations of the world outside the camp.

Aamiina is their constant companion, even homeschooling them with books she borrows from the camp's educational facility.

She had liked school as a kid, especially history class, and it makes her sad that her children do not feel safe going to the camp school because the teachers scream at them, and the other kids always want to fight.

Trying to create a sense of normalcy, she makes dinner every night as her son watches cartoons after his lessons.

Using whatever she has available, she experiments with recipes, a passion she developed in the camp.

She manages to rustle up quite a few dishes in her rudimentary cooking space, sometimes making her favourite, lasagne, or the children's favourite, pancakes. When she is feeling homesick, she will make Swedish meatballs.

As smells waft out from her cooking space, she can usually count on one or both of their cats to come and investigate.

An animal lover all her life, Aamiina had adopted the two cats in the camp, taking care of them, playing with them, and keeping them around her and the children, who love them dearly.

Overall, things in Roj are marginally better than they were in the al-Hol detention camp, a three-hour drive to the south, where she and the children spent the first year and a half of their captivity.

But in early 2025, the guards in Roj seemed to get jumpy, raiding more tents and, she heard, even shooting a woman in the hand for trying to smuggle herself out.

One night in February, it was taking her longer than usual to get her two daughters and son to bed.

They had heard a visitor was coming to see them the next day, and were excited to meet someone from outside the camp.

Then, camp security raided their tent, frightening the children, who took even longer to fall asleep.

The next morning, when guards arrived to take them to meet Al Jazeera in the administration office, they felt scared and decided to stay with their neighbours instead.

Aamiina pulled on a face mask and headed out with the guards into the damp, windy day.

The tension in the sparsely furnished administration office was palpable.

Aamiina, softly spoken and slightly built, fidgeted with her mask as she introduced herself in English, exchanging glances with a stone-faced female guard.

She had forgotten all her Swedish in the more than 10 years she spent in Syria, she said.

Still nervous, she started talking about herself, sharing a brief account of how she travelled from Somalia to Sweden as an unaccompanied minor when she was 11 and was granted permanent residency shortly after.

She spent seven years in her adopted homeland before travelling to ISIL-controlled territory in 2014, when she was 20, a decision she said she would not speak about.

Aamiina said she has done her best with the children, but is mindful that their chances of integrating into a society outside the camp diminish rapidly as they grow older. She believes they must leave the camp soon if they are to stand a chance of living a normal life.

"It's sad because I came from Sweden. I don't even have Somali citizenship. [The children] are Swedish... and they are supposed to be there," she said.

Then, with the guard distracted for a minute, Aamiina suddenly began speaking urgently in fluent Swedish.

"They [the guards] play nice now, but that’s not how they are with us," she said. "My son can’t go to the camp fence because he says they’ll shoot him."

Roj, where 2,600 women and children are held, is a smaller and marginally cleaner version of the al-Hol camp, which holds about 40,000 people displaced by ISIL or related to ISIL fighters.

But it has poor sanitation and lacks access to health services, Aamiina said, adding that her eldest daughter has been chronically fatigued and underweight for years.

The charity Save the Children paid for medical tests at a nearby hospital, but the results were inconclusive.

"If we were back in Sweden, I’m sure we could find out what’s wrong with her in a day," she added.

As the meeting drew to a close and camp guards ushered her out, she whispered: "Please try and meet my husband.

"No one has heard from him for a long time."

The next morning, a prisoner shuffled into an office in an SDF military compound in Hasakah, northeast Syria, handcuffed and with a hood made from sacking material over his head.

He was tall and walked with a limp, and the legs of his stained brown jumpsuit were rolled up, revealing scars down his shin.

A guard removed the bag from the prisoner's head, and he squinted in the light as he was told to sit down on a blue and beige sofa.

It was not Damaal.

Al Jazeera had asked to meet Damaal, but it was neither possible to raise the issue at that moment nor to appear too curious about him.

As the guard unbound his hands, the prisoner introduced himself as Erik*, a 34-year-old Swedish bus driver who had travelled to join ISIL in 2014.

Erik’s face had been badly injured, and he was blind in his right eye, a result, he said, of an air strike on his former home in Raqqa.

He appeared older than his age, and his hair had begun to grey - something he attributed to being separated from his wife and daughter, who had been repatriated to Sweden after stints in al-Hol and Roj.

He was calm, however, and happy to answer questions, volunteering that the cramped conditions in the prison had improved with the recent installation of air conditioning.

Then he brought up Damaal, whom he said he knew well. They had lived together in Baghouz in early 2019.

His description of Damaal fitted with Aaden's: a calm, quiet man who avoided conflict and whose personality was at odds with many of the other battle-hardened members of the group.

Damaal had told the other prisoners about his father, Erik said, and it had given him hope that if he ever made it back to Sweden, he could also pursue an education and succeed.

They had been in different prison cells, but they saw each other now and then during their captivity.

Damaal had told Erik that he was struggling with a chest infection but had appeared to recover.

Then Erik heard from other inmates that the condition had returned, and Damaal had died in November 2022.

Pressed subtly on the matter, he insisted that he was sure, adding, "I miss him."

Al Jazeera reached out to the relevant Swedish authorities. The Swedish Foreign Ministry responded that it "cannot confirm whether a Swedish citizen has died in Syria". Sapo stated that it was "not able to provide any answers".

Aaden sat quietly on a sofa, listening intently as he was told what Erik had said about Damaal.

He had been anxiously waiting for this meeting, sending numerous messages asking how his son was doing.

Now, his sadness enveloped him, along with a bitter disappointment that the authorities had refused to confirm if his son had died and give his family the closure it deserved.

Holding back tears, he insisted that everyone, including the social worker who had come to the meeting, eat some of the cakes and biscuits he had laid out as he poured tea for everyone.

Damaal’s physical strength had always been an issue, he said. Growing up, he and his wife had struggled to get their son to eat well enough, and he had often fretted that his boy would succumb to illness in prison.

The family would now need to grieve, retreating into themselves because they could not talk about their sadness as they mourned the loss of someone who was part of ISIL.

That shame is something Damaal’s older sister, Almas*, finds difficult to accept because she will always remember Damaal as the "most wonderful little brother" who was kind, funny and helpful.

Over the phone from her apartment in Stockholm, she said that since the 2021 proof of life via the ICRC, the family had wondered if he was still alive.

Now, they have to get over another shock, she said, that of their own government not telling them what happened to Damaal, and that the news had come instead from a fellow prisoner, via Al Jazeera.

For now, she said, the family is focused on bringing back Aamiina and her children, whom she feels a "strong connection and love for".

But Almas and the family know it will not be easy. They believe non-ethnic Swedes who joined ISIL are being treated differently by the authorities than ethnic Swedes who did the same.

Almas said this was reflected in Swedish media, which portrayed the ethnic Swedes as "brainwashed", while for those from a Muslim background, radicalisation was presented as having "always been a part of them".

Several families of Swedish ISIL members whom Al Jazeera spoke to agreed with her view.

"It feels very strange because we’re Swedish, even if we have a different ethnicity. I don't have any connection to Somalia as a country. So when you’re not appreciated as a citizen and you don't get the same rights as an ethnic Swedish person, it is hard to digest," Almas said.

The family will continue to seek confirmation of Damaal's death, Almas and Aaden said, although they believe he is likely dead and they need to focus on his widow and children.

Almas, like Aamiina, believes now is a crucial time. If the children come to Sweden soon, they could recover.

"They're still quite young. They can easily learn new things and adapt, but right now, with the eldest's health condition and stunted growth, it's imperative to bring her as soon as possible," she said.

For Aaden, the Swedish authorities must recognise their moral obligation to repatriate the children with their mother. "The children are innocent," he said.

"They have done nothing to deserve this. They must come home so we can look after them."

The children have seen families being repatriated from Roj and have begun to ask when their turn will come, Aamiina said.

Her oldest often asks how they came to be in the camp, why they cannot see their family abroad, and why her life is not like those of the children she sees on TV.

In 2022, the Swedish Foreign Ministry visited Roj and took DNA samples from the children. They matched them with Damaal’s parents in Sweden, which entitled the children to Swedish nationality under Swedish law.

The Swedish authorities offered Aamiina a choice: Her children could go to Sweden without her and be placed in foster families. She could not return because the Swedish government had revoked her residency, but they offered no explanation as to why the children would not be able to live with their grandparents or other members of the family.

Skramo, Damaal’s best friend, was of Swedish and Norwegian descent. His seven orphaned children, who were held in the al-Hol camp, were repatriated with the support of the Swedish Foreign Ministry in 2019 after their maternal grandfather, Patricio Galvez, embarked on a personal mission to rescue them.

Aaden said Galvez was able to garner significant media coverage, which humanised the plight of the Swedish children and support for his cause in a way his family could not.

Galvez was not granted custody of his grandchildren by social services, partly, they said, because his public profile would jeopardise the children’s protected identities. However, he is able to have contact with them.

UN experts and human rights groups describe open-ended detentions in camps like al-Hol and Roj as a breach of international law.

While some scrutiny falls on the authorities administering the camps, repatriating the people detained there remains the responsibility of their home governments.

A 2024 UN special procedures report criticised Sweden’s "offer" to take Aamiina's children, finding the "state practice of offering repatriation to children on the condition of permanent separation from their mother to be inconsistent with human rights law".

It also stated that Aamiina and her children were in a "position of extreme vulnerability and ill health", and that they "seem to be detained in inhumane, cruel and degrading conditions".

In December, the Swedish Foreign Ministry responded to the UN, saying Aamiina's residency permit had been revoked and no measures to repatriate her to Sweden were under way.

Swedish authorities have stifled repatriation efforts, providing rejections and using language that Louise Dane, a lawyer with the Swedish Refugee Law Centre, said can be misleading.

One example, she said, was when she helped Aamiina apply for a new residence permit, but the application was rejected on what Dane said was "very weak legal reasoning", suggesting Aamiina is a security threat.

Another was her request that the Swedish authorities confirm the children’s citizenship, a simple legal precaution during the repatriation case.

The Swedish Migration Agency did not process the application, claiming both children’s parents must sign the papers - impossible since nobody had contact with Damaal.

Then, the Swedish Foreign Ministry used that unprocessed citizenship application to give "the impression that the children might not be Swedish citizens", in response to the UN report that criticised the Swedish government, Dane said.

A 2024 ruling by Denmark's Supreme Court could serve as guidance for Sweden in Aamiina’s case, Beatrice Eriksson, the cofounder and spokesperson for Repatriate the Children Sweden, told Al Jazeera.

The ruling overturned Denmark’s decision not to repatriate a woman and her child, a Danish citizen, from Roj because the mother’s citizenship had been revoked after she had travelled to Syria in 2014.

The mother was born in Denmark with Somali citizenship and was granted Danish citizenship when she was three.

"Denmark's Supreme Court ruling is based on the European Convention on Human Rights, which Sweden also must follow," Eriksson said.

"This is the only way to protect and fulfil the rights of the children and ultimately safeguard their lives.

"After all the suffering they’ve endured, having access to their primary caregiver - unless that would pose a threat to the child - is essential for their healing and reintegration into society."

Aamiina hopes Sweden will reconsider its decision and get her and the children back home.

"No one wants to stay here. It is not a place for humans," she said firmly.

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the individual.