Her hair pulled back neatly from her face, eye shadow dramatic and flawless, Laura Passoni bears little resemblance to the jihadi bride she was less than two years ago, when she fled in darkness across a barbed-wire fence, her pregnant body betraying her with fatigue and terror. Convicted on March 23 in Belgium of joining Islamic State — the day after members of the group struck the Brussels Airport and Metro — Passoni’s decision lost her custody of her children to her parents and she is forbidden from contacting the baby’s imprisoned father.
She spends her time trying to persuade young people that her decision to go to Syria in June 2014 was the worst mistake of her life. Her book, In the Heart of Daesh with my Son, has been published in French for now.
“For Daesh, I am a traitor because I left and I’m denouncing them. For Belgium, I am a terrorist because I joined them,” Passoni said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
Others who have lived to speak about their regret for joining Islamic State do so with faces covered, their identities masked, but Passoni said she made a deliberate and personal choice — describing it in the same terms as her decision to stop wearing the headscarf.
In Syria, she soon encountered other recruits, including a 15-year-old French girl who met her husband on the Internet and a young German woman who said she was simply visiting family. For most, Passoni says, the choice to travel to Syria would be the last any woman there could make freely.
“Why women Because we make babies and especially boys, the future cubs of the caliphate as they say. They need descendants,” said Passoni.
Passoni became interested in Islam because her best childhood friend was Muslim, and she formally converted as an adolescent.
She was a 29-year-old single mother when she met a man named Oussama online. Within weeks, he persuaded her to marry and travel to Syria with her 4-year-old son.
She went, she said, because she hoped to reset her life and because recruiters on Facebook told her that Belgium could never be home to a good Muslim. Passoni said she realised the gravity of her mistake almost immediately. But going to Syria is one thing. Leaving is another.
“It was above all my little boy. I didn’t want him to be like them. I didn’t want him to be a terrorist,” she said, sitting in a hotel bar in central Brussels. “It was at that moment that I said, ‘I can’t do it’. And then for my baby, because I was pregnant. And finally for me, because as a woman, to be always closed in, not to be free. That was no life. I had a job, I worked in Belgium. I came and went as I pleased.”
