AMERICAN GIRLS: One Woman’s Journey Into the Islamic State and Her Sister’s Fight to Bring Her Home, by Jessica Roy
The narrative at the heart of Jessica Roy’s “American Girls”is so remarkable it could have been scripted for Hollywood: Sam and Lori Sally are sisters from the Ozarks, raised as strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. As young adults, they abandoned their faith and eventually married a pair of Moroccan-born brothers, Moussa and Yassine Elhassani, who proved domineering and violent. Lori divorced Yassine, but Sam stayed with Moussa. In 2015, she followed him from their home in Indiana all the way to Syria, where Moussa, radicalized by online propaganda, became a fighter with the Islamic State.
Sam took her two children with her and gave birth to two more in Syria. There, she and Moussa also bought and kept Yazidi children, who became Moussa’s sex slaves. Sam had no contact with Lori until she decided to flee the Islamic State, which she was able to do when Moussa was hospitalized after being injured during an airstrike. (He was eventually killed on the battlefront.) Sam is now serving a prison sentence in the United States for providing financial support to a terror group.
Roy, a journalist and former digital director at Elle, leans into the inherent drama of her tale, crafting “American Girls” as a stranger-than-fiction thriller. There are scenes of shocking brutality and palpable desperation. The book is at its strongest, however, when Roy spotlights the most relatable aspects of the Sally sisters’ story. “The pull between resentment and forgiveness,” she writes in one memorable line, “is, perhaps, what it is to have a sister.”
The Sallys were buffeted by the same forces — abuse, misogyny, poverty — but only one became enmeshed in a notorious terror organization. Roy wants to understand why, and she knows her readers will, too. In the end, she doesn’t offer a concrete answer, but this isn’t a flaw; the motives for our behavior, she suggests, often remain opaque.
Nowhere is this idea more evident than in the passages where Roy considers Sam’s complicity in criminal wrongdoing. Sam alternately calls herself an “idiot” who made terrible mistakes, and an abused spouse, forced by Moussa to go to Syria, where she was tortured and raped by other Islamic State fighters. “I am NOT a terrorist,” Sam wrote in her diary after being taken into custody in November 2017. She admits to helping her husband purchase child slaves, but she insists this was because she wanted to save them. “I would never apologize for bringing those girls to my house,” Sam told a CNN reporter. “They had me and I had them.” (Roy’s own conversations with the Yazidi children, who are now living in Iraq, are included in the book’s epilogue; I wish they had been better integrated into her narrative.)
Roy is frank about the difficulty of knowing how much of Sam’s account to believe; people are unreliable narrators of their own lives, perhaps never more so than when they are trying to redeem themselves. In Roy’s portrayal, which expands on a feature story she wrote about the Sallys for Elle in 2019, Sam is cunning yet naïve; she both does wrong and is wronged. She is “the victim, the terrorist, the monster, the mother.” Yet she is not unfamiliar. The truth of the matter, as Roy shows, is that Sam is terrifyingly human.
There is insight to be gleaned here about, among other things, the idiosyncratic pathways people follow into extremist movements. Roy mentions several other Americans who have joined foreign terror groups, and she gestures briefly at the rising tide of domestic right-wing hate that easily could have carried Sam, a white woman, in a different but no less horrific direction. But she doesn’t plumb the depths of the Sallys’ story enough to articulate its wider resonance and importance with real confidence. She doesn’t situate the book in the here and now, in an America and a world greatly changed since the days when “ISIS wives” were regularly making headlines. And beyond posing the question of what Sam will do once she gets out of prison — in all likelihood this spring — Roy does not look toward the future, either.
“American Girls” falls into a too-common category of contemporary nonfiction: the magazine article padded to reach book length, with new detail that does not necessarily offer new insight. This leaves it trapped in amber. “American Girls” is a compelling artifact, to be sure, but an artifact nonetheless.
AMERICAN GIRLS: One Woman’s Journey Into the Islamic State and Her Sister’s Fight to Bring Her Home | By Jessica Roy | Scribner | 341 pp. | $29
