27 Mar A TERROR SLAVE IN TORONTO
A TERROR SLAVE IN TORONTO (article by Stephanie Sauve, published in Maclean’s, September 2017 edition)
“He stood there watching as I was raped, smiled, and told me softly that it was Allah’s will.”
She tells me this in a flat, even tone, with barely a faint tremor of emotion, as we leave the Adoption Council of Ontario office for the final time, her newborn child jettisoned off to a future of hope she admits she can’t provide.
The horrific aforementioned rape was not, however, the cause of her pregnancy (on that matter, she has remained silent to protect her anonymity), but a pivotal event in her life at the age of 12, during the Battle of Mosul, Iraq, in November 2004. As she suffered, her parents were slaughtered like dogs. The perpetrators were a pair of unidentified U.S. troops.
And the orchestrator of the whole massacre was a fellow Muslim – a man who subsequently became her guardian and escorted her to her new life in Canada.
“Then he taught me everything I knew, or thought I knew,” she says, staring out the passenger window as I drive. She knows my digital recorder is on, but gives no hint of affectation or performance-making. Just numb recollection.
“I know now, in my heart, that he knew what he was doing all along. He wanted me broken, destroyed, angry. He wanted to be my mentor of hate. He wanted to whisper sweet nothings of revenge into my ear, and fuel my rage, and use it to reach his own goals.”
Exploitation of young Muslims by wily terror-minded ideologues is nothing new – and the ravages of war certainly make that diabolical task easier – and recent years have revealed the ugly reality of Islamic sex slavery, exemplified in the child sex-abuse ring run by British-Pakistani men in Rotherham, England, from the 1980s through 2013.
But we may be seeing a new form of terror weapon; a youth proactively, deliberately crippled and victimized by a trusted authority figure, and thus rendered helpless, malleable, and ripe for ideological manipulation. A sort of “terror slave.” We’ve seen it before in prominent cults – Jim Jones of the People’s Temple and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate were notorious for abusive control tactics – but not so much in the arena of global Islamic apocalyptic extremism.
The young woman with whom I’ve spent the past two months is on the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, and already feels as though she has lived – and died – two lives. As an innocent young girl in Iraq, and then as a tormented (and brainwashed) radical in Ontario – a phase that culminated in her escape from the cult-like terror cell that had gripped her mind and life for a dozen years.
She refuses to say much on the events that led to her epiphany, though her eyes tend to darken and narrow whenever I broach the subject, and on occasion she visibly winces as though suffering a kind of stigmata. “It was pretty bloody,” is all I’ve been able to coax from her.
After all, her former “master,” the man who once directed and guided her every thought and action by remote control, is still at large, wanted by police agencies throughout the West.
At large… and highly connected and influential.
That, I believe, is her primary reason for giving up her child, and she has stated as much, albeit offhandedly. “For a while, I seriously wanted to die. Realizing I was pregnant made me want to live. And if anything ever happened to him, as a result of the choices I made, I couldn’t forgive myself. I’d lose that reason to live.”
I decide not to goad her into admitting that she’s all but answered my big question – how’d you get out? – and let it rest.
How many young girls and boys, not only in the Middle East, but among Muslim populations in the West, have been steered onto a similar dark path? How many programmed radicals, remote-controlled killing machines, walking time bombs (literally, in some likely cases) currently reside among us?
Here’s hoping we don’t find out the hard way.
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