The mothers of ISIS are often left to wonder what happened

There’s been a lot in the news lately about the Western men and women who leave home to travel to Syria and join ISIS.

Countless op-eds and articles wonder why they went? What could’ve stopped them? That question hits especially close to home with the mothers of these young people.

Journalist Julia Ioffe recently spent time with several mothers of young men who were recruited by ISIS. She wrote about their stories for the online publication Highline.

One of the mothers she focused on was Christianne Boudreau from Calgary. Her son, Damian, left Canada to join up with al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

“[Damian] had had issues with depression. He had tried to commit suicide and shortly after getting out of the hospital he found Islam and found a certain peace in it,” says Ioffe.

And Boudreau was happy about his conversion, Ioffe says. He started making friends, he got a job; he seemed content. 

“But then he started acting more and more strangely. He wouldn’t come to the table if there was wine at the table. He told his mother that it was okay to have more than one wife. He talked about justified killings,” Ioffe explains.

This was the winter of 2011, just as things were heating up in Syria.

“This was not in the news that these extremeist groups were recruiting Western kids. And one day in November 2012, [Damian] said he was going to Egypt to study Arabic. And then a couple of months later two Canadian intelligence officers came to her door and said, ‘Your son is actually in Syria fighting with the al-Nusra front,” Ioffe says.

Boudreau fell down a rabbit hole of scouring jihadi websites trying to find any shred of evidence she could about her son’s whereabouts and the group that he had joined. He died in January 2014.

“Ever since then, she’s plunged herself into activism — trying to make sense of her son’s death and trying to prevent this from happening to other parents,” says Ioffe.

Boudreau’s journey as an activist mirrors the stories of many other “ISIS mothers” who Ioffe spoke with and wrote about in her article, trying to make meaning out of something out of their control.

“These parents can’t let go of their children on a basic instinctual level," Ioffe says. "Doing this activism, they are constantly talking about ISIS, about radicalization, about Muslim theology, about the geography of Syria. They live in the world that their children inhabited and it’s their way of maintaining a connection. It’s something so powerful that it really struck me. It made me appreciate what a sacrifice motherhood is and the kind of love that mothers feel for their children."