After they’ve gone, their parents are left with a form of grief that is surreal in its specificity. While some go with their families’ blessing, most leave in secret, taking all sense of normalcy with them. Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions. These women are just four of thousands who have lost a child to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. She realized those pains in her stomach were the inverse of giving birth to Sabri: They were her body telling her that her child was dying. A man told them that their 19-year-old son Sabri, their boy who loved reggae and chatting with his mother about world events, had died on the same day Ben Ali had fallen ill. Three days later, her husband received a phone call from a Syrian number. She went home early and cried through the night. “It was like when you have a baby and this baby has to come out,” she says. She hadn’t felt that kind of pain in years. In Brussels, Saliha Ben Ali, the modern, European-born daughter of Moroccan and Tunisian immigrants, was at a humanitarian aid conference when she began to feel wrenching pains in her stomach.
