An 8-year-old, American-born orphan who grew up under the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was rescued from a Syrian detention camp last month.
The girl, Aminah, was born to Ariel Bradley, a woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Islam and marrying a jihadist who moved the family to Syria. Bradley and her husband were killed in the international campaign against ISIS, leaving Aminah an orphan. She lived for years under the care of her Somali jihadist stepmother, who kept her hidden from the United States’s Kurdish allies in a sprawling detention camp, according to a report from Buzzfeed on Monday.
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Aminah’s plight was relayed by a former ISIS bride in Canada, who had been a friend of Bradley’s, to former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, now an adviser for the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. Galbraith has worked for the past few years to repatriate ISIS families who are U.S. citizens. He used his connections to identify and recover Aminah, who is now in a secure location in northeastern Syria.
Aminah’s mother settled with a Swedish Muslim in 2011 through an arranged marriage and moved to Sweden with him after a few months of Whatsapp and Skype calls, according to the 2015 profile by Buzzfeed.
She moved back to Chattanooga to give birth to Aminah in 2012, then moved into ISIS-held territory in 2014.
Despite previously identifying as a socialist, activist, and feminist, Bradley fully adopted the radical beliefs of ISIS. In a tweet from her now-deleted account, Bradley praised the 2015 Chattanooga shooting by an Islamic terrorist, writing, “Gifted this morning not only with Eid but w/ the news of a brother puttin fear n the heart of kufar [non-believers] n the city of my birth. Alhamdullilah [thanks be to God].”
Bradley had another son with her husband while in the caliphate, but her spouse died in June 2015. She then became one of several wives of a prominent ISIS fighter, a former pediatrician from Australia, with whom she had another son, according to a Canadian ISIS bride who knew her personally.
Bradley was killed along with her youngest son in a coalition airstrike on a hospital in 2018. Aminah was put under the protection of one of her former husband’s other wives, a Somali woman, who is still devoted to ISIS.
After the fall of the caliphate, Aminah and her caretaker ended up in one of several large detention camps for ISIS families, run by the Kurds.
As of last year, 80,000 ISIS men, women, and children reside in dozens of these camps across Iraq and Syria as the international community figured out what to do with them, according to analysts at the Middle East Institute. Aminah resided in the largest of these, al-Hol in Syria, which contains approximately 68,000 people, almost two-thirds of whom are children.
The conditions in the overcrowded detention camps, such as al-Hol, have been derided by Letta Taylor of Human Rights Watch as “another Guantanamo.” Poor sanitation, lack of proper medical care, and abuse by guards are common.
Aminah’s caretaker covered her in a niqab in order to avoid suspicion from the Kurdish guards, according to Bradley’s Canadian friend. Foreigners are often subject to harsher treatment than Syrian or Iraqi fighters, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
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Though U.S. officials refuse to comment on Aminah’s case, the U.S. policy for repatriation involves a DNA test to ensure that an individual is a U.S. citizen. Kurdish forces have previously repatriated several ISIS-affiliated U.S. citizens upon the request of the government, according to the Wall Street Journal.
