Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad documents the events leading up to, and following two teenage sisters who abandoned their family in Norway to join with ISIS in Syria.
Fellow journalist Sarfraz Manzoor met with Seierstad on the Hay stage to discuss the pertinent question of radicalisation in the current climate.
The sister’s story was a “textbook case of radicalisation” Seierstad said. Their family had moved to Norway but the mother chose not to integrate with
Norwegian society.
Norwegian language lessons are compulsory for new residents but there was no test to pass. The mother didn’t hold a job in Norway and also felt that her children were becoming too Norwegian, so she sent her daughters to lessons on the Quran where they met a radical instructor who showed them passages that romanticised and glorified death.
Their Somali father contacted Seierstad about his daughters, hoping to return them safely and she eventually gained access to the sisters’ chat logs, but
found that “They were very happy with ISIS.”
Radicalisation isn’t an immediate change, Seierstad said, it is much more of a step-by-step process, which in the case of the sisters took two to three years.