Beaten, tortured, sexually abused: An American Islamic State widow looks for a way home

A vacation is what made Samantha Sally to flip her quiet middle-American world of muscle cars, good lifestyle that turned into a nightmare of ritual beating, rape, torture and propaganda videos of Islamic State’s so-called Caliphate, CNN reported.

A holiday is what her husband, Moussa Elhassani, promised her when she went to Hong Kong in 2014, she says. The couple was planning to move to Morocco to start a new, cheaper life, she says, and needed to go through Hong Kong to transfer money.

PHOTO COURTESY: CNN

Sally said that she stood on the Turkish border with Syria on the edge of IS territory with her husband who was holding her daughter, Sarah, while she kept her son cose, Matthew, 7, where she had to make the most impossible decision of her life. Either to abandon her daughter to ISIS and save her son or follow her husband into IS. She said, that choosing to follow his husband was the only way to save her daughter’s life.

"To stay there with my son or watch my daughter leave with my husband - I had to make a decision," Sally, 32, tells CNN in northern Syria.



"Maybe I would never have seen my daughter again ever, and how can I live the rest of my life like that."

Samantha Sally speaks to CNN in northern Syria with her children.

Sally was in Syrian-Kurdish custody, in limbo, arrested after ISIS's collapse in Raqqa and unsure if she will ever see the United States again

This story made Sally feel on how she suffered the ways of mystery, compassion and animal savagery befitting ISIS’s legacy of almost surreal terror. While, Sally was given the role between being naïve, manipulated housewife and the savvy pragmatist able to survive the savage, male-dominant world of IS.

She was kept as a prisoner, and was treated as a slave from a market with two broken rib injury that she suffered later on.

Sally's time in the so-called Caliphate spanned from its most brutal beginnings in 2015 until its very final moments, the totality of which, in some way, complicates her defense that she was an innocent bystander.

Sally said: "I really don't care what people think and what people say. Once I left, I was extremely relieved and I was not able to breathe in three years until now. All I saw was a bunch of drug-using thugs who had no place. They created their own state here and called it in the name of God."



Yet it is the believability of her story -- that of the pliable and then abused housewife, turned savior of three child slaves -- upon which her and her children's fate surely hinges, as US authorities decide their next steps.

"I will do anything to get my kids back where they belong," Sally says. "If I have to spend 15 years in prison, it's better than anything here."

They dream of returning home, yet the FBI agents who visit them in custody to talk, have yet to bring charges or plane tickets home.

"Me and my kids we talk about wanting to eat McDonald's," she said. "We want to live a normal life again."

This article originally appeared on CNN.