She’s a mother of seven who married an Islamic State fighter and was captured in Syria, but Madina was lucky. She is a Chechen, and that means she got to come home.
Last November, the 36-year-old was pregnant, her small children jumpy at the slightest noise, when they were packed onto a plane and sent from Syria to Grozny, the capital of Russia’s mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya.
Taking the family out of Syria was an act of clemency on the part of Chechen authorities, who say it is their duty to bring back the women and children stranded in Islamic State territory after their insurgent husbands or fathers have been imprisoned or died.
The Chechen government says if we take back the women and children, and give them the best things, treat them the best way we can, we can try to let them forget who they used to be in Syria, said Madina, who agreed to speak on the condition that her family name not be disclosed. And this is the best method, in my eyes.
Short and intense, Madina had framed her small face with a thick black covering, a khimar, that stretches over her elbows and below the waist, like a cape. Not a whisp of hair could be seen. She spoke solemnly yet without remorse, relaying her life story as a series of unforeseen events connected to each other by sheer circumstance.
Following the men from around the world were their wives. It is estimated that hundreds, if not thousands, of Russian-speaking women accompanied men to the caliphate.
A month before she was returned to Chechnya, Madina and her family were captured in a raid by the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. Her husband is in prison in Syria, and the two do not speak. He doesn’t know that she gave birth, in Chechnya, to his third, and her seventh, child.
The family was held in a camp in Qamishli, near the border with Turkey, with women from Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere. Madina said she was regularly beaten and denied the toilet, and her children were starved.
The Kurdish women guarding them had taunted the prisoners, telling them they would be sold to Iraqi Shias. They will rape you, and take your children away, Madina recalled them saying. So when Madina was blindfolded and led to a car, she was sure they were heading to their enslavement.
Kheda Saratova, one of those overseeing the repatriation program, corroborated Madina’s account. She said Madina and her children were flown back from the Hmeimim air base, which Russia operates.
In Grozny, they live in a temporary refuge given to her by the government, a Soviet-era apartment on the outskirts of the capital, one of the few buildings to have survived the city’s flattening during its two doomed wars for independence from Russia.
Last year, 13 women of Chechen origin and their 35 children, including Madina and her family, were taken back to Chechnya, Saratova said.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the tiny republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, uses Islam to further his own interests, from rebuilding mosques in Syria to aggressively stamping out Islamist militancy at home. This is key to currying favor with the Kremlin, on which he relies for money and a large degree of autonomy.
Rehabilitating Chechen wives who went astray in the clutch of the Islamic State sends a signal, analysts say, that alternatives to extremism exist. And Madina said she’s grateful for that.
Compared with similar repatriation programs in France or the United Kingdom, Chechnya’s is by far the most lenient, so much so that other regions in Russia refuse to follow suit, instead bringing women to trial and placing the children in foster homes.
When Madina fled Chechnya in 1999, as Russian troops entered the breakaway republic, she headed with her sisters and mother to Maastricht, a hilly town in the southern tip of the Netherlands.
I have no interest in seeing that country again, she said, abruptly.
Her second husband was a Russian Muslim, her third is the Tunisian. She pointed to her three smallest boys, his children. See, they look Arab, don’t they? she said saucily.
She met him in Turkey in 2014, and they left for Syria a year later.
They lived all over Islamic State territory together, from Raqqa in the north to Deir ez-Zor in the south. Most of the family’s time was spent in Tabqa, a city on the Euphrates River.
During the heaviest battles between the Islamic State and the American-led coalition, in the second half of 2016, an explosion ripped through the side of their house in Tabqa.
If he hears loud noises, she said of 2-year-old Abdullah, who was sitting on the floor trying to navigate a fidget spinner, he is searching, looking, all around him. When he hears fireworks, he starts to cry and cry, and I cannot stop him.
A tiny scrap of a boy with eyes like chestnuts, Abdullah is still sickly from their time in prison. When he arrived in Chechnya, he weighed barely 11 pounds.