‘I went to join Isis in Syria, taking my four-year-old. It was a journey into hell’

Sophie Kasiki stared at the photograph of a young English-speaking boy in a camouflage uniform and black bandana covered in Arabic calling for unbelievers to be killed in the latest Islamic State propaganda.

Her eyes welled and she swallowed hard. “That could have been my son,” she said, her firm voice wavering. “That’s hard for me to say and makes me want to cry. I would have killed us both rather than let him become a killer, rather than let him fall into the claws of those monsters.”

The “monsters” she is referring to are Islamic State, and Kasiki weighs her words; she knows her four-year-old son was only ever at risk of falling into the jihadis’ lair because she had taken him there.

Kasiki is one of the few western women who have been to the capital of the Isis-declared caliphate at Raqqa in Syria and returned to recount the tale. It was, she said in her first interview with a British newspaper, like a journey into a hell from which there seemed no return.

“I have felt so guilty. I have asked myself how I can live with what I have done, taking my son to Syria,” she told the Observer. “I have hated those who manipulated me, exploited my naivety, my weakness, my insecurity. I have hated myself.”

About 220 French women are thought to be with Isis in Iraq and Syria, according to the country’s intelligence services. Two years ago only 10% of those leavingFrance to join the jihadis were women. Today the proportion is 35%. A third are converts, like Kasiki. Her story, Dans la Nuit de Daech (In the Night of Daesh), published by Robert Laffont Editions, reads like a thriller.Kasiki, 34, a petite but fiercely determined woman with neatly braided hair (who will not give her real name for fear of Isis reprisals), seems an unlikely recruit to the Islamist cause. Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and raised in a fervently Catholic and comfortable household of strong, independent women, she was nine when sent to live with her older sister near Paris after their mother died. The death of the woman she still calls her “guardian angel” sparked a childhood depression that cast a long shadow into adolescence and adulthood; a “hole in the heart” that even a happy marriage and motherhood failed to close.

While employed as a social worker helping mainly immigrant families in the Paris suburbs, Kasiki decided to convert to Islam, without telling her fervently atheist husband, believing it would fill the gap in her life. Her new faith brought only temporary psychological comfort, but introduced her to three Muslim men, 10 years her junior, whom she nicknamed Les Petits (the little ones) and teased like younger brothers.

In September 2014, the three disappeared, later turning up in Syria, from where they maintained daily contact with Kasiki. She saw herself as a conduit between three lost boys, who simply needed to know their mothers were missing them to catch the next plane home, and their distraught families. Slowly the roles reversed. “I thought I was in control of the situation, but I realise now they were probably trained to recruit people like me,” she said. “Little by little they played on my weaknesses. They knew I was an orphan and I had converted to Islam, they knew I was insecure …”

On 20 February 2015, Kasiki told her husband she was travelling to work in an orphanage in Istanbul for a few weeks and taking their son. Instead she took the well-worn jihadi route to southern Turkey and into Syria.

Installed in the Isis stronghold of Raqqa, the reality of daily life was predictably different from the “paradise” painted by her hometown friends. Kasiki was ordered not to go out alone and only then covered from head to toe, to hand over her passport, and to limit communications with her family in France.

At the city’s Isis-run maternity hospital, where she was to work, she was shocked by the squalid conditions, staff indifference to patients’ suffering, and a hierarchy in the city that put “arrogant foreign fighters” at the top of the social heap and Syrians at the bottom. The family apartment Kasiki was allocated had been hastily abandoned by its Syrian owners and their caged canaries served as an increasingly potent metaphor for her and her son’s confinement.

It took just 10 days for Kasiki to wake from what she describes as a “paralysing torpor”, prompted by regular missives and family photos emailed by her desperate husband, and to realise her terrible mistake.