Abu Fahad, 57, says she became harsh and showed anger over his smoking and long thobe. She got married two years ago, but due to problems with husband, she insisted on separation and returned to live with parents.
She stayed at home, avoided socializing and spent a lot of time on the Internet. Slowly, he says, she began imposing extreme rules on the house. She deleted all news and entertainment channels to highlight those with religious content, sparking concern and confusion about her behavior.
The father says he dealt with her extremism sometimes leniently and other times strictly, describing her behavior as a “curse that hit her.”
Abu Fahad, a Riyadh resident, is a retired municipal employee. Married for 30 years, he has two sons and two daughters. “I observe youths’ behavior in the Kingdom and the region with regard to their recruitment by radical groups,” says Abu Fahad, noting he had a feeling that his daughter may have been susceptible and perfectly suited to such extremist ideas. He says he appealed to one of his relatives, a preacher, to confront and restrain his daughter, but she refused any advice and insisted on her radical beliefs.
“Despite her extremism and fanaticism, I never expected my daughter to travel and join the ranks of radicals abroad, as she was not supportive of Daesh due to its brutality.”
One day, he recounts, he was surprised to find on her mobile audio and video clips on some battles by radical organizations, and upon confronting her, she said she viewed them by chance and that she did not approve of those terror acts.
Abu Fahad says he was afraid his daughter was hiding something, but feared reporting her would subject her to imprisonment.
Six months ago, he said, his daughter informed her family that she was going to perform Umrah with a group of women in her Qur’an memorization groups. These women accompanied her from Riyadh to Jeddah and eventually to Turkey from where she sent a voice message to her family informing them she had arrived at the Daesh territory in Syria.
The former artist holds a bachelor’s degree in arts, and is an experienced artist who participated in numerous events of the Riyadh International Book Fair and the Alwan festival. Her father says his daughter used to be open minded and liberal, “but since her marriage she was no longer the same girl.”
He said the Saudi Embassy in Ankara is working on finding her and bringing her back home.
More than 40 Saudi women have fled to areas controlled by Daesh in Syria, some with their children. One such woman is currently facing trial for spreading extremism in the Kingdom, having pledged that she will shed her blood for the sake of establishing and expanding the state of Daesh.
Abu Fahad traces the problem of militancy and extremism in the Kingdom to “the role of advocates and extremists propagating harsh ideologies since the emergence of the so-called Islamic awakening in the 1980s and 1990s,” noting it eventually became “a prevailing social tradition” despite its condemnation by senior Saudi scholars.
0 add comment::
Post a Comment