Thread by @bjoernstritzel

1. German Kim A. came back to Germany and was arrested in Frankfurt today, more than four years after I helped facilitate her escape from ISIS territory (which took several months due to her unreliability and costed me quite some nerves). generalbundesanwalt.de/SharedDocs/Pre…

2. In spring/summer 2016, ISIS still had firm control over large territory in northeastern Syria. Some of those cities like Manbij had a huge population of Foreign Fighters and a considerable presence of ISIS internal security members, making escape plans tricky and dangerous.

3. During our first talk she went to the roof of her house in Manbij for better connection which was risky due to her German neighbors. Soon a loud call to prayer interrupted our call. She yelled at the Muezzin: „Dude, why don't you scream louder, they can't hear you in Germany.“

4. It was this kind of recklessness which made the escape harder. Over the course of some months, even crazier incidents happened. She changed locations often due to SDF's advance on Manbij, sometimes not knowing where she was, sending pics from her house for geolocation.

5. Sometimes she would call crying at 4 in the morning during heavy Russian airstrikes in close proximity with windows shattering, followed by strafing runs.
Sometimes she would complain about not having enough credits on her phone only to later admit she downloaded Candy Crush.

6. One of the houses in ISIS-controlled villages where she lived was bombed by Regime/Russian airstrikes some weeks after she left and featured in an Amaq video.

7. After back and forth and some crazy close calls, we arranged a new meeting with a smuggler. ISIS was retreating from some areas, but still had firm control over their territory, with several checkpoints in place and regular raids from their Shurta Askeriya / Amniyat members.

8. I reminded her in strong words to be on time to meet the smuggler, as the village still had a heavy ISIS presence and he was risking his life: ISIS was regularly executing smugglers back then. Captured fleeing members were usually punished with prison for "first offenders."

9. Surprisingly, she managed to came in time and meet the smuggler who was waiting on his motorbike, ready to bring her out of the Caliphate.

There was a problem, though: She brought her two cats in a laundry basket. No place on the motorbike. Confusion, then she refused to go.

10. Waited for the confirmation call for a really long time.
Finally my phone rang: "Man, the ***** is crazy, that's a smuggling operation, not a vacation trip!"
Shortly afterwards she also called, crying that she can't leave without the cats.
In the middle of a fucking warzone.

11. Somehow managed to calm everyone down.

The smuggler returned with a car and Kim, Flauschi and Tigger Lou could finally escape from ISIS.

12. The trio was brought to a Syrian family in the FSA area near the Turkish border. Kim then complained that Turkey wouldn't let her enter so she could fly back to Germany. Turkish-German relations are worsening in this time, though can't blame Ankara for not allowing her in.

13. The Syrian family didn't demand any money from her, but generously gave her a room and food and somehow she also managed to get some other stuff.

A Syrian family which the convert Kim from Frankfurt would have denounced as "murtadeen" (apostates) a short while ago.

14. She still owed the smuggler money and suggested me to write a book about her case as she had told me her life over the past months. Back in 2016 there was no other case of a former ISIS member speaking out so openly, no inflation of interviews with captured members and so on.

15. I agreed and told her that she could have all money made from this book, but that she had to pay the smuggler first and whatever would have been left donate to a Yazidi NGO. She replied angrily that she never had a Yazidi slave and wouldn't understand why she should donate.

16. I reminded her that for two years she was a member of an organization which committed a genocide on Yazidi. After some arguing, we started working on the transcript, detailing her troubled past in Germany, her Hijra, the life in ISIS and her escape.

17. As time went by, SDF continued advancing. Her German husband, who was in Raqqa back then and didn't know about her escape plans, contacted her as he also wanted to get out now. She asked me if I could help him, too.

18. SDF was closing in on Raqqa and he was hiding from ISIS. Spoke with him several times but didn't find him trustworthy enough for a smuggling OP – partly due to some stupid lies she told me about him which made it more difficult to investigate his honesty.

19. I declined as I couldn't tell if he wanted to get out or was working with Amniyat to catch smugglers. She was mad, yelling that I had "killed" him and she would have rather never left ISIS. She also contacted the Foreign Office and told them that I am to blame for his death.

20. We didn't continue on the transcript . She stayed with the Syrian family near the Turkish border, playing CandyCrush, binge-watching Netflix, lamenting to the Foreign Office to evacuate her. She really suffered when Turkey shut down the internet for three days in the area.

21. Some months later she was contacted by Christoph Reuter from „Spiegel“, who heard from Syrians in the village that there was a German woman living there. She told him about her escape and the transcript for the book she made with me.

22. Reuter offered her 17,000€ for the story, asking her not to speak about this with me. When I met him at events in Germany during this time, he strangely avoided me and was very shy as soon as he saw me. I wondered about his behaviour, but soon figured it out.

23. Some weeks later he already published a book about „Maryam A.“ and her journey into and out of the Caliphate (quite a fast writer he is).
The plot sounded very familiar, though he managed to make several errors in the book.

24. When I called him out on Twitter back then, Spiegel's legal department wrote a nice mail, saying that my "frustration" was understandable, but nonetheless demanded that I delete those tweets:

https://twitter.com/bjoernstritzel/status/931885353891483650

25. Reuter mentions an anonymous German smuggling facilitator several times in his book and finally, "Maryam A." thanks this anonymous guy without whom she "might have been still in Raqqa or elsewhere."

26. I was quite pissed back then. Though traveling to the region for quite some time and writing for small publications, I never had formal training in journalism and only did this as a main job then for a little more than three years – Reuter for more than three decades.

27. He continued to anonymize me when reporting about stories which I covered first (here he calls me a "foreign reporter" after I intervened on behalf of a sick baby of a German woman in al-Hol – somewhat strange, as if I didn't have a German passport).

https://twitter.com/bjoernstritzel/status/1109154790569840640

28. Of course he knew my reports in BILD on behalf of the suffering German baby in al-Hol camp (which was brought back to Germany later). The German mother there didn't tell him about a "foreign reporter" but mentioned my name – which he apparently didn't like too much.

29. Anyway, back to Kim A.: Some time after the book was published, she contacted me again, complaining in lengthy messages how Reuter had "betrayed" and "abandoned" her and doesn't help her to get back to Germany (can't blame him for that, though).

30. Relevant German authorities knew from the beginning about her escape attempts from ISIS and the staff at the German Foreign Ministry tried their best to get Ankara's permission to let her in. She lived near the Turkish border for four years, now she's finally back in Germany.

31. She's now facing trial, though I assume she gets a rather light sentence: Kim A. fled from ISIS much earlier than many others and distanced herself from the organization years ago.

32: Important Addendum: Flauschi's and Tigger Lou's fate is unknown. They lived with her for quite some time in the Syrian village near the Turkish border, but made several escape attempts, though they always returned before they eventually left for good.

33. The town near the Turkish border where she lived after escaping from ISIS was heavily besieged and shelled by ISIS for years, but never captured: Local FSA forces held their positions in fierce battles, though there were times when they had been cut off from all supply lines.

34. When Kim and the cats arrived, ISIS was still besieging the town, occasionally shelling it.
Some day, Flauschi went AWOL.
Kim kept asking me to ask local FSA commanders to look for him. During an ISIS siege.
Eventually FSA was looking for Flauschi. He returned on his own.

35. Life under siege wasn't too funny.

36. She asked me to share her audios but it didn't really change anything.