School Teacher Turned ISIS Militant Shares Her Story

"He would say, 'We are going to properly implement Islam. Right now we are in a state of war, a phase where we need to control the country, so we have to be harsh," the former ISIS fighter claims.

The Tunisian man ultimately said the he was going to travel to the city of Raqqa in Syria so they could be married. Khadija said she got in touch with a cousin living in Raqqa, who had a husband involved with the Islamic State.

The cousin invited her to join the Khansa'a Brigade – the highly-feared all-female ISIS police force. The brigade reportedly consists of about 30 women who patrol the streets, making sure that women are wearing the proper attire and following rules as outlined by the Islamic State.

Khadija convinced her parents that moving to Raqqa would make it far easier to get her younger siblings enrolled in school amidst all the turmoil in the country, and added that living in the city meant the family would also have the support of relatives.

"She's not a normal female. She's huge, she has an AK, a pistol, a whip, a dagger and she wears the nijab," she explained.

"We are harsh with the infidels, but merciful among ourselves," Umm Rayan, an ISIS female brigade member allegedly told Khadija after noticing how fearful she was after first joining the Khansa'a Brigade.

Khadija said she was given $200 a month and food rations as payment for being a member of the ISIS police brigade. She also said she was trained to fire, clean, and dismantle a firearm. Her family noticed the change in her demeanor, and attempted to warn her away from being a part of ISIS, but she was not prepared to hear them at the time.

"You are walking, but you don't know where you are going," the Syrian school teacher's mother would often tell her.

She recalled feeling "seduced" by her new sense of power, but eventually started to question both her beliefs and those of the Islamic State.

"I felt that I had authority in the streets. But then I started to get scared, scared of my situation. I even started to be afraid of myself," she said.

"The worst thing I saw was a man getting his head hacked off in front of me," the former ISIS fighter revealed.

According to the teacher, the Khansa'a Brigade shared building space with a man who "specialized" in finding wives for ISIS militants.

"He was one of the worst people. The foreign fighters are very brutal with women, even the ones they marry. There were cases where the wife had to be taken to the emergency ward because of the violence, the sexual violence," Khadija concluded.

The school teacher said she fled Syria just a few days before the airstrikes began in the country. While Khadija was smuggled across Turkey, her family remains in Syria. When asked how Syria could have allowed ISIS to take hold of the country, Khadija said "there is a weakness in us."

What do you think about the Syrian teacher turned into an ISIS fighter, and then fled the all-female police brigade?

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