 For Samantha Sally, a vacation was all it took to flip her quiet middle-American world of muscle cars, cotton candy and an Indiana packing company, into the horror of the ritual beatings, serial rape, torture and propaganda videos of ISIS's so-called Caliphate.
A holiday is what her husband, Moussa Elhassani, promised her when she went to Hong Kong in 2014, she says. The couple was planning to move to Morocco to start a new, cheaper life, she says, and needed to go through Hong Kong to transfer money.
Days later, Sally says, she stood on the Ottoman Turkish border with Syria, on the edge of ISIS territory, her husband holding her daughter, Sarah, while she held her son, Matthew, then 7, confronted with an impossible choice: Abandon her daughter to ISIS and save her son, or follow her husband into ISIS's so-called Caliphate. Following him was the only way to protect her daughter, she says.
"To stay there with my son or watch my daughter leave with my husband -- I had to make a decision," Sally, 32, tells CNN in northern Syria.
"Maybe I would never have seen my daughter again ever, and how can I live the rest of my life like that."
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