Laura H. The Caliphate Girl from Zoetermeer

Laura H. The Caliphate Girl from Zoetermeer

Laura H. The Caliphate Girl from Zoetermeer

Thomas Rueb

In the summer of 2016, near the self-proclaimed caliphate of IS, a young woman is found running through the desert, carrying two small children. Her name is Laura, she says. She is twenty years old and from ‘Sweet Lake City’. She has escaped. She is crying. She wants to go home to the Dutch village of Zoetermeer. In a last attempt to save her, her father had set up a rescue mission with the help of a shady network of private soldiers.

However, once Laura arrives at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, she is immediately arrested. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service thinks IS has sent her back with the task of committing a terror attack. And where is Ibrahim, the handsome jihadi from Alkmaar for whom she left everything behind? Laura from Zoetermeer becomes Laura H. of the terrorist detention facility in Vught: the first Dutch woman to return from the caliphate – straight into the eye of a media storm.

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