His stepfather took him to Syria in 2014. His ordeal had just begun.

In Su-lay Su’s room at the Houri Center in northeastern Syria, which he shares with nine other boys, the wall is adorned with artwork: a painting of a sunset, a winter scene and his favorite soccer team, Barcelona. 

Su-lay Su, 22, has been stuck at the Houri Center in northeastern Syria for the last 5 ½ years. The rehabilitation center holds about 100 boys and young men who are believed to have connections to ISIS. 

ISIS used children in its propaganda. It trained some of them to fight on the battlefield. They even had a nickname: “cubs of the caliphate” — referring to the area that ISIS controlled. Today, five years since the group was defeated, hundreds of these children and youths up to the age of 22 remain detained in Syria.

But Su-lay Su said he never fought for ISIS or did any propaganda for the terrorist group. Instead, he said a series of whirlwind events when he was about 12 years old upended his life in Trinidad and eventually led him here. 

As Su-lay Su tells it, his mother, Gailon Su, long separated from his father, converted to Islam, and then, remarried. Gailon and her new husband, Anthony Hamlet, decided to take the family on a trip. So, on a hot, September day in 2014, they packed their bags and after a few different flights, made it to Turkey. 

Su-lay Su and his mother didn’t know it then, but they were being taken into ISIS territory. Soon after, Hamlet separated from Gailon Su, and after that, it was just Su-lay Su and his mother fending for themselves in a foreign country under ISIS rule. 

Their nightmare, he said, had just begun. “There’s no way to go back [home], you know, [my mother] doesn’t know how to speak Arabic. I don’t know how to speak Arabic. And no one is helping us.”

Su-lay Su said he started to make friends on the streets and picked up some Arabic from them.

His mom lived with other women, and under ISIS’ strict interpretation of Islam, he was too old to stay with them. 

“Half of my life in ISIS, I lived in a mosque. I never really had a house to stay in. Sometimes, maybe a room.”

In 2016, the pair moved to Raqqa, the capital of the so-called caliphate in northern Syria. They survived on a small, monthly stipend that ISIS distributed to foreign divorcees or widows.

Su-lay Su’s surrender to SDF

As Su-lay Su got older, other ISIS women pressured his mom to send him to fight. He said that he didn’t want to do that, so they avoided going out much.

By then, he’d managed to get a phone, which was their only connection to the outside world. They would download movies to watch.

Although he and his mom had some good times, he said, “it’s really shifty. Sometimes you hear bombings around you.”

In 2017, the US-led coalition began an operation to push ISIS out of Raqqa. Su-lay Su said that the bombing got so intense, they were forced to evacuate to another area called Deir-el-Zour.

“And then, you know, it’s even worse than before.”

Su-lay Su said that he wanted to surrender to the other side — the Kurdish fighters called the SDF. But Gailon Su worried that ISIS could capture and kill him.

“So, she dressed me as a girl in black clothing. I wore a hijab, and we saw some Syrian family [that] were leaving, walking out of ISIS.” 

Su-lay Su explained that ISIS fighters allowed women to pass but if they saw a man, they would take him. His mother told him to pretend he could not talk, as if he was deaf, to ensure that he would pass. 

On an early December morning in 2018, Su-lay Su and Gailon Su and a group of other families started making their way out of ISIS territory, treading carefully amid mines all over, and airstrikes. 

“We surrendered ourselves,” Su-lay Su said. 

When the soldiers asked each woman where they came from, Su-lay Su didn’t know if he should answer because his mother had instructed him not to speak.

“I just tried to put on the voice of a girl, and I said, ‘America.’” 

It didn’t take long for Su-lay Su’s cover to be blown by the SDF. 

Su-lay Su and his mother were separated that day in December 2018. Su-lay Su said that for about a year, he didn’t know if she was dead or alive. He was moved to two prison facilities before the SDF brought him to the Houri Center.

Su-lay Su continues to claim that he is from the US, but The World couldn’t verify this and found no evidence of this. The State Department said it doesn’t comment on specific cases.

One expert said that Su-lay Su might be saying he’s American in hopes of getting better treatment at the Houri Center. 

‘A grave injustice’

Su-lay Su tried to find out about his mom’s whereabouts every day. Finally, in February 2020, Su-lay Su got a letter from Gailon Su saying that she was alive and in one of the camps for families of ISIS. A few days later, she came to visit him.

“I saw her. I hugged her. We stayed together for like an hour and a half. We spoke to each other. That was one of the best days for me in Syria.”

Su-lay Su isn’t allowed to have a cellphone or any connectivity with the outside world, aside from periodic calls from his mom.

Ahmad Lawand, who heads the Houri Center, said in Kurdish that the boys and young men there were trained by ISIS. Some were fighting on the front lines and were injured, he said, adding that the center provides medical treatment to those who still need it.

The boys and young men stay at the center until they turn 23. Then, they’re transferred to an adult prison. That means that next year, Su-lay Su will be sent to an adult prison.

Lawand said in the adult prisons, the environment reverses all the work they have done at the rehabilitation center.

“I can’t see that somebody like Su-lay Su is any kind of security threat at all.”

Simon Cottee, who teaches criminology at the University of Kent in the UK, has done extensive research on ISIS fighters from outside Syria, especially those from Trinidad.

“The children of the caliphate were absolutely key to the whole Islamic State. The actual caliphate, in some ways, was a very strange world in which the whole concept of childhood didn’t exist. Boys as young as 8, 9, 10, were enlisted into the Islamic State’s machinery of war.”

Cottee said that he hasn’t found anything that would dispute Su-lay Su’s claims.

“I have no evidence that he was involved in any fighting or propaganda. Nothing to indicate that he’d actually been radicalized or that he’d participated in any combat.”

He added, “I think it’s a grave injustice, it’s a travesty that he’s still there.”

In fact, many experts say that these children and adolescents being held should be treated as victims of ISIS.

‘I’m not a terrorist’

Ben Saul, a United Nations expert on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism, said that he doesn’t see the Houri Center as a place of rehabilitation.

“I don’t think that it’s possible for meaningful rehabilitation to take place under detention conditions when you’re held in the territory of a nonstate actor in the middle of a war zone.”

Saul said that these children and adolescents need to be in their homes and communities where they have support from their families and friends. 

Separating them from their mothers is another problem, he said. Gailon Su is still in a camp called Roj about two hours drive from the Houri Center.

Saul said he raises this issue of detained children in northern Syria with officials from their countries of origin, but they seem to have washed their hands of the problem.

“Many governments just don’t seem to understand the sense of urgency needed to repatriate large numbers of people.

Children should not have to spend their whole childhood in detention, Saul said.

For Su-lay Su, hopes of one day leaving Syria, and also becoming a professional soccer player, have waned over the past couple of years.

Su-lay Su blames his stepfather for robbing him of a normal childhood. But he also wants to look forward instead of backward. And, he said he wants to set the record straight about his trajectory from Trinidad to Syria.

“When I was back home, I didn’t know there was a country called Syria. I didn’t know anything about what’s going on. I want people to know that I’m not a terrorist. If I get outside, I don’t want someone to look at me and say, ‘Oh, this guy, he was in ISIS and he wants to kill people and stuff like that. He wants to blow himself up. That’s not me.”