Hamilton ‘ISIS bride’ stuck in Syria in poor health, seeks return to Canada
He had a vibrant personality, not what you would have expected for the persona of a terrorist," says Hamilton native Kimberly Polman.
In a new documentary film, she explains why she married a member of ISIS online, when she was in a really bad place" mentally.
He said come where you are actually loved, and needed.'"
The bloody advance of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) ended early in 2019, but Polman's dark odyssey continues, trapped in a detainment camp in Syria nearly six years after she left Canada to marry an ISIS fighter - and then a second, after the first man was killed.
The film, The Return: Life After ISIS," is about women who embarked upon doomed lives with ISIS men, and who remain trapped in northeast Syria hoping for repatriation to their home countries.
A British woman held in the Al-Roj detainment camp had her citizenship revoked, and U.S. president Donald Trump tweeted in 2019 that an American woman in the camp who had joined ISIS should not be allowed to return.
An Ottawa-based lawyer is representing Polman, through her sister in Canada, in an attempt to bring her home. The lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, told The Spectator that Polman suffers from physical and mental illnesses.
(Polman) has had lung and kidney issues, hepatitis, malnutrition, and a mental health issue as well," he says. So she's not doing very well at all, to put it mildly."
He says there are about 45 Canadian citizens in Syria - male and female - either in the detainment camp or prison, who joined ISIS or married into it.
In an interview with The Spectator from Barcelona, the filmmaker, Alba Sotorra, says Polman and others were lured by ISIS propaganda.
(ISIS) knew how to detect women around the world who were vulnerable to it, and used different narratives for each person," she says. The women were lied to, and brainwashed."
In the film, Polman says she has since learned how manipulative and evil people can be."
In one scene, she says she never even had a parking ticket" in Canada, and in Syria never harmed anybody." But then a Kurdish human rights activist visiting the camp challenges Polman, telling her: Maybe not you, but maybe your husband killed my cousin, or killed my neighbour, or my teacher."
Polman's story has been covered in U.S. media, including a piece last year by ABC News in which she said she was raped by ISIS men multiple times," and that she had been unaware of the murderous nature of ISIS when she left Canada in 2015.
In 2014 there had been extensive media coverage of ISIS atrocities, including the beheading of a journalist and aid worker, and of the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015.
Reports say that in the summer of 2015, Polman told her siblings in B.C. she was taking a trip to Austria, when in fact she had married the ISIS member and moved to Syria.
Polman's background prior to leaving Canada remains something of a mystery. In 2011 she attended a college 40 minutes east of Vancouver and received the Soroptimist Women's Opportunity Award.
In the film, she talks about being a lonely empty nester back then, as a mother of three adult children, vulnerable to the companionship she found in the ISIS man she met online.
She is now about 48 years old. Polman has said she has dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship - a Canadian father and American mother - and that she was born and raised in Hamilton. It's unclear when her family moved to B.C.
A request to interview her sister was made by The Spectator, but Polman's lawyer says he has advised the sibling not to speak to media.
Kimberly Polman has said she was raised in a Reformed Mennonite family in Hamilton, and that she had a happy childhood.
Reform is a small branch of the Mennonite faith. An archivist with the Mennonite Archives of Ontario told The Spectator there is no record of the Polmans as members, but added Mennonites are decentralized in their approach to keeping such records.
Sotorra says Polman told her that after separating from her first husband in Canada - it's unclear if she married in Ontario or out West - she converted to Islam, finding a sense of belonging in that faith community, and then married a second time.
She told Sotorra that she spent a couple of years living in Saudi Arabia with this second husband, prior to marrying the ISIS member in 2015.
Polman appears in the film several times, as she is interviewed in the Al-Roj camp. She describes a moment from early 2019 - with ISIS nearly destroyed by advancing U.S.-backed coalition forces - when she assisted in a war zone underground area like an intensive care unit."
She says squeegees were used to mop the blood of dead and wounded ISIS fighters from the floor.
You are wading through it, it's like a river running. And you don't imagine that, and I can't tell you what that smells like or what that feels like on your skin."
Polman speaks the words with little emotion in her face and her voice sounds composed.
After interviewing women in the camp many times, Sotorra says she believes they have seen and experienced so much violence they live in a kind of mental shock.
I think it is a self-defence mechanism. Because if you feel it all, you fall, you cannot take it. It's like this for all of them; there is a part of you that needs to be frozen, so you can block it out."
At issue now is whether governments will repatriate thousands of nationals like Polman, who aligned themselves with ISIS and are still held in Syria.
What rights do citizens hold, after leaving their home countries to join a terrorist movement abroad, or marry those who fight for it?
One of the women Polman met in the camp, Hoda Muthana, was born in New Jersey and joined ISIS in 2014 at 19. According to U.S. court documents, she became a prominent spokesperson for ISIS on social media, advocating the killing of Americans and encouraging women to join ISIS."
Christina Jump, a Texas-based lawyer for the Muthana family, told The Spectator she is preparing to file a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to bring Muthana back.
It's an unusual situation, says Jump, but citizenship goes to the heart of the matter and it should not be subject to the whims of a new administration; you can't revoke citizenship by tweet" - a reference to statements by Trump, and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about Muthana.
Greenspon, meanwhile, says it's a sad day when Canada, that signed a declaration condemning arbitrary detention of people one day, does absolutely nothing the next to repatriate our own Canadian citizens."
A spokesperson with Global Affairs would not confirm Polman's presence in Syria, citing privacy reasons, saying in an email to The Spectator that federal officials are aware of Canadian citizens being detained in northern Syria. Given the security situation on the ground, the Government of Canada's ability to provide consular assistance in Syria is extremely limited."
Greenspon counters that 20 countries have so far repatriated citizens, including on April 30, when 69 children and 24 women were returned home to the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan.
Diplomats and humanitarian organizations have worked for repatriations through the governing body that oversees the refugee camps, called AANES (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria).
Human Rights Watch reports that 43,000 men, women and children linked to ISIS are detained in degrading conditions ... often with the explicit or implicit consent of their countries of nationality."
(Canadian officials) say the situation there is not secure, which is not the case, and also say that we don't have diplomatic relations with AANES, but neither do any of the 20 other countries," Greenspon says. Neither excuse holds water. AANES has been begging countries to come and take their nationals home."
He suggests the federal government is focused more on political optics: the notion that Canadians like Polman, who made their bed with ISIS, should find their own way home.
And that is not a fair or proper Canadian response to our citizens being unjustly held, without charges, in inhumane conditions," he says. If you have something on these (men and women), bring them home, charge them, and let them face justice in Canada."
Jon Wells is a Hamilton-based reporter and feature writer for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jwells@thespec.com