http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mothers-of-isis/
Her first husband left the family when Damian was ten, and the boy retreated into his computer from a world that exasperated and excluded him. When he was 17, he tried to commit suicide by drinking antifreeze.
Shortly after his release from the hospital, Damian told his mother that he had discovered the Quran. Although Boudreau had raised him Christian, she welcomed his conversion. He got a job and became more social. “It grounded him, made him a better person,” she recalls. But by 2011, Boudreau noticed a change in her son. If he was visiting and his new friends called, he would only answer the phone outside. He wouldn’t eat with the family if there was wine on the table. He told his mother that women should be taken care of by men and that it was acceptable to have more than one wife. He spoke of justified killings. In the summer of 2012, he moved into an apartment with some new Muslim friends right above the mosque in downtown Calgary where they all prayed. He became a regular at the gym and went hiking with his roommates in the wilderness around the city. At the time, the conflict in Syria was in its infancy, and all Boudreau saw was her often-troubled son going through another phase, one she hoped he would outgrow. In November, Damian left Canada, telling his mother that he was moving to Egypt to study Arabic and become an imam.

Lukas had been a withdrawn child, and his social interactions often ended in conflict. When he was ten, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit disorder, but in adolescence, his problems became more serious. He was stopped driving a stolen scooter; he stole a friend’s mother’s engagement ring. Dam suspected he had joined a gang.
But then there was a break in the darkness. Lukas got an apprenticeship at a local garage where most of the employees were Muslim. They took the boy in and introduced him to their religion. Dam only learned that he had converted some months later, when she realized that that her son wasn’t eating during the day. He was observing Ramadan.
Like Boudreau, Dam initially saw her son’s conversion as “a little miracle.” Finally, her hard-to-reach boy was opening up. And, like Boudreau, Dam didn’t understand what it meant when Lukas got irritated at her for playing music, or why, one day, he came home sobbing, horrified that she wouldn’t be able to join him in paradise unless she converted to Islam.

Torill, a petite blonde with delicate features, told me Thom Alexander’s story, its contours were familiar. There was the absent father, who died of a heroin overdose when Thom Alexander was seven. Her son was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at 14; in his early twenties he was arrested for petty crimes and went in and out of rehab for addictions to increasingly harder drugs. Once, he was pronounced clinically dead. And then Thom Alexander discovered a copy of the shahadah, the Muslim declaration of faith, in the gym locker room and became a new man. He quit heroin and started calling his mother; he got a job at a kindergarten and married a nice Moroccan girl. “It was like getting a new son, a good son,” Torill says, sighing.