Louise Monaghan’s journey to Syria to rescue her kidnapped daughter begins years ago at a club in Cyprus. It was there she met a Syrian man named Mostafa, whom she would marry.
“I was smitten from the first second,” she tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden. “I felt he was what I needed. He made me feel safe.”
But Monaghan was not safe. Mostafa was verbally abusive and beat her. They married, and the couple had a daughter named May. When they divorced, Mostafa was given visitation rights, but he wanted more.
In 2011, when May was 6 years old, he kidnapped her and took her back to his family’s home in Syria.
Monaghan went after them. She and her sister went to the Turkish border to hire men to rescue May, but then she realized getting her daughter back would require an even tougher choice. Monaghan would have to cross into Syria herself.
The story of Monaghan’s journey through Syria is the subject of her book, Stolen: Escape from Syria.