AIN ISSA, SYRIA - The 17-year-old Indonesian girl made a persuasive case to her family: Lured by what she had read online, she told her parents, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins they should all move to Syria to join the Islamic State group.
Each of her two dozen relatives found something in it for them. Free education and health care for the girls. Paying outstanding debts for her father and uncle. Finding work for the youngest men.
And the biggest bonus: a chance to live in what was depicted as an ideal Islamic society on the ascendant.
It didn't take long before their dreams were crushed and their hopes for a better life destroyed as each of those promised benefits failed to materialize. Instead, the family was faced with a society where single women were expected to be married off to IS fighters, injustice and brutality prevailed, and a battle raged in which all able-bodied men were compelled to report to the frontline.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Nurshardrina Khairadhania, now 19, recalled her family's fateful decision to immigrate to the IS stronghold of Raqqa two years ago - and how, only months later, their bid to escape began.
During that time the family endured separation, her grandmother died and an uncle was killed in an airstrike.
"IS shared only the good things on the internet," said the young woman, who goes by her nickname, Nur.
She now lives with her mother, two sisters, three aunts, two female cousins and their three young sons in Ain Issa, a camp for the displaced run by the Kurdish forces fighting to expel IS from Raqqa. Her father and four surviving male cousins are in detention north of there. While the men are being interrogated by the Kurdish forces for possible links to IS, the women wait in a tent in the searing heat, hoping for the family to be reunited and return to their home in Jakarta.
Nur's family is among thousands from Asia, Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East who chased the dream of a new Islamic society advertised by IS in slickly produced propaganda videos, online blogs and other social media. By the time they got there, the group's brutal campaign of beheadings, kidnappings and enslaving women was well underway.
For Nur and her sister, such images were part of a hate campaign against the nascent Islamic caliphate or simply justified punishment for crimes committed there.
"I was afraid to see that. I first thought it was another group ... who hates IS," Nur said.
Nur recalled calling her family together just months after the extremists' declared their "caliphate" on territory seized in Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2014.
Making her pitch, she recounted the benefits laid out on the IS blogs: her 21-year-old sister could continue her computer education for free. Her 32-year-old divorced cousin, Difansa Rachmani, could get free health care for herself and her three children, one of whom was autistic. Her uncle could get out from under the debt he incurred trying to save a struggling auto mechanic business in Jakarta - and could even open a new one in Raqqa, where mechanics were in high demand to build car bombs, the extremists' signature weapon.
For Nur, the Islamic State seemed to be the perfect place to pursue her desire to study Islam and train to be a health practitioner.
"It is a good place to live in peace and justice and, God willing, after hijrah, we will go to paradise," she recalled thinking, using the Islamic term for migration from the land of persecution to the land of Islam. "I wanted to invite all my family. ... We went to be together forever, in life and afterlife."
The family sold their house, cars and gold jewelry, collecting $38,000 for the journey to Turkey and then on to Syria.
But once in Turkey, the first quarrels began, over how or even whether to sneak into Syria. Seven relatives decided to head out on their own and were detained by the Turkish authorities while trying to cross the border illegally. They were deported back to Indonesia where, the family says, they remain under surveillance because the rest of their relatives had lived in IS territories.
The saga of family separation had only just begun, however.
After arriving in Islamic State group territory in August 2015, the family was divided again: the men were ordered to take Islamic education classes, and ended up jailed for months because they refused military training and service. After their release, they lived in hiding to avoid forced recruitment or new jail sentences. The women and girls were sent to an all-female dormitory.
