Author opens new chapter

"Two Sisters allows us to see the charm of nonfiction," writer Qian Jianan says in her recommendation for the book. "The writer and journalist rejects any subjective assumptions and recounts the true life of the two sisters. They are just a pair of ordinary siblings, similar to you and me, and for this precise reason, their journey to radicalization can prove cautionary and thought-provoking for us."

More than two years after the book was finished, in the autumn of 2016, there was still no word or news of the sisters. However, according to Seierstad, in May or June, they were identified at a refugee camp in Syria called al-Hol. They fled Baghouz, the last stronghold of ISIS, right before the Syrian Democratic Forces announced liberating it.

"They met a Norwegian journalist there, and they said very briefly, that they wanted to return home to Norway. They said their husbands were killed. They have now three daughters between them," Seierstad says. "They wanted to go to Norway because of the children, but then I've heard from the family that they kind of changed their mind, and now they want to go to Somalia."

As an objective writer, Seierstad does not reveal her own opinions in the book, but as a woman who has witnessed the brutality and torture of war zones, she says that the sisters were in a way defending their own rights, but only in order to go back and become submissive wives.