German Mother Lost Son in Pakistan
Her grayish-blue eyes are swollen from crying. Cirsten B. sits on the couch in her small apartment in the western German city of Aachen and presses her folded hands into her lap. She's searching for words for something a mother has no words for -- because it simply can't be true. The 54-year-old, born in the eastern German state of Thuringia, married a Tunisian man and converted to Islam 25 years ago. Now she has lost two children to jihad. In the fall of 2009, they secretly slipped away to join the holy war. Her son, Samir, was the first to go, followed a month later by Soumaia, her youngest daughter. "I'll never see Samir again," Cirsten B. says as she glances over at a computer. For two and a half years, that computer kept her in sporadic contact with her children in the mountainous Pakistani region of Waziristan. News of her son's death also reached her via Skype. After months of silence, Soumaia finally made contact in March. The 21-year-old spoke