Hailing from Syria, she grew up as an educated woman, where she earned her college degree and subsequently taught elementary school. She testifies that her upbringing was "not terribly conservative."
She began demonstrating with participants of the Syrian uprising, but it quickly spiralled into chaos, and Khadija found herself wanting to run away from the destruction. Little did she know that she would run into something even uglier.
Khadija met a Tunisian man online, who eloquently convinced her that the Islamic State is a misunderstood group, and was not a terrorist organization. Coaxed into believing that the organization was harsh only because it needed to take control of the country to properly implement Islam, she convinced her family to move to Raqqa, where they could stay with her cousin.
Upon moving to Raqqa, she joined the Khansa'a Brigade, a female police unit made up of 25 to 30 women. She was trained in handling and maintaining a weapon, and was given $200 a month in salary.
The Brigade had authority in the streets -- an empowering feeling for a woman in their world of men. She felt happy with her job.
Noticing that she was fading away, her mother tried to warn her.
"She would always say to me, 'Wake up, take care of yourself. You are walking, but you don't know where you are going.'"
Drunk with the power and authority her Brigade had, she did not heed her mother's warnings.
"At the start, I was happy with my job. I felt that I had authority in the streets. But then I started to get scared, scared of my situation. I even started to be afraid of myself."
Her image of ISIS began to crumble as Khadija witnessed ISIS fighters crucifying a 16-year-old boy accused of rape, and another instance where a man got his head hacked off.
Then she began noticing how ISIS treated their women, as the Brigade shared a building with a man who specialized in marriage for local and foreign ISIS fighters.
"The foreign fighters are very brutal with women, even the ones they marry," she said. "There were cases where the wife had to be taken to the emergency ward because of the violence, the sexual violence."
She was being pressured into marrying, and it was a future she did not want.
"So it was at this point, I said enough. After all that I had already seen and all the times I stayed silent, telling myself, 'We're at war, then it will all be rectified.'
"But after this, I decided no, I have to leave."
Khadija was able to leave days before the airstrikes came, but her family remains in Syria. She was smuggled into Turkey, where she seeks a new life.
Struggling to adapt into a life outside of the Islamic State, Khadija is careful not to swing into rejecting religion outright because of her experience.
She spoke out because she want people to be wary -- girls especially -- of what ISIS really is.
"I don't want anyone else to be duped by them. Too many girls think they are the right Islam," she said.
She is desperate to be the girl she used to be before she was lured into ISIS -- "a girl who is merry, who loves life and laughter... who loves to travel, to draw, to walk in the street with her headphones listening to music without caring what anyone thinks."