It was early on the morning of June 13th when Loubna watched a video sent to her in France via her mobile phone showing nine-year-old Zara and a wriggling, three-year-old Inès. “I don’t have the words to describe what I felt upon seeing these two little ones, it was overwhelming,” said Loubna, whose real name, like all those cited here, is withheld.
Zara was born in France, while Inès was born in the town of Baghuz, the last bastion of the so-called Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, where their jihadist mother, Leyla, gave birth in a tunnel. Leyla later died following an airstrike launched by the international coalition against IS, but was survived by her two daughters and their brother Medhi, 7.
“Zara looks so much like her mother, and something incredible radiates from Inès, it’s crazy, one wouldn’t say that they’d been through hell,” said Loubna, the paternal aunt of Zara and Mehdi. Her nephew Mehdi has been taken into the care of an orphanage in Damascus, separated from his sisters who are in another care institution in the Syrian capital. Loubna has been told Mehdi is in good health, and a contact of hers in Syria sent a photo of him, in which he appeared smiling.
Loubna wants the children, whose whereabouts have been known to her for several months, to be brought to France, but says that the French authorities have told her that they cannot help with their repatriation. “Zara asked me to show her the house where I live, and asked where she was going to sleep,” recounted Loubna. “She wanted to see my cat and also the garden where she could play. She told me she was impatient to return to France. I didn’t know what to say to her.”
For a long time, Loubna feared that all of the family had died in Syria. Her brother, who left France to join the ranks of IS in June 2015, taking with him Leyla and their two children, Zara and Mehdi, had died in fighting in 2016. “After his death, all of my family begged my sister-in-law Leyla to bring home the little ones,” said Loubna. “We told her, come back, you have nothing more to do there with Daesh [the Arabic acronym the for Islamic State group].”
But Leyla chose to remain in Syria, where she remarried with another jihadist. Her last contact with those close to her in France was in February 2019, one month before IS lost its last territorial strongholds in the Syria-Iraq region. During that last contact, she reportedly said that all was well, and that things would work out. She would never mention the birth of her youngest daughter, Inès.
Mediapart has been told that shortly after the contact with Leyla in February 2019, she was seriously wounded and paralysed from a mortar attack, and that several weeks after that the tent in which she was living was burned down during an airstrike, when she was unable to escape. Shortly before she died, she placed her children in the care of another woman jihadist, a 33-year-old Belgian national, who had tried to help Leyla at the scene.
Loubna recalled the events that followed the lost contact with Leyla: “You know, we almost lost all reason. My mother looked for them everywhere in the reports on the fall of Daesh. She would say to me, ‘there’s Zara, and there is Mehdi’. I couldn’t accept that they had all died at once. I contacted the Red Cross, but I didn’t know what else to do. The DGSI [editor’s note, the French domestic intelligence agency] summoned us on several occasions. They questioned me for hours without ever giving us information about the children. They only asked questions about my elder brother.”
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Loubna remained without news of the children or their mother for 18 months. She had no idea that the siblings had been placed in the care of the Belgian woman jihadist, nor, of course, that the latter was finally arrested by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the alliance of Kurdish and Arab forces of the autonomous administration of north and east Syria operating with the support of the international coalition. Captured by the SDF as they fled Baghuz, they were sent to the prison camp of al-Hol, in north-east Syria.
But on November 14th 2019, and after several weeks of preparation, the Belgian woman escaped the camp along with Leyla’s three children and two others. She had managed to collect sufficient finances to pay local people smugglers to take them out of the zone controlled by the SDF, travelling in a vehicle westward, like dozens of other women captives before her. At the time, Inès, not yet one year old, was poorly, having stopped eating properly since her mother’s death.
The journey did not go to plan, which was initially to leave Syria via the town of Jarablus, on the Syria-Turkey border. The woman and the five children were reportedly arrested close to a zone controlled by the army of the Damascus regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to jihadists who knew the woman, contact with her was lost after she sent a text message declaring: “We’re with the regime!”. Mediapart understands that they were taken to Damascus and placed in detention, when the woman was separated from the children.
On October 13th last year, Loubna received a recorded message on her mobile phone in which the sender announced “I have been trying to contact the family of the children for a very long while”, detailing that Leyla was dead and that her children were in Damascus, and advising her to contact the Red Cross.
“I wanted to cry with joy, but at the same time I had no idea in what state they were in,” recalled Loubna. “I told myself that they had perhaps been beaten or tortured.” She said she immediately contacted the French foreign affairs ministry. “From that moment, I called them almost every day. On each occasion the response was the same – ‘we can’t do anything, it’s complicated, we can’t bring them back, even if they are in Damascus’.”
Mediapart contacted the French foreign affairs ministry and the Syrian embassy in Paris several times, both by phone and email, to invite them to comment on Loubna’s account, but neither responded.
Loubna said she and her close entourage were eventually able to trace and contact the two orphanages where the children had been placed, and received news of them; firstly, in the form of a few photos, and then two scribbled drawings by them of flowers and sketches of women. Finally, she received two written notes. “I am Mehdi, I love you my aunt,” wrote the young boy; “My dear aunt, I hope that we could soon see each other,” wrote his sister Zara.
“Their childhood had already been taken away and today they are being deprived of a family which could give them the love they need to rebuild themselves,” said Loubna. “I was told that it was complicated to check their identities, that it’s complicated to track them down, that it was complicated to communicate with this state [the Damascus regime]. Yet me, I managed to do so.”
As of March 2012, France closed its embassy in Damascus and broke off diplomatic relations with Syria in reaction to the brutal repression of the waves of protest against the regime, which had begun in 2011. Since then, no representatives of the French government are present in the country.
Paris lawyer Marie Dosé has for several years led a high-profile legal campaign for the repatriation to France of the wives and children of jihadists detained in Syria following the military defeat of IS in the region. She represents Loubna and her family. “Even if France has no diplomatic relations with Damascus it could turn towards a European country which still has representatives in Syria – I’m thinking of the Czech Republic,” she told Mediapart. “That would pose no difficulty. These orphans are not being held in a prison. They are in an orphanage and the Syrians have clearly said that they would be handed back to those close to them without difficulty, as soon as possible. These children are victims of war. France owes them protection. It must do everything so that they return home.”
“They are abandoned by everyone, and our country appears to go about things as if they didn’t exist,” said Loubna. “It’s a political question, but it is these children who suffer the consequences. They have already paid for the choices made by their parents.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.