Bosnian women struggle to return female relatives, children from Syria

March 11, 2019 Article

A quarter of a century after their own country was devastated by war, three Bosnian women are struggling to bring home loved ones caught up in Syria’s ruinous conflict and the collapse of Islamic State rule.

The Bosnian government, in common with its counterparts across Europe, lacks a clear plan to deal with the families of defeated fighters of the ultra-hardline militant group.

For Bosnia, the predicament has a particular historical resonance: Bosnian Muslims generally practise a mainstream form of Islam, but some adopted radical beliefs from the foreign fighters who came to the country during its 1992-95 war and fought with Muslims against Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.

When Syria’s war broke out in 2011, some Bosnians joined Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But the three Bosnian women say the daughters and a sister whose return they seek — plus their nine children — have played no role in militancy.

“Our only goal is to bring our children back home and finish this agony as soon as possible,” said Senija Muhamedagic from the northwestern town of Cazin, who joined forces with two other women to press authorities to help their relatives return.

Their daughters and sister, stuck with their children in a camp in northern Syria since November 2017, are desperate to return, saying they were forced to go to Syria by radicalised husbands and were ready to face charges at court if needed.

Alema Dolamic, whose sister was left widowed with three children after her husband was killed in fighting in 2017, has created a closed Facebook page for families of the people from the Western Balkans who are still in Syria to exchange information.

“It’s been going for five years, I practically don’t have my life anymore,” Dolamic told Reuters in her home near the central town of Tesanj.

“I am trying to imagine reunion with her, with children, but it’s unimaginable,” she said, showing the pictures of the children on her phone.

“THE CHILDREN ARE NOT GUILTY”

Hundreds of people are believed to have left Europe to fight for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. With the Islamist militant group down to its last shred of territory, more and more of them are asking to come home.

According to Bosnian intelligence, 241 adults and 80 children left from 2012-2016 from Bosnia or the Bosnian diaspora for Syria and Iraq, where 150 more children were born.

About 100 adults, including 49 women, remained there while at least 88 have been killed or died. About 50 have returned to Bosnia, including seven children.

“I feel terrible, miserable, because the children are not guilty, they did not have a choice,” said the third woman, from Sarajevo, awaiting a government decision on the repatriation of her 22-year-old daughter and her two children from Syria.

“Every day I think, my God, when will this child of mine come, to see her, to hold her, to feel her, and then anything may happen, it won’t matter anymore.”

The three women have been talking to police, security and intelligence agencies and government ministries for more than a year, supplying them with information and documents in the hope that their children, who they say were not involved in any military activities, would come back.

But as elsewhere in Europe, the Bosnian authorities have been slow to address the families’ pleas, their concern being the security challenges that might arise with the return of people from a war zone and environment of militancy.

REPATRIATION STILL NOT IN SIGHT

Their reunion still seems distant.

The Bosnian central government announced last year it would set up a coordination body to deal with the return of Islamic fighters and their families, but it has yet to be formed. It does not help that a new government has not been established after a general election in October.

“There are certainly security aspects of their return, it cannot be perceived as if just some women and children should be returned to Bosnia from somewhere,” Security Minister Dragan Mektic told Reuters.

Mektic said Bosnia was obliged to accept the women who held its citizenship but not their children who were never registered as Bosnian citizens, adding also that it could not be determined with certainty if their warrior husbands were really killed.

And even if they return, they are set to face a difficult process of re-socialisation and reintegration in a country where programmes to address such problems do not exist, warned Vlado Azinovic, an expert on terrorism and lecturer at the Sarajevo University School for Political Sciences.

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Categories: Bosnian Women, children, Islamic State, News, Syria

Extremism – Italy: Islamic State fighter wants to return to Italy, warns of ‘sleeper cells’

March 11, 2019 Article

An Islamic State fighter detained in Syria urged Italy on Saturday to let him come home to start a new life, saying he had abandoned the self-styled jihadist “caliphate” after growing disillusioned with its rulers.

Mounsef al-Mkhayar, a 22-year-old of Moroccan descent who grew up in Italy, spoke to Reuters in his first interview since surrendering to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) two months ago.

He has been in prison since emerging from Baghouz, a tiny village in eastern Syria where the SDF is poised to wipe out the last vestige of Islamic State rule – which once spanned a third of Iraq and Syria.

Mkhayar gave an account of growing chaos among jihadists on the brink of defeat, and of disputes in the ranks as top commanders fled Syria.

But he said Islamic State was also planning for the next phase, smuggling out hundreds of men to set up sleeper cells across Iraq and eastern Syria: “They said ‘We must get revenge.’”

Mkhayar is one of thousands from all over the world who were drawn to the promise of an ultra-radical Sunni Islamist utopia overriding national borders. Kurdish security officials identified him as Italian, and he said he holds Italian citizenship.

“I wish to return to Italy to my family and friends … for them to accept and help me to live a new life,” said Mkhayar, who walks on crutches after shelling injured his leg. “I just want to get out of this movie, I’m tired.”

FROM MILAN TO MAYADIN

Mkhayar was sentenced to eight years in jail by a Milan court in 2017 for spreading Islamic State propaganda and trying to recruit Italians to its cause, according to Italian media. As a result, he is likely to have to serve this sentence if he does return to Italy.

Reuters interviewed him at a security office in northern Syria in the presence of an SDF official.

As it nears victory, the SDF has struggled with the dilemma of holding fighters who travelled from abroad to join Islamic State along with women and children.

Before the final assault on Baghouz, the Kurdish-led SDF said it had around 800 foreign militants in jails and 2,000 of their wives and children in camps. Since then, the numbers have ballooned.

The SDF wants them sent back where they came from. But foreign governments generally do not want to receive citizens who may be hard to prosecute, and who pledged allegiance to a caliphate that left behind of a trail of butchery.

Once an atheist with an affinity for rap music and a dream of moving to America, Mkhayar joined Islamic State at 18.

He said he had spent most of his life in Milan with an aunt he calls his mother, before being placed in a home for troubled youths overseen by an Italian priest. He spent a month in prison on drugs charges.

Then he began immersing himself in Islamic State videos on YouTube and speaking to recruiters on Facebook. It took him only a month to decide to move to Syria with a friend four years ago.

His friend was later killed on the battlefield. After military and religious training, Mkhayar fought on various fronts. As Islamic State lost its Syrian headquarters at Raqqa, he left for Mayadin on the Euphrates river in Syria, then moved further east across the desert, towards the Iraqi border.

“WE’RE GETTING OUT”

Amid a string of military defeats in eastern Syria, Islamic State leaders were in disarray, killing off rival clerics and commanders known as emirs, Mkhayar said.

He said he had tried to quit the fighting but had been imprisoned, and then dispatched back to the frontlines as attacks intensified.

He wound up in Baghouz, where he said the jihadists were split between wanting to give up or fight to the death.

Mkhayar said his wife, a Syrian Kurdish woman from Kobani whom he had married three years ago, helped convince him to leave.

“‘That’s it,’ we said, ‘we’re getting out.’ I saw my little daughter turning weak. I was scared my children would die.”

Mkhayar said he could not sleep thinking about his wife and two daughters in a camp for displaced people in another part of northeast Syria. His wife is due to give birth in a month.

He said he still believed in the idea of a caliphate for Muslims, but accused Islamic State rulers of governing their land like “a mafia”, seeking only to make money and violating their own rules with impunity.

Commanders had stolen money and fled to Turkey, Iraq or Western Europe while ordering people to stay and defend Islam, he said.

“This is my belief and I won’t change it, but here in Islamic State, in reality this doesn’t exist … There is no justice,” he said.

“Honestly, I came here too fast … When I arrived, I found another story.”

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Categories: Baghouz, Islamic State, Kurdish, Mayadin, Milan, Mkhayar, News