- Syria: Spanish Islamists in Syria and their children have received military instruction
- Feature: The Madrilenian girl well from the Salamanca district who ended up in the Califato del IS with four children
In the photo, Aicha smiles with her mouth, with her freckles, with all her small and fragile little body. She is almost four years old, has a light mane and wears a light dress with blue floral print braces. She is sitting on a mattress in a tent, a kind of white plastic bubble that seems to isolate her from what happens outside. On his wrist, a blue plastic bracelet, like those given to children when they enter a zoo or an amusement park. In the image that is taken a few months later, Aicha has a bleak air, the dress is big because she has lost weight and has no hair. They have shaved it like the rest of the children in the store, perhaps, at best, to avoid being eaten by lice.
Aicha is Aicha El Harchi Martínez , a Spanish girl who waits, like 16 other children - the youngest of only two months, the oldest, 11 years old -, to have the Government repatriate them from the two refugee camps - located in the Kurdish area in Syria-, likely to be bombed by the Turkish offensive initiated on Thursday, the 10th.
The camps in which these 17 children, children of jihadist fathers , remain with their mothers - four - are called Al Roj and Al Hol. The four who are prisoners in this last enclosure, in addition to being subject to the uncertainty of the invasion and the certainty of living overcrowded between sewage and diseases, face a monster much more tremendous than the bombings and misery: they are trapped in the so-called "minicaliphate" or "annex." They live in the refugee camp area where there is no more law than the sharia brutally applied by jihadists. "The women of the Daesh fighters summarily judge the less orthodox," says an official Spanish report. The international press reflects the existence of some decapitation.
Guilt of your parents, you will say. But also the responsibility of the State that has the obligation to judge their mothers - only one of the fathers, Omar Hadouchi , precisely that of Aicha, survived the fall of the Islamic State and remains in a Syrian prison - and undertake the very complicated task of recover the children. As Chronicle has known, less than two weeks ago, the Government informed the Security Forces and Intelligence services that the decision was made to bring the 17 children and their mothers to Spain. Shortly after, Foreign Minister Josep Borrell referred to it in Brussels. The intention is to do it through the Turkish embassy, unless the conflict forces to divert the operation through Iraq. The moment remains to be seen.
"My lawyer says that until after the elections we expect nothing but it is that, at worst, then they are all dead," Ceuta taxi driver Halil Miludi , father of one of the displaced Spaniards , lamented hours after the bombing Turkish. However, things may rush. After months without response, the Government has summoned for next Wednesday Luis Martinez , the grandfather of four of the children. This man and his wife, both elders, both emotionally shattered, have set up a crib since September that they do not know if they can use.
Halil Miludi is the father of Lubna Miludi , a 26-year-old girl from Ceuta, a teacher, from a very well-positioned family, who was initially radicalized through the Internet. Her mother told us that her daughter had been especially interested in the experiences that two young British people spread through the networks. But Lubna also had a suspicious friendship with one of the captors in the El Principe neighborhood, arrested shortly after she left for Syria. She left alone on November 5, 2015 from Malaga via Istanbul. And he married Hamza , a French jihadist he didn't know and had a son.
Halil is, therefore, the grandfather of Abderrahman , a boy of just three years of white skin that stares at the camera in a dark blue jumpsuit, who was born in that implacable universe and is growing in the minicalifato of Al Hol. In a small tent where 15 women of various nationalities are crowded with their children. When the Islamic State was defeated last March, the four Spanish women, or with Spanish children, arrested - there are another 24, at least, whose location and that of their offspring are unknown - were transferred together to that refugee camp. Along with Lubna Miludi, were Lubna Fares, Yolanda Martínez Cobos and Luna Fernández Grande .
Fares is a Moroccan who had lived in Ceuta for years when she married a Spanish nationalized jihadist. He had two children in Spain, Mohamad and Abdorrahman , aged seven and five. And a girl, the smallest, Aicha Sanati , born in Syria. Yolanda Martínez, daughter of Luis, from Madrid, educated at El Pilar and the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute, graduated in Art, born in a wealthy family in the Salamanca district, took her son Bilal when he was four years old. And he had in Syria three other children, Aicha - the little girl without hair -, four years old, Khadija , two and Omar , who is now nine months old and grandfather's cradle waiting for him.
Regarding Luna Fernández, this 24-year-old woman, also from Madrid, had to face a difficult life since childhood. Abandoned by her father at age four, her mother could not support her and left her to social services to be raised. He met Mohamed Amin in the City of Boys and converted to Islam without cracks. "It was an entire institution in the M-30 mosque," says one of the women with whom he shared the prayer. He even converted his mother, who surrendered to his rigor. He has five children of his own: Abdulrahman, 11, Ibrahim, seven, Maryam, Zaynab and Asiyah, two months .
In his flight, Luna took responsibility for four other children, Salman (seven years), Faris (six), Isaac and Daud . The first three are children of a jihadist friend of her husband. The fourth is the son of her husband Amin and the friend's widow, whom he took as his second wife. All three were Moroccans but left from Spain to do jihad. The three ended up dead. The eldest children of the friend marriage, Salman and Faris, were born in Spain. In fact, like all the elders in the group, they have Spanish ID. Luna's case is an example of how ISIS works, in which the women of the brothers in combat are inherited.
Luna's husbands, Lubna Fares and Yolanda Martínez were part of the "operational nucleus" of the Al Andalus command but were able to flee before their dismantling. Therefore, when they arrived in Syria, the women lived in the same places. They have only separated, after staying a few months in Al Hol. The Kurds decided that Lubna Miludi and Lubna Fares would stay in this refugee and prison camp and the two Madrilenians, and their offspring - up to 13 children - were transferred to Al Roj.
The two places are very similar to hell, but Al Hol takes the palm. To get there, you have to cross the desert road in northwestern Syria and stop on an arid stretch 300 kilometers from the border with Iraq. The camp was conceived so that 10,000 people lived in it but there are already 70,000 refugees fighting to survive. Among them, there is a group, whose number varies according to the source, which lives in that piece of the field, the annex, whose access is restricted and which is thoroughly monitored. A jail .
A Kurdish soldier stationed in the field with whom Chronicle has contacted ensures that the residents of the minicalifato are 11,200, children and women, wives and children of foreign jihadists killed in combat. This place "is run by women who have reproduced the terror regime of ISIS," he says , detailing an aspect that is corroborated by another source from the administration of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDS) and the Spanish reports.
OPEN DOORS
Two weeks ago, a group of men dressed as Kurdish soldiers entered the camp and helped several jihadist widows escape; and some of those who failed to escape managed to spread a video, recorded in one of the tents, in which they promised to revive the Caliphate while their children waved Daesh flags. "You think we are trapped in a rotten camp," they said, "but we are a bomb . "
Before even the Turkish attack of the last day 10, these women had organized to carry out assaults whose objective was to kill the guards and flee. Afterwards, «the attacks have intensified, there are revolts every night and the fortuitous fire of tents is common. The situation is critical, ”they say since the administration of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Thus, the life of Lubna Farres and Lubna Miludi has been full of rumors and expectations in recent days. «They don't even let them out of the store. To my daughter, the Kurds have been told to have the bag ready because if the Turks arrive they will open the doors for them to leave and find life outside. They say they can't keep the field and fight, ”explained Halil Miludi last Tuesday. And it did not seem at the beginning of last week an unlikely situation because one day after the Turkish invasion, 785 foreign jihadists linked to ISIS escaped from a third camp, that of Ayn Issa.
The Ceuta communicates with his daughter by calling the prepaid phone number of a Moroccan from Fez who is in the same tent as Lubna. It also sends you money through Western Union through Morocco. Yolanda Martínez's father also usually contacts his daughter through a third person. That's why she knew that after the Turkish bombing, she and her grandchildren were "fine" in Al Roj. Except because the little ones, also Luna's, suffer from "diarrhea, ear infections and hunger."
Yolanda says she doesn't know anything about her husband, Omar Elharchi , a Spaniard captured by the Kurds. As Chronicle has learned, the Iraqis have offered some European countries to stay in jihadists in exchange for an agreed amount. France, which in its day already repatriated the children of the terrorist Galas, and which counts the Islamists displaced by thousands, is considering this possibility. It is not the case in Spain. At least in relation to women. Last September, the National Court ordered his arrest for crimes of collaboration and integration into a terrorist organization .
The parents of these women, the grandparents of the children, insist that they can take care of them but this is a decision that the Administration has to take with great care. "The Spanish Government cannot let them be in those conditions," says Halil Miludi. «And I don't say it for my daughter or the other girls but for kids like my grandson who are not to blame for anything. I just want my grandson brought to me. If my daughter has to pay her sins in prison, let her do it, ”he adds.
Security Forces experts ask for prudence. They say that when they arrived in Syria, displaced men received three months of religious training and military instruction for another three months; and that women and children over the age of five also met these requirements. “They are ideologized women who underpinned the Caliphate project, who have thus educated their children and have been exposed to a situation of superlative violence that they have normalized,” recalled Carla García Calvo , a researcher at the Elcano Institute.
For this reason, the agents who were tracking the Spaniards during the war warn that older children have internalized some difficult-to-erase postulates and will need a lot of help. Before any of the displaced jihadists were arrested and transferred to Spain, these experts were wondering about the suitability of giving children to their grandparents, to the same homes that parents have left. When the first of them, Assia Ahmed , one of the most active Ceuta teenagers' captors, the woman from the Kokito headgear, was arrested in Turkey and transferred, the system settled the matter and decided that the grandmother could take care of the children while she remained in jail. Despite her and also her brother, who had already died in Syria.
The case of these children is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of the State . One of those who tests intelligence, efficiency, compassion and also the humanity of the system.
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