Moroccan Grandmother Stranded in Syria After Failed Rescue of ISIS Grandchildren

Latifa’s grandchildren remained stuck in Syria, after their father, a 42-year-old ISIS jihadist, was killed in 2015, writes the Huffpost citing the Spanish news agency EFE.

"My son and his wife came to Syria without my permission. After seven or eight months, his wife called to tell me that he had died and asked me to come and get her and her children," Latifa told the Spanish news agency EFE.

Alarmed, Latifa contacts ISIS, flies to Turkey where she spends 2 days, before meeting the members of the organization in the former capital Raqqa.

The organization had promised to allow her to see her grandchildren, but this was not the case. They seized, she claims, her passport, her identity card and her mobile phone. Desperate, she finally finds her grandchildren.

The situation worsens when, instead of returning to Turkey, "the radicals asked her to wait," writes EFE. "They remained in Raqqa until the Kurdish forces took control of it in October 2017."

With her grandchildren, her daughter-in-law and other civilians, they were displaced by ISIS fighters to another detention camp. "There, they found a smuggler who, six months later, took them to Al Shadadi, in the province of Hasaka, putting an end to their captivity at the hands of ISIS, then they entered a camp controlled by the Kurdish authorities," EFE specifies.