Four children taken from Syria to Chechnya and Dagestan

A boy and two girls, transported a few days ago from Syria to Moscow, have been taken to Grozny and handed over to relatives, a representative of the office of the head and government of Chechnya told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

According to his story, several years ago, the mother of these children went with them from Chechnya to Turkey, from where she then moved to Iraq. In late 2018, she and her three children were detained in the area of the Turkish border by Kurdish militias. "The family had been looking for several years for the children, whom their mother had secretly taken to Iraq," the Chechen official has stated.

"In the end of 2018, the mother with her three children fled from Iraq," the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent was told in the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA). "The eldest child, a 15-year-old girl, stayed in Mosul; nothing is known about her fate. The woman with the rest of her children was detained in December 2018 by Kurdish militias near the Syrian-Turkish border; and then, they ended up in a prison in Damascus. The children were taken out; and their mother is, apparently, awaiting a trial," a Chechen police officer has explained.

In total, on September 7, four children were taken out of Syria. One of them, a girl, is being handed over to her relatives in Dagestan, the RIA "Novosti" informed on the same day with reference to Anna Kuznetsova, the Children's Ombudsperson in Russia.

Ms Kuznetsova has noted that the children were held in a Syrian prison in hard conditions.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on September 11, 2019 at 08:38 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.