HOME FROM ORDEAL IN SYRIA
Chatham woman returns to Canada
Two and a half months after going to Lebanon in a bid to bring back her two young sons, a journey that ended with her being smuggled into Syria with a friend and taken into quasi-captivity by al- Qaeda-affiliated militants, Jolly Bimbachi is back home with her family. The Chatham woman arrived at the Ottawa International Airport early Thursday, greeted by her mother, her daughter and three sisters.
Having spent more time closer to the Syrian civil war than most, she was in surprisingly good spirits.
But as happy a return as it was for Bimbachi, it was still an incomplete one, and it was clear that the absence of her sons in Canada is a point of acute sadness for her.
“I know they were super-excited to come here, to come back home and be with their cousins, and their grandmother and grandfather, to be back in Canada,” said Bimbachi. “It didn’t happen. They got taken back to Lebanon. They were a little sad, but they’re OK.”
Bimbachi, along with Sean Allen Moore of Chatham, had been held captive for nearly a month by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an al- Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria, after the two tried to smuggle Bimbachi’s two sons — nine-year-old Omar and seven-year-old AbdalGeniy — out of Lebanon and back to Canada.
Her sons had been in Lebanon with their father Ali Ahmad, Bimbachi’s ex-husband, since May 2015. According to Bimbachi, Ahmad had taken the boys on a vacation to visit family in Lebanon when Bimbachi received a call from the boys’ uncle telling her they wouldn’t be returning to Canada.
The boys have been in Lebanon ever since.
In November, Bimbachi travelled to Lebanon, hoping to come to a custody arrangement in the Lebanese court system. When those negotiations broke down, Bimbachi connected with smugglers who, she had hoped, would escort them through Syria and across the Turkish border, where she would be able to get to the Canadian Embassy.
Those plans went awry, she said, when people connected to the boys’ father began posting on social media that Bimbachi was planning to convert the children to Christianity and offering a cash reward for their return.
“It became dangerous for us to move,” Bimbachi said in an video posted by SITE Intelligence Group. “I don’t know how the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham got involved, but I think it’s a good thing they did. They came and they got us and we spent a few nice nights with my boys before they took them back to Lebanon.”
The specifics of what happened to Bimbachi and Moore during the month of January remain somewhat unclear to her; she’s not certain where the smuggling ended and the captivity began, or who her captors were. Travelling through Syria, her and her sons were “bounced around” from safehouse to safehouse, and eventually handed off to the Syrian Salvation Government.
“Originally we were supposed to drive from Lebanon to the Turkish border,” Moore said in the same video. “It went south in Lebanon, I just didn’t know it yet.”
She and Moore were separated for part of the time, Bimbachi said, and while she was put up in safehouses, Moore was held “in a jail.”
Moore returned home to Chatham on Wednesday.
Bimbachi still believes she will be able to bring her sons back to Canada some day.
She said she’s hoping for a meeting with both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the prime minister of Lebanon to discuss the issue of parental rights and co-parenting.