Orphaned Daesh baby brought ‘home’ to Sudan
KHARTOUM: When Sudanese security agents came to call on businessman Alithi Yousef at his home in Khartoum, he knew immediately that his worst fears had been realized.
“They told me on Jan. 17 that my daughter Aya had been killed in fighting in Sirte,” he said.
The Libyan city on the Mediterranean coast was a former bastion of Daesh, of which his daughter was a member. Pro-government forces retook it last December.
“But they also said they had some good news — Aya had a four-monthold baby” daughter, Yousef said.
On Aug. 30, 2015, Aya, then a 20-year-old medical student at a Khartoum university, disappeared from a restaurant in the city just hours after finishing her exams.
For two months her whereabouts were unknown.
But then Yousef received a call from Aya to say she had joined Daesh in Libya along with four female friends from Khartoum.
Officials say dozens of Sudanese students — some also holding Western passports — have joined Daesh in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Sudanese media have reported the deaths of some of them.
Yousef said some of Aya’s friends who joined Daesh had American or British passports.
“I was sure Aya could not go because she had a Sudanese passport, but I did not understand,” Yousef told AFP at his luxurious two-story house in a Khartoum suburb.
Aya traveled to Libya by road — her passport was found in a Khartoum apartment a few days after she went missing.
In Libya, she married a Sudanese Daesh member who had also been to the same university, Yousef said, showing a marriage certificate registered by the terrorist group in Sirte.
Details of their deaths remain sketchy, but Yousef and his wife Manal Fadlallah vividly remember the rapid changes they saw in their daughter before she joined Daesh.
Educated partly at an English primary school in Abu Dhabi where the family lived years ago, Aya had grown up listening to Western music and reading English novels.
But Aya’s journey to “radicalism” was swift. Her personality changed in her second year at university, said Yousef as his wife fed milk to their granddaughter Lojien.
Although she used to dress casually in trousers and T-shirts, Aya began wearing conservative clothes and donned a headscarf.
Praying five times became the norm, and she was heard reciting Qur’anic verses late into the night, Yousef said.
Aya soon stopped visiting relatives or exchanging greetings with men.
“She just went into a shell, into her own world which was hidden from us,” Yousef said.
Almost every day there was some further change in Aya, said her mother. “When we asked her who was behind this, she told us ‘Now I know my God,’” Fadlallah said.
Yousef said he had trusted his daughter and never checked her mobile phone or laptop.
“If I had had any idea about her plans, I would have stayed in her room all the time and never left her alone,” said the father of four, dressed in a Sudanese traditional white jelabiya.
The couple’s shock at how Aya’s life unraveled is evident from their family albums and her room.
“Our shock will last for years,” said Yousef, looking at the only photograph of Aya wearing a headscarf.
Her parents now have the task of raising Lojien themselves.
Yousef initially refused to bring her from Libya when Sudanese officials offered to escort him to the war-torn country.
“I had lost my daughter: What was the point of bringing the baby here?”
But he relented, and a few days later decided to go after all.
Two Sudanese female officials accompanied him to Misrata, east of Tripoli, where Lojien was being cared for by the Libyan Red Crescent.
“As women, we were very concerned about the security situation there,” one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“This was also our first experience of bringing a baby back to its family.”
Lojien was brought to Khartoum in February, and in a way, bringing her “home” has helped to ease the family’s pain. “We have a major responsibility,” said Yousef, vowing to make sure his granddaughter wants for nothing. “Lojien is very dear to us. She is Aya’s daughter and Aya was special.”