‘MY DAD SNATCHED ME TO A WARZONE’
Thirty-two years ago, Safia Saleh was abducted from her Cardiff home by her father and taken to Yemen. She spoke to Aamir Mohammed about the life she has had and the life she lost...
SAFIA Saleh was just 18 months old when her father took her and her two sisters to a relative’s house in Cardiff.
It was a May Bank Holiday in 1986 and her mother, Jackie, had been told they would return after the weekend.
When the family never returned, Jackie went to the relative’s house who told her they hadn’t seen the family. She rang police but it was too late. Her husband Sadek Saleh had taken the children and left for Heathrow from where he travelled to Saudi Arabia.
Although she fought for years, there was nothing she could do. Yemeni law gave Sadek 100% rights over his children, even though he had kidnapped and flown them 4,000 miles from their mother.
Thirty-two years later Safia is married with four children, Mohammed, 12, Jacqueline, 11, Lucy, 10 and Asalah, two.
She lives in a suburb of Aden called Shaykh Uthman in southern Yemen, a country ravaged with conflict and a civil war. The buildings around her are pockmarked with the scars of bullets and bombs.
The life she should have had as a young girl growing up in Wales has been stolen from her. She has never been taught English. Poverty in Yemen is all Safia has ever known.
With the help of a translator and a video call, we spoke to her.
“My childhood in Yemen was not normal, no child should have my childhood,” says Safia, now 34.
“It was full of fatigue, deprivation and moving from one house to another with constant fighting and shouting.”
Safia was too young when she was abducted by her father to remember anything about Cardiff and her mum Jackie, who was 24 when her three children were taken.
Yet her elder sisters Rahannah, who was five, and Nadia, who was four, did remember and were desperate to be returned to their mum and the life they’d had before.
Their dad banned them from talking about their mum, whom he had met at a disco in Cardiff where he had been living with his own father.
He told them their mother had died. “I was his favourite because I was the youngest and didn’t understand anything,” she says.
“Me and my sisters couldn’t speak about my mother, we were told she died.”
As she grew up, her father’s violence destroyed their relationship.
“I hated my father so much, I just wanted to be out of the house,” she says. “We were afraid of him because he was beating us and shouting.”
It was only when her dad married again that the truth began to appear.
Her dad would ultimately marry three times. As well as Safia and her two sisters he would have two daughters and a son with his second wife and two children with his third wife.
The three sisters were moved from place to place in a country right at the foot of the Saudia Arabian peninsula known as the poorest in the Middle East. Riddled with corruption and beset by civil war, its people struggle to find food and clean drinking water.
“We’ve lived with fear, hunger problems and worries,” she says.
From the age of seven, Safia was sent to school. It was there in 2001, when she was a teenager, that she met