Christmas at home in Trinidad for boys held in Isis caliphate
Houses and malls in the Trinidadian capital Port of Spain are festively decorated for Christmas, and local parangcarols drift from radios and television sets.
Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira, now 12 and eight, have been taking it all in with wonder. The boys are part of the island’s Muslim community, but have been enjoying the celebrations both in the city and at their mixed-religion school.
To their mother, Felicia Perkins-Ferreira, it seems unthinkable that just a year ago, the children were facing another bitter winter alone in Syria, where they had been stranded since their father abducted them and left Trinidad to join Islamic State in 2014.
Their remarkable journey home in January began after the Guardian tracked down the boys’ family in Trinidad. Human rights lawyers stepped in to help them obtain emergency travel documents and then Roger Waters of the rock band Pink Floyd offered the use of his private jet to facilitate Perkins-Ferreira’s brave journey into Kurdish-held Syria to retrieve her sons from a displacement camp.
Now they’re home, the brothers are recovering well. Ayyub likes cricket and
Mahmud has gone back to playing football: he also likes art and has just been made a class prefect. Ayyub is adapting to his new English-language school: his form teacher loves him and says his grasp of the language is improving.
The boys adore their half-sister,Baiyyeenah, five, who had only just been born when they were taken to Syria, as well as their 12-year-old stepbrother, Siddiq and all four regularly crowd around their mother while she reads a story or they look at a tablet screen to obsess over Roblox online video games.
Perkins-Ferreira herself has recently completed a college diploma and is about to open her own physical therapy business.
She is aware of how lucky her family is to be reunited.
“Bringing the boys back was overwhelming ,” she said in a recent phone call from the family home in Petit Valley, a suburb of Port of Spain. “I thank God for them every day and pray for the families who are still stuck there.”
The Ferreiras’ happiness after years spent apart and filled with danger and uncertainty throws into sharp relief the fate of the 7,000 foreign children of Isis fighters still languishing in Kurdish-run camps in Syria.
Since Mahmud and Ayyub were rescued earlier this year, the so-called caliphate has fallen, leading to an exodus of around 60,000 women and children who were unwilling or unable to leave the last slivers of the jihadists’ territory.
Almost all of them are now being held at the infamous al-Hawl camp, where a lack of adequate shelter, healthcare and educational facilities as well as the persistence of Isis’s toxic ideology has created what Kurdish officials and foreign diplomats describe as a “timebomb waiting to go off”.
At least 409 children have died since arriving at the camp, mostly as a result of malnutrition and disease. Now winter has set in again there are fears of hypothermia for infants, and residents are forced to dig up the mud or frozen ground to keep food and any important belongings from rats. The camp’s radical core cannot be controlled by the outnumbered guards, making murders and beatings increasingly commonplace.
Among the residents are 25 Trinidadian women and 71 children whom the government has so far refused to help: Mahmud and Ayyub are the only documented Trinidadian children to escape Syria to date.
While Trinidad is guilty of dragging its feet on repatriation, the tiny country is following the example of states with far more resources and international muscle that have also refused to address the issue, such as the UK. Only three British orphans have been returned home from Syria so far out of an estimated 60 UK national children trapped there.
Those not as lucky as Mahmud and Ayyub are living on borrowed time. In October, Turkey made good on a long-standing threat to attack Kurdishled forces in Syria that Ankara views as terrorists, plummeting the area into fresh chaos and jeopardising the fragile status quo at al Hawl. On the border, intermittent fighting continues despite a nominal Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Her children have come home but Perkins-Ferreira is helping other affected families lobby the Trinidadian government and offering support and advice for families across the world.
She talks frankly about the difficulties she has faced since the boys re
turned, including fighting off attempts by the state to take them into care.
Watching her sons cry for their father, her ex-husband Abebe Oboi Ferreira, has been particularly painful. He has been missing since the Isis-held city of Raqqa fell in 2017, which is when the boys ended up in Kurdish custody after being found on the side of a road.
All the same, she says, they have a real future now. “There’s plenty of love in this house and room for them to grow up. When he built this house my current husband made sure there were two extra bedrooms for Mahmud and Ayyub. He always said they’d come back. We are so lucky.”