Front Burner - Syria’s forgotten children

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

In 2018, under bombardment in Syria, a 2-year-old boy named Salmaan disappeared along with his mother. At the time, the Islamic State was at the brink of defeat. For years, ISIS led a brutal campaign across Syria and Iraq, killing and kidnapping thousands of people. After the war against the Islamic State was won, many of the wives and children of its fighters were placed in prison camps in Northeast Syria. Today, BBC investigative journalist Poonam Taneja on her journey to those camps to find out what happened to Salmaan, and the fate of the thousands of children left behind in the Syrian desert.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. In 2018, under bombardment in Syria, a two-year-old boy named Salman disappeared along with his mother. At the time, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or IS, was on the brink of defeat. For years, they had led a brutal campaign across Syria and Iraq,

killing and abducting thousands of people. After the war against ISIS was won, many of the wives and children of its fighters were placed in prison camps in northeast Syria. Thousands of kids, from countries all over the world, were brought to the region by their parents and now have no way back home. My colleague Poonam Taneja is an investigative journalist with BBC News, and she traveled to Syria to see what became of Salman. She and I were part of a larger team that made a series called Bloodlines. It's a co-production between CBC Podcasts and BBC Sounds. Bloodlines. It's a co-production between CBC Podcasts and BBC Sounds. So today, the story behind Poonam's dangerous journey to find out what happened to Salman and the fate of thousands of

children left behind in the Syrian desert. Hey Poonam, thanks for coming on FrontBurner. Thank you, Damon. It's great to talk to you again. Yeah, it's so good. So, okay, let's start with your mission in the making of this series. So you had this mission to find a little boy named Salman. Say, hello. Hello.

I love you, daddy. Daddy. So let's start with him. You first heard of Salman through his grandfather, Ash. How did that happen? So that happened back in 2019. And this was during the last days of the war against IS. 2019, and this was during the last days of the war against IS, when IS militants were making their last stand in this little village in northeast Syria called Baghouz. And Ash had

recently lost contact with his grandson and his daughter-in-law, Salman's mother, his Canadian daughter-in-law. And he was seeing all these pictures on TV about women and children coming out of Bagus and going to these camps. And he was convinced that his grandson and his daughter-in-law may be amongst those people. And so I think it was really desperation that brought him to me on his part, certainly. him to me on his part, certainly. Right. And we should just point out too that, so Ash's son, a guy named Harun, had gone to Syria, he ended up fighting for IS, and then married this Canadian woman named Aisha, who you really didn't know anything about at the outset, right? I knew so little about her, pretty much nothing, in fact. I wasn't even sure if Aisha was her real name. All I knew is that she was Canadian.

We had a region that we believed that she was from. We had a surname that Ash had given us. But this person was a ghost online. We knew absolutely nothing else about her. Finding Salman was really only just a part of what you wanted to cover. He was one of these tens of thousands of kids over there. And that's really what I think was driving you, was this larger story. So why was telling the story of the kids in these camps so important to you?

Yeah, so I only realized about the kids in the camps when I started looking into Salman back in 2019. Because IS was this black hole to a certain extent and we'd heard so much about these foreigners who'd traveled from everywhere in the world to live under there but then it went quiet and it was only after the fall of Bargoose that I realized actually just how many children had been taken there and how many children had been born there and that they were now stuck in these camps there didn't seem to be any real way for them to come back home and then i couldn't quite understand it and if i'm really open i still don't the fact that these children who were recognized by governments as being the innocent victims of war were left to languish in places that no children should have to live.

I think to me never really made sense and I couldn't quite understand why they were still there. It really, it just seemed so inhumane. Why don't you tell us about these two camps, there's Al-Raj and there's Al-Hol. The conditions there are really, I mean, they're really quite stunning. You had been there before on a reporting trip, and I really only came to understand it because of your reporting. Maybe you can explain for listeners what they're like. So there are two sprawling camps in the middle of the Syrian desert. Al-Hol is the larger camp and the more dangerous one. These are both

tent cities. Al-Hol is about 50,000 people living in the camp. And they're dangerous. There are women who are living there who remain loyal to IS. Killings take place. People used to be smuggled out, weapons smuggled in. There was a lack of healthcare, certainly very little education. And these children were being left to live in these tents al roj was the smaller slightly more organized camp and that is the one where we spent most of our time um but again there are about 3 000 women and children living there kids had not gone to school they were some had injuries that were very visible, missing limbs, shrapnel injuries, and of course, all the injuries that we couldn't see. But just miserable places.

It's also, I think, worth pointing out too that, I mean, when you talk about dangerous camps, like there were a few instances of children being killed in the camps, right? This isn't just, they're not just suffering from trauma from the war before they got there, but these camps themselves present a significant danger to them. Yeah, absolutely. A few weeks before we even traveled to Syria for the series, there were two children who'd been beheaded in Al-Hol. It's brutal. So maybe you can explain how these kids, like we're talking tens of thousands of kids,

how did they end up in these camps? So when IS was defeated in Bagus, that village on the edge of the Euphrates, they were then taken to what used to be camps for internally displaced people, but then started filling with the families of suspected IS militants. And that is where they were taken. They were supposed to be holding camps,

but of course turned into something a bit more permanent. It's now been almost five years since many of them were there. And they were taken there while, I suppose, the international community tried to figure out what to do with them, really. Yeah, and I think, if it's not clear already, a lot of these kids are children from foreign nationals who went to Syria, went over to the region to live under IS. So these are kids from all over the world who ostensibly are citizens of nations across the globe, right? Yeah, that's right. So Canada, Australia, Trinidad, Britain, France and Germany, everywhere.

And I'd always see that when I'd be in the camps. So it really was an international community, and I think it really showed and illustrated really clearly for me just how far-reaching IS was in sort of seducing people to join its or live under its caliphate. Let's talk about that reach because the kind of long-term plan that IS had with these kids, either the kids brought in or born under the caliphate, and I know you're not a fan of the term cubs of the Caliphate. I know it kind of is reiterating IS propaganda. But the reason I mention is that it does articulate a way of thinking about these kids that I think is important for people to understand. So maybe you can talk about what that long-term plan for these kids was for IS. these kids was for IS? So originally, I think IS were trying to state build in their kind of worldview. So the emphasis was on family. It was on, it just wasn't on attracting foreign fighters.

It was also on attracting women so that they could produce children, produce, and these children were supposed to be the next generation. These children were supposed to ensure the survival of Islamic State group. They were indoctrinated, brainwashed in ways that I don't think we've ever seen before on that scale from a very, very young age, indoctrinated into IS's worldview, its ideology. They were trained to fight. They were forced onto the battlefield in some cases. It was horrific. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So you prepped for this three-week journey to Syria. Turkey happened to be bombing Syria when you got there, so it was pretty hairy.

Neighboring Turkey is firing missiles unrelentingly. Payback, it claims, for deadly attacks. And right in front of me is a massive fire. I'm not sure if you can actually hear it. So huge flames, massive plume of smoke. This was the target of an airstrike last night. And you spent a lot of time trying to get permission to get into these camps. So you finally get permission to go into Al Raj, which is the camp where the majority of the kids are from all across the world. And it's not clear to you at first, whether you're going to be able to find anyone who will help you locate Salman or his mom, Aisha.

And then I know you got this voice message kind of out of the blue from a woman in that camp, in Al Raj camp, who we call DA in the series. So tell me about that. Yeah, so we put our feelers out in the weeks running up to traveling to Syria through our contacts, trying to get messages to women in the camp who may have known Aisha, baby Salman's mother. And then just when we arrive in Syria, we get this voice message from a Canadian woman called DA.

And she's willing to speak to us. We go into our lodge and we meet her. We've been looking for you. We've been looking for you. I've heard so much about you. Really? And she's incredibly helpful. She knew Aisha, she knew Salman. Yeah, we met back in Raqqa. You met in Raqqa? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She had two kids,

she had Salman and she had another daughter. She had a daughter? Yeah, she had a daughter. Salman and a daughter? Yeah. She was really small last time I seen. She gave us information about them both. But more than that, she introduced us to other women who were able to give us more information, particularly about where they were last seen and what may have happened to them and the location where they were last known to be. So DA ends up helping you kind of get a beat on where Aisha and Salman were. But at this point, we could have done a whole series on DA. We could probably spend a whole hour talking about her, and we won't. We spent many hours talking about DA. We did, yeah. So maybe just for the listeners, who is DA?

Well, when we met DA, she was another Canadian woman who had traveled to live under IS. Now, while she was really helpful about giving us information about Aisha, she was fairly cagey about her own life, specifically about her husband or her ex-husband. Her ex-husband was British, and he was part of a terror cell known as the is beetles and this was the the worst of the worst when it came to is this was the the terror cell that beheaded western aid workers journalists on camera and she was married to one of them, El Shafi El Sheikh. And you confronted her. She admitted to it. And so that, which is a whole, again, like I say,

it's something you can make a whole series about. But it was also a big deal in another way where aside from like this journalistic scoop you had just stumbled on, you know, as you point out, IS is this black box and it's really difficult to get insight into how it operated, but suddenly you had access to the wife of one of the worst, you know, most brutal members of IS. It gave you a lot of insight into what life

was like for women and children under IS, which is kind of this black box within a black box. So, so tell me a bit about what you learned from talking to her. I think there were, there were a whole range of things. I think first of all, just in terms of the social aspect, kind of the IS-shaped society. She was in a polygamous relationship. We knew that men had all the power in that society. But also just simply the way was seemed to have a bit of a posh lifestyle is how we we say it and she gave quite a bit of information about that as well but i think it was also simply the kind of her trajectory through her life under is which she made it sound almost normal you know she had these um she had these sleepovers and these trips to the restaurant but at the same time you know is in raka the de facto capital

there were executions carrying on and it was it was kind of interesting to sort of tease that out of her how did you sort of marry those two elements of living under IS? Okay, so getting back to your search for Salman, after you spoke with DA and some of the other women in El Raj, you have a sense of where Salman and his mother Aisha were staying as IS was making its last stand against the coalition forces. There's a place called Mirajda, which is near this region, this town called Baguz, which you mentioned before. So you and Jawan, your producer, made a really risky journey there. Tell me about that. Yeah, so to a certain extent, Marajda and Barghusa, that entire sort of desert area, is still a hotspot for IS militants. They regularly carry out attacks in that region. And it was just simply too dangerous for us to sort of make that eight-hour drive to the desert

alone. So we had an escort, we had the syrian democratic forces who well basically it was almost like an embed situation where we had a bunch of armored vehicles and we had soldiers accompany us but it was pretty tense um through the desert to this very remote um village and it's worth pointing out too that there i think one of the concerns there is that it's an area where fighters could potentially come out on motorbikes from behind rocks and, you know, shoot up your convoy, right? Pretty much, yeah. So shoot up our convoy, kidnappings is always a worry. So when you got to the area where you believed Salman and Aisha to be, what did you find? So we, on the way there, we'd stopped off at various military bases.

And we'd, Juwan, my producer, had met a contact of his who knew a number of guest houses where IS women and their children were living. So we discovered two of these guest houses and they had both been bombed to the ground. One guest house, all that was left was rubble. The other one was a giant crater in the ground. It had clearly been rocket attacked. And it became very clear to us that if this is where Salman and his mother were living, there was absolutely no chance that they could have survived. I think everyone around us made it very clear that there were no survivors.

And it was clear from what we were seeing that there could be no survivors. So sorry, I'm getting a bit confused. I'm going to start again because what I'm seeing is a bit shocking. So I'm at the site of... I'm at the site where a guest house for IS women, or widows and their children, once stood. There is nothing left of it. It is... So when you went back to London

and you had to break this to Ash that his grandson almost certainly didn't survive, what was that like? It was tough. I think when we, or when I started the search, realistically I knew that I'd probably never be able to find Suleiman. But I think, and I understood, I think what Ash needed was information. And I thought that that could be what I could provide him with. So you can see the crater. The crater's massive, isn't it? Yeah.

I think you can see the scale that really nobody could have survived. Yeah, definitely. It wasn't certainty, but I think it was quite a bit. It was information. I walked him through the process in the hope that actually that would allow him to find some peace. I know it's not the news that you were hoping for. It's not in our control, is it?

Nothing was ever in our control. Before I used to cry. now I can't even cry. I've cried so much. I just can't cry anymore. So what really stood out to me during this whole thing was how affected you were by the kids. So there's a moment early on in the series, in the second episode,

where you and Juwan come across a cemetery outside of Hull, and it's devastating. I think it's really, it's evidence about how dangerous Al-Hol is for children and how it really is a race against time to bring them back. And some of them are quite fresh graves, so children dying very, very recently. Especially, you see,

you know, there's two fresh little tiny graves. It's just like a 25-centimetre grave. That's babies, isn't it? That's a baby, you know. Yeah.

But the episode that really stands out for me was the second-to-last episode of the series where you spoke with a number of kids who survived the war under IS and then they're stuck in these camps. And you got these really remarkable interviews with some of the kids who were detained there. So tell me about that. So that was, I think that was the hardest part. we managed to speak to a whole bunch of children with their mother's consent ranging from sort of

the ages of 13 14 to 20 and I think that what stands out for me really was sort of the kind of I always say small dreams and big dreams mixed with despair see we, I spoke to one child who was a 14-year-old boy who had been told that back in his home country, which is Trinidad, that school was like this. But his greatest fear living in the camp was that he would be separated from his mother and taken to a detention center. Another girl told me that she pretty much didn't leave her tent because it was just a stark reminder of what was outside, the guards, the razor wire. She wanted to be a teacher.

She pretty much knew that there was no chance of that. She felt abandoned. And then, of course, we have this incredible um boy Sule who is a very talented footballer who had been taken there by his his mother and stepfather my mom she every time she speaks to me she always apologizes to me you know she's like I'm sorry I ruined your life I brought you here to Syria yeah it's. My life is almost like half of it is gone. If you can say like that, my childhood. And I'm still getting older and I'm still here. It annoys me sometimes, but I forgive my mom for everything, whatever she did, you know,

she didn't know. And he was terrified of where, that he would end up in an adult men's prison with battle-hardened fighters. But it was just the sense that all of these children were sort of clinging to some kind of hope. And yet, I certainly couldn't provide any hope for them. And I think what really hit me was a sense of despair. The fact that they were just going through day to day knowing that or feeling that they'd been abandoned um abandoned and forgotten we call that episode the forgotten children

and i think that was tough it's been just over a year now since you were there. We've put out this series. Has anything changed for these kids? Are they still in that state? So most of them are in that state. They're still in the camps. They're still in the detention centers. Nothing has really changed for them.

And that is quite difficult. Ray Poonam, thanks so much for talking with me. It's great to talk to you again. Thank you. That's all for today. Bloodlines, the podcast series that Poonam and I were talking about, all seven episodes, are out now. You can check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Front Burner was produced this week by Rafferty Baker, Shannon Higgins, Joyta Shingupta, and Derek VanderWijk. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron.

The music is by Joseph Shabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Damon Trellis. Thanks for listening.