Chechen refugee took children from Netherlands to Syria 'to join Isis'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/16/chechen-refugee-children-netherlands-syria-isis

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A Chechen woman who came to the Netherlands as a refugee more than 15 years ago has taken her two primary school aged children to Syria against their father’s wishes and apparently joined Islamic State, Dutch authorities have said.

A spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office, Bart den Hartigh, said the unnamed 33-year-old woman had fled the southern city of Maastricht at the end of October with the children, identified as Luca, aged eight, and Aysha, seven.

“She first tried to leave unsuccessfully from Germany, then some time later travelled from Belgium to Greece and onward to Syria,” den Hartigh told the Dutch broadcaster NOS. “We have an international alert out but now they’re there, there’s not much we can do.”

The children’s estranged Dutch father – the couple separated six years ago, soon after the woman, who arrived in the Netherlands in 1999, began showing signs of radicalisation – received an anonymous text message on 23 September warning that she was planning to go to Syria, the local newspaper, Limburgs Dagblad, reported.

The father told the paper he now understood why his former partner had asked for more money than usual in the weeks and months before she left: the €300 he sent to help to settle the family into a new flat “now look like they may have contributed to funding my children’s journey”. Not knowing what has become of Luca – whom he described as “often sick”, even in the Netherlands – and Aysha, he said, was “crushing my soul”.

According to the Dutch child protection service, 31 young children have left for Syria with their families over the past two years, while a further 12 minors aged between 16 and 18 have travelled independently. This is thought to be the first time that one parent has taken young children without the permission of the other.

The paper said the father, who lives two hours from the city, asked the children’s teachers at the el-Habib Muslim primary school to alert him to any unexplained absences. After two false alarms, when Luca and Aysha were found at their maternal grandmother’s house, the deputy head called on 29 October to say the mother had asked if she could print out “some documents for the social services” on the school’s printer.

The documents proved to be airline tickets from Düsseldorf, Germany – 90 minutes’ drive from Maastricht – to Alexandroupoli in north-eastern Greece, leaving at 7.20pm that evening. Horrified, the father called the mother, who insisted she was in Maastricht and was not going anywhere.

Eight-year old Luca, though, reportedly told his father that he “might be going to sleep at someone else’s house tonight”. Arriving at the grandmother’s house, police learned that the mother had left with both children in a car “driven by a Turkish woman” barely an hour earlier.

Police believe the three almost certainly travelled on false or stolen passports and are trying to establish whether the mother was helped by an Islamist network in the Netherlands. Of 180 Dutch jihadis, at least six have come from Maastricht, several reportedly with ties to the same Muslim associations.

Last November, the city made international headlines after a middle-aged woman identified only as Monique dressed in a burka and defied police warnings to travel to Raqqa in Syria and rescue her 19-year-old daughter, Aicha, a Muslim convert, from marriage to a Dutch jihadi.

The mother believed to have taken her children to Syria had reportedly come to the attention of the Dutch intelligence service AIVD in 2011 when she had a short-lived relationship with a fundamentalist Chechen with whom she had a third, younger child. That man has joined the Islamist al-Shabaab group and is thought to be in Somalia, the paper said; a third radical Islamist partner, the father of the woman’s fourth child, is thought to be in Belgium.

The three missed their flight from Düsseldorf but despite the issue of an international arrest warrant and publication of the children’s school photographs in Dutch and German media succeeded in flying out of Charleroi airport in Belgium just over two weeks later. In mid-December, according to the Limburgse Dagblad, the father was shown a CCTV image of the three from a bank in Istanbul where the mother, who had dyed her hair blonde, had withdrawn €50.

On 28 December, she posted a picture on her Facebook page of a town since identified as Tell Abyad, a Syrian town just over the border with Turkey. On 2 January, the woman called her mother in Maastricht, telling her that she was now in Raqqa, self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State.

It was difficult to phone, she reportedly said, and internet access was sporadic. No one, the paper said, has heard anything from her since, and there is no word on the children.