Swedish daily newspaper Dagen has interviewed Sabah Elia, A Demand For Action has translated the horrifying report.
42 of her relatives have been kidnapped by IS.
’’ This is going to be a harsh Christmas’’, says Sabah Elia, who’s thoughts are constantly with her relatives in Syria, who are being treated as slaves in IS captivity.
It happened on February 23rd, in the middle of the night at 4AM. The north eastern Syrian village of Tal Shamiran was attacked and taken by the Islamic State, many villagers woke up to the screams of their horrified friends, and relatives. Some attempted to flee over the nearby river, but most were captured (around 280 people, among them nearly all of Sabah Elias relatives.)
The same happened in many other assyrian villages in the area. We meet her in Södertälje, as Nuri Kino was being awarded as Rolemodel of the Year by the newspaper Dagen. Nuri tells us we simply need to listen what she has to say while he is there to offer her support during the interview.
”I fainted, lost conciousness, worse than sick”, says Sabah Elia when she recounts how her entire family was captured by IS.
Ever since, for almost 10 months, life has been a torture. Sabah Elia has been living in Sweden for some time now, she has four children who all live in security, but all the time her thoughts goes to what happened to the rest of the family. She knows where they are beingen held, that the women and children are separeted from the men, that they are often only given food every third day. It does not take long before a tear starts running down her cheek, and even if Sabah Elia is clear on that she wants to tell her story so that the world shall listen, it is clear for all to see how much this affects her. She has trouble sleeping at night, her entire life revolves around what happens in Syria.
Last summer she herself tried to cross the border from Libanon, but was stopped. As she has no direct contact with her captured relatives it is hard to know exactly how they are doing. Sabah Elia remembers when she called her uncles wife on the phone and a IS-fighter picked up on the other end. Forget the number, the phone was now theirs, was the message. But at the same time she knows how brutally they are being treated. Some of the captives have been released after a ransom was paid.
”It is as if they have ageed prematurely”, says Sabah Elia. ”It was hard for us to see them, they had been treated worse than slaves, they had been beaten and were riddled with lice”, she tells us.
A woman who had been forcecd to make the dishes had tried to wet her lips, for this she was beaten with a rifle butt in the back of her head, with clear orders that it was IS who decided when they were allowed to drink. One can also find information via IS fighters own information channels. As when six of the captives, not only Sabahs relatives, were lined up and dressed in orange, in a dreadfully familiar scen that usually ends with executions. Three of them were shot to death, the rest were allowed to live, with ransom demands put on them.
Sabah Elia tells that her relatives used to be farmers, and quite well off. Now they have nothing. And they will have nothing even after they are released, if they ever are. They will then be in Syria, without neither money or ID-documents. Under those circumstances, to flee and try to make their way to somewhere like Sweden for instance, is close to impossible. The only hope in such a situation lies with the church, who do all they can to help those in need.
Now christmas is almost upon us and Sabah Elia does not look forward to it at all. No preparations has been made on her part, ’’what is there to celebrate’’ she says with sadness in her voice. The only thing she can think of are the captured children, the youngest of which was only 3 months old by the time IS took them.
”If they dissappear I will have no roots left. I would rather be captured myself, for this is the most difficult. Here I live without knowing and I slowly die, hour by hour.”
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