A delegation from Sweden traveled to northern Syria on May 7 where they met with the foreign relations department of the Kurdish administration, ANHA news first reported.
Sweden’s public broadcaster (SVT) identified the father of the children as Michael Skramo. Skramo was a member of ISIS and he and his wife were killed in fighting. The children’s grandfather, Patricio Galvez, has been trying to bring the children home and negotiations were ongoing between Kurdish representatives and the Swedish government.
The children range in age from one to eight.
Shiyar Ali, a representative of the northern Syrian administration told the Swedish broadcaster that the children had been in bad health when they came into Kurdish custody in Baghouz, the site of the last stand of the ISIS so-called caliphate before they were defeated by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and global coalition in March. It is not immediately clear when the parents were killed.
The children’s grandfather said he was very happy to finally be with the children, something he was working on for four months. He met up with his grandchildren at a hospital in Hasakah, northern Syria. The eldest ones recognized him right away, he said.
“The oldest recognized me, he said ‘Ah grandfather’,” Galvez recalled. They hugged and Galvez said he cried.
The eldest three children were born in Sweden and the youngest were born while under the Islamic State in Syria. Galvez knew them only by photographs that his daughter, their mother, had sent.
His first priority is to ensure the children get medical care.
"I will go to hospital tomorrow and after that to Swedish consulate and maybe go home to Sweden," he said.
Grandfather Patricio Galvez speaks to Rudaw in a hotel in Erbil on May 7, 2019. Photo: Rudaw
The children’s father Skramo was born in Norway but grew up in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, according to Norwegian outlet The Local. He converted to Islam in 2005 and moved to the Islamic State in September 2014, going to Raqqa with his wife and the children they had at the time.
He was killed in the final battles in Baghouz, his mother and sister told ITV in March.
The father of the children has been identified as Michael Skramo. Photo: handout from the family
Kurdish and Swedish officials are discussing the situation of about 80 people with connections to Sweden, most of them children, SVT reported.
Child rights’ activists have urged Sweden to repatriate the children.
“We believe that Sweden has both a legal responsibility and a humanitarian and moral obligation to act,” Ola Mattsson, head of the Swedish branch of Save the Children, told Swedish media in April.
Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said at the time that they were looking into the matter and obtaining “all the necessary documentation.”
Grandfather Galvez, who lobbied the Swedish government for months to bring the children home, said officials were very skeptical at first, but he hopes it will change policy now.
“I think the Swedish [government] will now take all the children,” he said, vowing he will not stop now that he has rescued his own family, but will continue to help others “because the children [are] innocent.”
Families of ISIS members who escaped from the last vestiges of the ISIS caliphate are among the more than 75,000 people being sheltered at al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria. Among them are some 2,500 foreign children identified as essentially stateless by the UN’s children’s office (UNICEF). Conditions in the camp are desperate. At least 211 children under the age of five have died, according to UN figures.
Western nations have resisted repatriating their nationals, citing security concerns and fears they will not be able to collect evidence to obtain a conviction of the ISIS members in their home courts. Grandparents of two children who are with their French mother in al-Hol camp have filed a lawsuit at Europe’s top rights court over the French government’s refusal to let them come home.
