ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Two Yezidi children reunited with their family in the Kurdistan Region on Friday after returning from Turkey with Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani, who was on an official visit to Ankara.
“Two Yezidi children, who had been abducted by ISIS [Islamic State] terrorists many years ago, have returned to the Kurdistan Region on Friday. The two siblings, a boy and a girl, accompanied the Kurdistan Region delegation headed by President Nechirvan Barzani as it arrived back to Erbil from an official visit to the Turkish capital Ankara,” read a Friday evening statement released by the Kurdistan Region Presidency.
The children were reunited with their family at Erbil International Airport, it added.
Amir Khudeda Hussein, 10, and Amira Khudeda Hussein, 11, were among 6,417 Yezidis abducted by ISIS when it attacked Shingal district in August 2014. According to KRG data, 2,878 remain missing.
The two siblings were said to have been adopted by a Turkmen family who then gave both children to an orphanage in Kirsehir province in 2017 to hide their affiliation with ISIS. They had changed Amir’s name to Ahmed and Amira to Aya, the Turkish edition of the Independent reported in mid-July.
Their sister Hadiya has battled Turkish courts since 2017 to reunite with her siblings. Authorities refused to hand over the children on the grounds that their parents could be alive.
“Their parents fell to the hands of ISIS in 2014 but there has not been any news of them yet. Therefore, the children are still under the control of their parents,” read a November 2019 ruling from a Turkish court, according to the Independent.
“For more than three years, the Office of Yazidi Abductees’ Affairs, established by President Nechirvan Barzani, put intense efforts into finding the two children; and with the help of good samaritans and relevant authorities of the government of Turkey, the office managed to locate the two children and return them to their family in the Kurdistan Region,” read the statement from the KRG Presidency.
This is not the first time Yezidi survivors have been found in Turkey.
Three brothers and a sister from the family are still missing, Hadiya told Rudaw from Erbil International Airport.
Data from the KRG puts the number of those killed in the first day of the ISIS attack at 1,293, adding that the attack has internally displaced some 310,000 Yezidis and forced more than 100,000 to flee Iraq. Additionally, 2,745 children have been orphaned.
The ethnoreligious minority lived mainly in the district of Shingal in Nineveh before it was attacked by ISIS on August 3, 2014, in what has been recognised by many states as a genocide. Many Yezidi men and elderly people were killed, and young women and girls sold into sexual slavery.
The plight of the Yezidis was brought to renewed attention in 2018 when survivor Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.
Additional reporting by Mahdi Faraj
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