Family of missing Australian boy share their doomed efforts to bring him home
Whatever the truth of the matter, Hala says, what blame could be fixed on Yusuf? “He was a young boy,” she says. “He couldn’t make decisions on his own.” And yet he would pay the price.
The fleeting contact confirmed her second-to-worst fear. Yusuf was alive, but he had spent two years detained in the youth wing of Gweiran prison in Kurdish-controlled Syria, a notorious facility housing about 3,000 of some of IS’s most hardened fighters. The teenager was in a grotty, overcrowded cell, where he had contracted tuberculosis.
Nonetheless, Australia and the UK have been hesitant, repatriating eight and nine children respectively,Hala, who formed a network with others in Australia whose former IS family members were detained in Syria, says her efforts to persuade the Australian government to help Yusuf were met with disinterest. “You’d get nothing. Either an automated response, or I’m sorry, we don’t have consular assistance in the area.
Desperate for help, and in coordination with Human Rights Watch, Hala and the family authorised the public release of two of Yusuf’s voice notes from inside the siege, the first time a boy imprisoned in the facilities has ever been heard. Three weeks later, The Australian newspaper cited unnamed sources to report the government believed Yusuf might now be dead. The combination of the two updates convinced the family to abandon hope Yusuf was still alive. “We were shattered, absolutely shattered,” Hala says.
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