Film about fate of five Chechen sisters raises problem of children’s return from Syria

The film "Forbidden Children" about the fate of five sisters from Chechnya, who ended up in the Syrian camp of Al-Khol after the death of their parents, was shown in Moscow. Evdokia Moskvina, the film director, told about the difficulties that the girls' relatives had to go through in order to achieve their return home. The work on the return of children from Syria and Iraq is not very active, the debaters have noted after watching the film.

The parents of the film heroines were natives of the village of Beni-Yurt in Chechnya; they perished in the territory controlled by the ISIL* (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation by the court). Some footage was filmed in the Al-Khol camp in the Kurdish enclave of Rozhava, where the captured wives and children of ISIL militants are being kept, and where Ms Moskvina literally miraculously managed to find the girls.

The author of the film reports that children were starving. One of the girls tells in the film that at some point she and her sisters had to eat grass for several weeks.

Igor Boev, the director of the Stavropol Clinic for Borderline States, who was attracted by Moskvina, said in the film that malnutrition makes children look younger than their age; and the horrors and indoctrination they had suffered from the ISIL led to the fact that they perceived the world exclusively as black and white.

Evdokia Moskvina said that now the sisters' life has improved. She noted that the work on the return of women and children from camps and prisons in Syria and Iraq is not active enough.

They also discussed the fate of hundreds and thousands of women and children kept in prisons and camps for prisoners of war (POWs) in Syria and Iraq.

Araf Azmani, a co-chair of the International Union of Kurdish Public Associations, has stressed that the majority of those kept at the Al-Khol camp are people who had undergone propaganda treatment by the ISIL; and their minds have not changed, despite the disappearance of the organization itself. As an example, he cited a woman shown in the film, shouting in Arabic that the ISIL would return and take revenge.