“Novaya Gazeta” reports information on fate of Dagestani women in Middle East

Many of the men, who left Dagestan for Syria and Iraq to join militants, were killed, and their wives and children remained in a foreign country without money or a roof over their heads, the newspaper “Novaya Gazeta” reports.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) of Dagestan, until 2017-2018, 300-500 people left Dagestan for Syria every year, while according to unofficial sources, their number was much higher.

Stories of natives of Dagestan in Syria and Iraq were reported by their mothers. So, Patimat said that her daughter Ashura got married in 1997, and in 2014, she went abroad together with her husband and two children. They told their parents that they were going to Egypt to study Islam. In 2018, Patimat learned that her daughter with children stayed in a camp in Syria and that the daughter’s husband was killed.

Ziyarat, another native of Dagestan, studied at the humanitarian academy in Khasavyurt. Her mother Jeannette was against her daughter’s marriage until she graduated, but Ziyarat was abducted for marriage. In 2015, Ziyarat together with her husband left for Turkey. Later, the young woman called her mother and confessed that she stayed in the “Islamic State”* (IS, a terrorist organization, banned in Russia by the court, – note of the “Caucasian Knot”). According to the mother, Ziyarat “was crying and asking to forgive her.”

“Three months later, her husband disappeared, and my daughter was placed in a widow’s house ... There was information that she became a second wife of a man so as not to stay on the street. Then there was an assault on the city. Rumours reached us that the house where Ziyarat stayed with her children was blown up,” the woman said.

Pazilyat reported that her son Eldar had married a Dagestani woman. The last time she saw them was in 2015, and in 2017, the woman learned that her son had been killed. “It was a bad dream for me. I could not understand that reality could be so cruel. After all, my daughter was also killed in Syria: in Al Kishmah, a bomb got into her family’s house where she stayed with her two children whom she tried to cover with her body,” Pazilyat said.

Akhmedkhan, a son of Madina, studied in Saint Petersburg, but after the first academic year, he wanted to study Islam and left for Egypt. His family members could not contact him for six months. The mother of the young man learned from social media that he got married in Syria. His wife reported that Akhmedkhan was blown up and that she herself was pregnant. “Gulnara said that they ended up there with a desire to observe pure Islam, but the result was complete disappointment,” Madina, the mother of Akhmedkhan, said.