DUBAI: As pictures of starving kids in Syria break the internet, a Kazakh woman in Dubai is agonising over the fate of her two minor children who she claims have been taken to the war-ravaged country by her ex-husband’s family without her knowledge.
Chinara Kassymova, 35, said she has had no news about her seven-year-old daughter Mariam and three-year-old son Mohammad since August 2016 when her Syrian husband surreptitiously bundled them off to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo with his mother.
“I don’t know whether my children are dead or alive. There is not a single moment when I don’t think of them. My life has become a wreck. I am going insane without my kids and often contemplate committing suicide,” Chinara told XPRESS, holding back tears.
Chinara said she had gone to meet her parents in Kazakhstan when the incident happened.
My husband and I were not getting along well, but I never knew he would do something like this. I was in regular touch with him from Kazakhstan. In fact, he promised to pick me up when I landed in Dubai. Imagine my shock when he didn’t show up at the airport. I tried calling him but there was no response. So I took a cab to Ras Al Khaimah where we stayed in those days. A bigger shock awaited me when I reached home. As it turned out, it was locked from outside. I spent the night in a nearby mosque,” recalled Chinara who works at a saloon in Dubai Mall.
Clueless
Chinara said since then she has been knocking at the doors of various authorities to find out the whereabouts of her children.
“I have been told by Ras Al Khaimah police that my kids boarded a plane to Aleppo from Dubai with my mother-in law on August 22, 2016. “I can’t understand how my kids were even allowed on the plane because they never had a passport. The same day my husband and his father took a flight to Jordan from Sharjah,” she said.
Abandoned and rendered homeless, Chinara later filed and won a divorce lawsuit against her husband. Subsequently, she also got a court order granting her custody of her children. “For now the court order is just a piece of paper because I don’t have the faintest idea where my children are, ” she said
The humanitarian situation in Syria has pushed nearly 350,000 people including children to the verge of famine. “I hope Mariam and Mohammad are not among them,” said Chinara.
