Luna Fernández, along with one of her children, sees a video message sent by her mother from Madrid, in March 2021. Natalia Sancha (EL PAÍS)
María Yolanda Cobos recalled on Thursday that one of the things she had suffered the most in recent years was knowing that her daughter suffered from health problems, anxiety;
that she did not have sufficient medical care in the Syrian camp of Al Roj, a stone's throw from the southeastern border of Turkey.
One of those problems occurred in March of last year.
Cobos and her husband, Luis Martínez, knew that something was wrong with Yolanda, confined in northeastern Syria with the four children she had with the jihadist Omar el Harchi.
She had chest pain, she had been transferred to a health center, but there was no information available on her condition.
The pain and frustration at that time of the parents of this Spaniard was very great.
As Cobos recounted it before the press, in Madrid, with his hands on his chest and a Christian cross around her neck, her husband,
Luis Martínez, burst into tears with emotion.
Because the story that preceded the repatriation on Monday of 15 Spanish citizens from northeastern Syria, including his daughter, almost four years after they were located, has undoubtedly been that of those children and women stranded in a legal limbo at the doors of a war, but also that of the relatives who demanded their return without response from the authorities.
The reporter
The story does not begin in Syria but in Madrid, many years before the caliphate project began in the Arab country.
It is in the Spanish capital where Yolanda Martínez, now 37, and Luna Fernández, 36, also repatriated, married two individuals who were ultimately linked to the Al Ándalus brigade, a jihadist recruitment cell that operated in the mosque. of the M-30 in Madrid between 2011 and 2014. It is with them, with El Harchi and Mohamed el Amin Aabou, with whom the two would travel to Syria a little over eight years ago to form part of that self-proclaimed Islamic State.
In March 2019, the adventure of terror led by the Iraqi terrorist Abubaker al Baghdadi came to an end with his defeat in the city of Baguz.
Syrian Kurdistan camps began to overflow with women and children linked to members of the Islamic State (ISIS) group.
There, a month later, in April, EL PAÍS reporter Natalia Sancha located three Spanish women with their children.
Luis Martínez, father of Yolanda Martinez, on Thursday in Madrid. THOMAS COEX (AFP)
For many relatives, such as Manuela Grande, mother of Luna Fernández, or Hafida Dadach, grandmother of four repatriated orphan children, it was the first proof of life they had had in years.
The revelation was such that the content of the video appeared included last Wednesday in the order of Judge Santiago Pedraz in which he ordered the preventive detention of Martínez and Fernández, accused of belonging to a terrorist organization ―the Area for the Protection of Minors of the Community of Madrid has taken care of the minors.
That first public appearance contained an error: the surnames Miludi and Fares were mixed to speak of the same woman, but they were two different people.
In total, four women with Spanish roots were being held in north-east Syria.
Along with the two repatriated on Monday were Lubna Miludi, a native of Ceuta, and Lubna Fares,
The Ministry
"After that and gathering the documentation," the lawyer José Luis Laso, who represents the relatives, explained on Thursday, "the minister Josep Borrell received us."
He was the first of the three foreign ministers who have had to deal with the repatriation of Spaniards in the last four years.
Borrell stated that he had decided to bring them, but that was the thing.
This was stated in a telephone conversation by Luis Martínez, Yolanda's father: "Then he went to Europe [as High Representative of EU Foreign Policy] and forgot about it."
The negotiations were paralyzed by the reluctance of the Ministry of the Interior in the face of the risk of radicalization posed by the inmates.
The time passed.
Along with these four women lived a total of 17 minors, all in the custody of the Kurdish administration that governs northeast Syria.
Based on the interviews, testimonies and images collected, the camps in which they were locked up can be described as a kind of open-air prisons in the middle of the desert: violence, thefts, fires;
lack of food, communication and health, and proselytism with the still latent threat of the embers of ISIS.
The escape
One of the three women that the journalist Natalia Sancha met was Lubna Fares, married to Navid Sanati, a Spanish jihadist of Iranian origin who died on the front lines.
In February 2020, Fares, who is now 44 years old, wrote to her mother-in-law, Mahin Jafari, to tell her that she had run away with her three children.
She did not want to continue in Al Hol, a camp crowded with displaced persons from the Caliphate and which has come to house more than 60,000 people.
Since then, the Spanish authorities have been unable to locate her.
She also does not know where Sanati's family is, consulted by this newspaper.
The children's grandmother is unwell;
she did not recover from the blow she suffered from the terrible journey into jihadism that her son made.
At that time, Arancha González Laya was in charge of Foreign Affairs.
According to the story of the defense of the families, González Laya ignored the issue of repatriation.
He also did, according to this same version, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, still in office.
Despite the fact that the Spanish security forces had contacted the families at some point at the beginning of the investigations, everything was cut off radically.
The return of the Spanish was blocked.
Brussels
They had to knock on another door, so the lawyer José Luis Laso left for Brussels.
While the situation that the women and their children were suffering in the camps was denounced before the European Parliament, at the end of 2021, a letter was presented to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament so that it consulted the Spanish Government about the repatriation process. .
On February 7 of last year, the commission approved the request and sent the families' letter to Madrid ―in a resolution of March 2021, the European Parliament had already urged member countries to repatriate their nationals from the concentration camps. Al Hol and Al Roj.
The addressee was the new Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares.
The families received no response.
A woman walks with a minor, in Syria's Al Hol camp, in April 2019.Kate Geraghty (Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
Just when that letter was traveling from Brussels to Madrid, Abdurahman Aabou was completing his first year of confinement in a Kurdish correctional facility close to the Iraqi border.
The eldest of Luna Fernández's children, like other adolescents in the camps, had been separated from his mother and brothers.
During his stay there, ISIS cells raided another center for minors, in the city of Hasaka.
Concern in Madrid about the fate of the children grew.
The next to be separated could be Bilal, the eldest of Yolanda Martínez's offspring.
The violence had killed dozens of children under the age of 16 since the opening of the camps to accommodate the families of the jihadists.
Miludi
The families of Martínez, Fernández and Miludi, consulted in recent months, have always affirmed that the women, despite knowing that they would have to be held accountable before the courts - the National Court requested their arrest after being located in 2019 - wanted to return to Spain.
Finally, last November, the Government made public that it agreed to go to repatriate them.
The operation was launched so that before the end of 2022, the three of them, along with the 14 children under their care, would land in Madrid.
But a problem arose that delayed the mission: Lubna Miludi, 29, mother of a seven-year-old boy, held in Al Hol camp, was held incommunicado.
It had been four months since they had been able to speak to her on the phone.
Communication from the camps via telephone requires getting hold of a mobile, in contravention of the ban on Kurdish uniforms.
Halil Miludi, Lubna's father, expressed in her last conversation with EL PAÍS that she wanted to return.
The family lawyer, in contact with him, maintains that the young woman's desire was to return.
That seemed like the plan until something happened to the phone used by the Spanish woman a few days after diplomat Guillermo Anguera headed the delegation sent by the government to northeast Syria.
At 11:00 p.m. on Monday, a plane from Kuwait landed at the Torrejón de Ardoz base in Madrid, with Yolanda Martínez, Luna Fernández and the 13 children in charge of the two women, four of them from a couple killed on the front jihadist.
Miludi was not there.
The objective now of both the authorities and the defense is for her to "request" in some way to return to Spain;
that she communicate again to request her repatriation if that is still her wish.
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