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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Imprisoned Australian teen Yusuf Zahab feared dead in Syria jail
2022-07-19
[AlArabiya] Australian teenager Yusuf Zahab is feared dead in a Syrian jail, after he was imprisoned without charges in 2019, the BBC reported on Monday.

The 17-year-old Australian was taken to Syria by his relatives in 2015 and his Sydney-based family has since been "heartbroken and angry," because he had been begging for help for years.

Although it is still unclear how Zahab is suspected to have died, rights groups said in January that he was injured in an ISIS attack on a prison in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast in an attempt to free its imprisoned fighters.

With the support of the US, Kurdish fighters fought the ISIS hard boyz for a week, killing over 180 people in the process.

In voice recordings which Zahab sent to his family at the time, he reportedly said that he "might die at any time," as the fighting continued to intensify. Scared, he told them he had "lost a lot of blood" and that there were no doctors to help him.

According to United Nations
...a formerly good idea gone bad...
’ children’s charity agency UNICEF, Zahab was one of almost 850 children who were detained in 2019 — after the fall of ISIS — in case they posed a security risk.

The teen’s family described him as a happy and compassionate child.
NPA Syria adds:
An Australian teenager, who was detained in northeast Syria for contacts with Islamic State Organization (ISIS), died on Monday.

The 17-year-old Yusuf Zahab had caught tuberculosis in the prison, where Syrian and foreign ISIS suspects were held in.

Zahab, who was born in southwest Sydney, Australia, was 11 when he travelled to Syria to live in the newly declared so-called ISIS caliphate in northeast Syria with his parents and siblings.

In 2019, Zahab was arrested by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and he was detained in al-Sina’a prison in Guweiran neighborhood in the city of Hasakah alongside suspected members of the ISIS for three years.

In January 2022, during fighting between the SDF, supported by the US-led Global Coalition, and ISIS, Zahab was wounded in the head and arm. He sent audio recording, begging for help during an ISIS siege of al-Sina’a prison to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Clashes started on January 20 after militants of ISIS assaulted a prison that holds thousands of ISIS inmates. The assault coincided with three explosions in an attempt to break out the ISIS detainees out of the prison.

Between 69 and 80 Australian nationals, including 19 women and 39 children, are held in northeast Syria as ISIS suspects and their family members, according to Kamalle Dabboussy, the representative for the Zahab’s and other detainees’ families.

“The big obstacle that hinders the advance of the SDF is that ISIS used terrorist children who are ‘Cubs of the Caliphate’ and amounts 700 minors in the prison, as human shields,” the SDF said in a statement.
It's VERY Islamic
The previous Australian government repatriated only eight citizens, all unaccompanied children, Dabboussy stressed.
Posted by:Fred

#2  ZFG
Posted by: Dron66046   2022-07-19 10:01  

#1  
Posted by: DEEPTI SINGH   2022-07-19 09:48  

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