Trapped in Syria, Part 2: A Plea to Parliament

Oct 22, 2019

Yesterday on “The Daily,” we met Kamalle Dabboussy, who said his daughter had been tricked by her husband into joining the Islamic State. His daughter and three grandchildren are being held in a Syrian detention camp for the relatives of ISIS fighters.

When we left off, Mr. Dabboussy had just received a call from a journalist that suggested his family’s situation was about to become far more precarious. President Trump had announced that he would withdraw U.S. troops from the Syrian border, and Kurdish forces who had been guarding the prisons were expected to abandon their posts, leaving the detainees’ lives in imminent danger.

Today, we follow Mr. Dabboussy’s struggle to convince the Australian government that his daughter and her children are worth saving — despite their ties to the Islamic State.

Guest: Livia Albeck-Ripka, a reporter for The Times in Melbourne, Australia, spoke with Kamalle Dabboussy, whose daughter Mariam is trapped in Syria with her children. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. 

Background coverage: 

• Here’s the first episode in this two-part series, in which we introduced Kamalle Dabboussy and his fight to bring his family home from a war zone.
• Mr. Dabboussy is one of a cohort of parents in Australia lobbying the government to help release their loved ones from detention camps in northern Syria. 

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