Mother calls on authorities to save children in Iraqi prisons

ISTANBUL

A Turkish woman has called on the authorities to save her two children that ended up in Iraqi prisons after being abducted by their father, who was an ISIL member.

Tülay Kaya has recently learned the whereabouts of her son and daughter, who were kidnapped by her former husband three years ago. Her son is in a prison in Erbil and her daughter is in a prison in Baghdad, daily Vatan reported on Oct. 8.

Kaya told the newspaper she had visited her 17-year-old son in the prison. “Mother save me,” her son had reportedly said.

“Let our state help us rescue my children, whose lives were made miserable by their father,” Kaya said.

Kaya applied to the court four years ago demanding a divorce from her husband İrfan Küpecik. Kaya told the court Küpecik was emotionally abusive. The court then ruled for the couple’s divorce, giving custody of the children to Kaya.

However, a while after the divorce, Küpecik took his son, who was 14 years old at the time, and daughter, who was 11 years old at the time, from their mother under the pretext of spending time with them and crossed the Turkey-Iraq border with them on May 2, 2016.

Küpecik took his children to the Iraqi city of Tal Afar and was an ISIL fighter for two years. In August 2017, Küpecik was killed when the Iraqi army conducted an operation in the Tal Afar area. Up until that point, Küpecik had called Kaya to tell her their children were fine, but after that point, she did not hear from them.

Kaya immediately went to Erbil when she found out her son Anıl had been kept in a prison there. “Mother save me, I can no longer take this,” her son reportedly told her during their two-hour visitation.

“I have also learned my daughter is being kept in the Rusafa prison in Baghdad. But my attempts to see her remain inconclusive,” she said, calling on the authorities to save her children.

“There is no evidence that they [children] have committed a crime,” Kaya said.