Searching for lost daughter 战乱分离母女终团聚
2021-07-19陈莹莹
陈莹莹
戰争给人们带来了无尽的悲痛和创伤。本文中一对因战乱分离的母女在多年后有幸重逢。她们经历了什么呢?
At an orphanage in Mosul, Iraq, the woman and the girl sitting on the long, gray sofa com?municate mostly through touch. The girl leans against the woman, playing with her blue bracelet(手镯).
The woman smiles as she removes the bracelet and puts it on the childs slender wrist. There isnt a lot of conversation between Kamo Zandinan, 40, and the girl. She believes the 10?year?old girl is her lost daughter. The girl, believed to have been kidnapped by ISIS when she was four, was raised by an Arab family. Zandinan, who is Yazidi(雅兹迪人), speaks only simple Arabic learned when she was forced to live among ISIS fighters who enslaved her in Syria six years ago.
“Reunions make us very happy,” Kamo Zandinan says. “God only knows what misery and sadness we have been through.”
So far, this orphanage, currently home to 21 children, has reunited three other Yazidi children kidnapped by ISIS with their families. It posts photos of the children on Facebook and on local television, and follows up with DNA tests for possible relatives who come forward.
In the summer of 2014, Zandinan was a mother of six kids with a seventh on the way. ISIS roared into Iraq and Syria that August, slaughtering(屠杀) almost everyone who opposed it. Zandinans husband and eldest son were taken away by ISIS fighters—she believes they were shot. ISIS fighters also took two of her daughters—Suzan, 13, and Sonya, 4—ripping the younger girl screaming from her arms.
Zandinan and her four remaining children were resettled in Canada as refugees three years ago. There, she saw a Facebook photo sent by relatives, showing a girl found by Iraqi police in Mosul, rescued from an Arab family. This child had Zandinans distinctive(独特的) nose and the scar that her mother says she recognized.
After pandemic restrictions eased in last October, Zandinan flew to Baghdad with her two youngest children for DNA tests to help deter?mine whether the girl in the photo was hers.
Two weeks after they arrived, the family gave more blood samples to try to identify Zand?inans husband and eldest son Sufian from the remains exhumed(挖出) from mass graves in Sinjar, filled with ISIS victims.
After reading this report, what will you say to Kamo Zandinan and her family as well as to ISIS?