Mahmud and Ayyub, so traumatised they no longer know their mother’s name, face new dangers as US troops withdraw

Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira look shyly at the camera, bundled up in layers and hats against the Syrian winter. They can barely remember the sun and beaches at home in Trinidad, from their life before their father decided to join Islamic State and abducted them in 2014.

Ayyub, seven, wants to be a footballer when he grows up; Mahmud, 11, loves cricket and misses KFC chicken. More than anything, they wish they could go home and hug their mother, who is thousands of miles away on the Caribbean island.

Turkey primed to start offensive against US-backed Kurds in Syria Read more

The brothers are among the estimated 1,200 foreign children – including at least 10 from Britain – left in legal limbo since Isis was driven out of its de facto capital, Raqqa, in October 2017. More than a year later, the international community has failed to bring them home, and the children face an imminent new danger: Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that US troops will withdraw from Syria is likely to embolden Turkey in attacking the Kurdish corner of the country where they are being held.

Kidnapped the day after Ayyub’s third birthday, the boys spent several years living in the so-called caliphate before the US-led coalition closed in and their father sent them out of Raqqa to Turkey with their Belgian stepmother.

She abandoned them on the side of the road, where they were picked up by the Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces. Since then they have been alone in Camp Roj, the miserable new home of the families of dead or imprisoned militants. Their father is believed dead. Their stepmother is in another camp in Kurdish territory.

Mahmud (left) and Ayyub Ferreira, photographed in Syria. Photograph: Supplied

Conditions at Roj are wretched. Over time the camp has become the designated holding facility for women and children with Isis links; as a result, several aid groups were forced to withdraw their services as the camp no longer fell under their humanitarian remit, and living standards have deteriorated.

Tarpaulin tents do not provide adequate shelter from cold and wet winter conditions nor the heat of summer. Tent fires caused by paraffin cooking stoves are common; one such fire in June killed two small children.

Even the relative safety of Camp Roj may be ripped away if the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, follows through on his promise to invade north-east Syria.

The brothers are already so traumatised by their experiences they cannot remember their mother’s name, but they have clung on to battered and water-stained pictures of her for the last four years. The Guardian used the pictures to find Felicia Perkins-Ferreira who lives in Petit Valley, a quiet suburb just outside Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain.

She had only recieved intermittent news of the boys for the last year and has suffered from panic attacks since they were taken by her ex-husband. “When they left, he told me they were going to their grandmother’s house. The next day my sister came and she said he’d gone to Syria ... It wasn’t until a bit later I felt this emptiness and broke down crying,” she said.

Play Video 0:40 Trinidadian brothers record message for mother from Syria – video

The international legal nonprofit Reprieve has stepped in to help bring the children home but it is a race against the clock to secure travel papers and get them out of the country before the situation destabilises. The Trinidadian authorities have shown little interest in reuniting the family.

“We don’t have the machinery or the wherewithal to identify people and bring them back. We have to rely on the international community and the information of people who are in contact with their families out there,” the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, Keith Rowley, told the Guardian at a Christmas political fundraising raffle outside a supermarket in the affluent Westmoorings neighbourhood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph of Felicia Perkins-Ferreira. Photograph: re Camp Roj

Trinidad may be guilty of dragging its feet on repatriation, but the tiny country is following the example of states with far more resources and international muscle that have also refused to address the issue.

The Kurdish authorities say the UK government in particular has stonewalled requests for help in dealing with the few dozen British men, women and children currently in their custody, although earlier this year it attempted to extradite two surviving members of the terror cell known as the Beatles to the US after stripping them of UK citizenship.

Several Kurdish, military and diplomatic sources have suggested the US-led coalition against Isis is seeking to hand over suspects to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, a regime with which western countries severed relations in 2011.

The human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, a legal director at Reprieve, alleges the British government has pressured other countries not to repatriate their citizens on the grounds that all the men and women held are dangerous.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira pictured before they were taken from Trinidad. Photograph: Supplied

As first reported by the Guardian, Canada and the Kurdish administration struck a deal in spring to repatriate Canadian citizens, including the suspected fighter Jack Letts, a dual UK-Canadian national. Ottawa pulled out at the last minute, however, after what Stafford Smith said was British “arm twisting”.

“First, 10 of the 14 British citizens I’ve met in Kurdish custody are children; second, the British authorities are all over the area but they’ve only actually bothered to speak to one British woman. It’s a sham position to stoke a populist fear, just as it was in Guantánamo Bay where most detainees were guilty of nothing,” he said.

Global Affairs Canada, which manages the country’s diplomatic relations and provides consular help for its citizens, denied there had been any deal concerning the repatriation of citizens.

It said in a statement: “Given the security situation on the ground, the government of Canada’s ability to provide consular assistance in any part of Syria is extremely limited. Canadian diplomats have established a communications channel with local Kurdish authorities in order to verify the whereabouts of Canadian citizens.”

A UK Foreign Office spokesperson reiterated that consular services in Syria were suspended in 2012. “The government will do what it takes to keep families, communities and our country safe. The security of the UK will always come first. Where there is evidence that crimes have been committed, foreign fighters should be brought to justice in accordance with due legal process, regardless of their nationality. The appropriate process will be dependent on the individual circumstances.”

The timeframe for action is close to expiring. After 14 months of relative calm, Trump’s decision last week to withdraw the 2,000 US special forces who act as a buffer between Syria’s Kurds and neighbouring Turkey, which views them as terrorists, makes renewed violence in the area all but certain.

“We had lots of alternatives for bringing these people home, but they all required time,” Stafford Smith said. “We don’t have that luxury any more. We have failed the children stuck in north-east Syria once already … We cannot do it again.”

In Trinidad, thousands of miles away from the snow her sons are playing in in Syria, Felicia Perkins-Ferreira has laid eyes on her children for the first time in a year after receiving recordings from Reprieve.

“I dreamed of them for three nights straight,” Perkins-Ferreira said in a WhatsApp message. “I’m just praying to get them back safe and sound.”