PRISTINA, Kosovo — It started out as a father-and-son trip to Kosovo’s western mountains in July. It turned into a months-long ordeal for an 8-year-old boy who was taken to war-torn Syria by his jihadi father and only returned after a shadowy operation involving Kosovo’s spy agency.
“I thought they were going on a holiday for a couple of days,” said his mother, Pranvera Zena Abazi, 30, in an interview late Thursday. “Three days later, I got an SMS from his father, Arben, saying they were in Syria.”
She was reunited with her son, Erion, late Wednesday after what Kosovo officials said was a “delicate and dangerous” operation that involved security and intelligence agents.
“It was a moment that I have no words to describe,” Zena Abazi said, adding that authorities gave her only an hour’s notice before she saw her only child again.
Extremists in Syria are apparently encouraging jihadis traveling to join them to bring children, intent upon proving that they can establish an Islamic caliphate, compete with devout families.
Erion’s case received wide attention in Kosovo after his mother made a public appeal for her son’s return.
A Facebook page was opened in support of Zena Abazi and she made media appearances in Kosovo and Albania, from where a growing number of youths have joined Islamist radicals in Iraq and Syria.
Details about Erion’s return remain murky. Kosovo media suggested the boy was brought back by another Kosovo jihadi in return for a pardon from authorities for joining a terrorist group, an illegal act in Kosovo. Officials declined to comment on the reports.
An Associated Press reporter saw the boy ushered into a room in Pristina’s International Airport on Wednesday night by two men in civilian clothes, apparently agents of Kosovo’s Intelligence Agency who had flown into the Kosovo capital from Turkey.
The boy’s father, Arben Zena, is thought to be in Iraq, according to Kosovo authorities who are monitoring his contacts with other suspected radicals. Abazi Zena said she has not heard from him.
Zena Abazi said she has not spoken to her son about his months in Syria, which has been ravaged for years by civil war.
“I want him to go back to the life he had. I’m not dealing with what went on there,” she said. “He wants to play football, he always did. And I would like to make that wish come true. I want to fulfil his every wish.”
