The Guardian

It shouldn’t take Pink Floyd to rescue Isis fighters’ abandoned children | Letta Tayler

Governments with nationals trapped in Syria should do what Roger Waters did when he saved Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira
Mahmud and Ayyb Ferreira, their mother (right) and an NGO worker leaving Qamishli in northeast Syria on 21 January. Photograph: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty

“Pink Floyd rescues Trinidadian boys born to Isis dad”: it reads like a headline from US satirical outlet the Onion. But the information is real, and the issue it highlights is no laughing matter.

On 21 January, Roger Waters, co-founder of the British rock band Pink Floyd, from a camp in Syria that was holding wives and children of foreign Islamic State, have been reunited with their mother and are poised to return to their native Trinidad. The boys were taken to Syria by their father – reportedly now dead – in 2014. A few years later they were found abandoned on a roadside, and put in the camp run by the Kurdish-Arab forces controlling northeast Syria.

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