For the families of Albanian men who died fighting for Islamic State, the pain and uncertainty drag on.
Salushe Seferi’s ordeal began in 2013, when her daughter, Ruzhdie Balliu, left Albania for Syria. It ended, of sorts, eight years later in July 2021, when Ruzhdie was repatriated to a shelter in Durres, on the coast. Seferi, however, still suffers the scars of a war that was not hers. And she’s not alone.
Barred from visiting her daughter while she is living in the shelter, Seferi told BIRN: “We appealed and called many times so I can see her while I am still alive. At least now I know that she is here, even though I haven’t had the chance to touch her and hug her.”
Seferi’s story is a familiar one – a daughter whose 18-year-old son and then husband left for Syria to fight alongside Islamic State. Ruzhdie followed, only for the husband and son to be killed. At least that’s what was said in the news; there is scant official information and the family still hopes they are alive.
“Ten years we have been waiting for at least our sister to come back; we almost lost hope,” said Ruzhdie’s brother, Sefer Seferi. “Fortunately, she came back and has the opportunity to live here as a human being and not in the camps.”
Hundreds of Albanians from Albania and neighbouring Kosovo fought for ISIS in Iraq and Syria before the collapse of its self-proclaimed caliphate in March 2019. Many of their wives and children ended up in squalid camps in Syria, to be repatriated in a slow trickle ever since.
Former fighters – those who survived – have faced punishment, while the woman and children entered reintegration programmes that have had mixed results.
The phenomenon, meanwhile, has devastated the families and communities that were left behind, still at a loss to explain what happened and why.
“One day he told his mother that he was leaving for Turkey with his wife and two children,” said Laureta Kosturi, whose brother Dritan was reported killed in Syria in 2014. He was 36.
Speaking in Cerrik, central Albania, in the house her brother built partly with money earned during five years in the UK, Kosturi told BIRN: “He talked to our mother almost every week on the phone… until he cut it off and for a year he didn’t answer the phone again.”
“We don’t believe he’s dead; mum says she feels that he’s alive. She’s in her 80s and is still waiting for her son.”
Kosturi said she “rarely” gets to speak to her brother’s two children, and struggles alone to look after her mother and her other brother, who has mental health problems.
“He was the pillar of the house,” she said of her brother who left for Syria. “The fate of our brother is unknown; he could be somewhere, even in a prison.”
Roots of radicalisation
The area of Librazhd, eastern Albania, is one of the poorest in the country. With the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, visitors began arriving from the Middle East, bringing aid, food and clothes on behalf of Islamic humanitarian organisations.
A former member of the Albanian intelligence service, SHIK, said such visitors also brought with them a stricter school of Islam, and found fertile ground in the village of Dragostunje.
“Families were divided and even the mosques were divided,” said the former agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We even have testimony that up to 30,000 lek [260 euros] was given to families to dress girls in burqas. That’s no small sum at a time when there was a lot of poverty.”
“We saw how little girls covered themselves, how they organised closed marriages without music with men and women separated… Even young boys were sent for education and all came back as theologians and clerics,” he told BIRN.
After the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on the US, Albania – a staunch ally – turned its attention to such communities and “the more radical ones” were marginalised, said the former agent. Those who ended up in Syria were “taken advantage of,” he said, noting that Genci Balla, arrested and jailed in 2015 for recruiting fighters for ISIS, was born in Librazhd.
“They were so indoctrinated that one father in Dragostunje didn’t open his house for condolences when his son was killed in Syria; he felt proud that his son was killed in the war in Syria.”
The former agent said the village had since changed, that the villagers were focussed on farming and that everyone now worships at the mosque together. But, he said, “Those who did not find opportunities emigrated. There has been a drastic decrease in the population in recent years.”
Families left devastated
In Cerrik, where the Kosturi family lives, the house of another family with a son reported killed in Syria sits empty.
“We have no information about them. Only the house remains, nothing else,” said Edmond Xhufka, a former neighbour of Sherif Taushani, whose death was reported in July 2013.
Local authorities told BIRN that officially two families in Cerrik have lost family members fighting with ISIS, while several other families had returned but not sought help.
“We have identified them and offered them the opportunities we have, but we have accepted their request not to be identified as returnees or people in need, although there are cases that really need support,” said Ilma Mema of Cerrik municipality social services.
The area around Pogradec, on the southwestern banks of Lake Ohrid, has also proven another hotspot, particularly a triangle of villages – Leshnica, Zagorcan and Rremenj – along the road to Korce in southeastern Albania near the border with Greece.
The area suffers from high levels of unemployment, with men and boys traditionally supporting their families through seasonal work in Greece. At least 20 people from each of the three villages left for Syria.
Dylber Shuli, from Zagorcan, is still waiting for word of his five grandchildren, who ended up in Syrian camp when Shuli’s son, Krenar, was killed having taken his family to Syria on October 24, 2013. Shuli does not know what happened to his daughter-in-law.
“We have seen videos of children asking to return from the camp; they [the authorities] have not returned my children. I have been asking for my children to return… for nine years, but they have not given me any hope.”
Shuli and his wife are both elderly and live alone in a dilapidated house with only their meagre pensions to support them.
“We are two old people who cannot do anything,” he told BIRN through tears. “We have not seen any representative of the state.”
“Some time ago, people came to me from Kosovo asking for money to go and bring Krenar’s five children to Albania; I don’t have money and I can’t do anything privately.”
To add insult to injury, Shuli said the man who “encouraged” them to flee still lives in the village. “We cannot talk about the fact that they follow us and threaten us. The state should have intervened, not us.”