They left Tajikistan as a family of six, but only one would live to tell the tale of how they lived — and most of them died — in Iraq after joining the Islamic State (IS) terror group, according to Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service.
"Ten-year-old Maryam is the only surviving member of my son's family," Muhammadrahim Shoyev, a farmer from a village located on the outskirts of the Tajik capital, tells RFE/RL's Tajik Service.
The last time Shoyev saw his son Jamoliddin was in 2015, when he returned briefly from abroad and stayed at the family home in Ghairatobod for six months before leaving again along with his wife and children.
Shoyev says that his son said he was going to Egypt, where he had studied more than a decade before.
He has no idea how the 37-year-old and his family ended up in Iraq.
Now, three months after being told that his granddaughter was the only member of his son's family to survive a 2017 attack on Mosul, Shoyev says that “I want to bring her back home from Iraq.”
Maryam Shoyeva was discovered almost by chance after she appeared on a Russian TV program about Russian-speaking children who had been taken to an Iraqi shelter after the recapture of Mosul from IS militants last year.
While the RT program identified four Tajik siblings who were staying at the shelter, it wasn't until later that Maryam — who can be seen saying in broken Russian that her parents had been killed in an air strike — was spotted by a former neighbor.
The Tajik migrant worker living in Russia contacted RFE/RL and provided the child's relatives' address in Dushanbe.
Maryam later appeared in another video in which she pleads with her relatives in Tajikistan to contact her. It is unclear who recorded and posted the video.
After becoming aware that his granddaughter had survived, Shoyev says he asked Tajik authorities to help bring the child home, a task the Foreign Ministry says might take some time. "We are working with the Iraqi Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan, to repatriate the Tajik women and children left there," the press office of the ministry said on February 22.
The government estimates that there are some 200 children among more than 1,000 Tajik nationals who left for Iraq and Syria to join the IS group since 2014. Some were killed in the conflict there.
Tajikistan offered amnesty to all its citizens who were not involved in IS violence and return home voluntarily. Dozens have since come back and reintegrated into normal life, resuming their work and studies.
Tajik authorities say the return of unaccompanied and undocumented minors is a complex and relatively long procedure that involves identifying the children and issuing provisional travel documents to submit to the Iraqi Embassy before arranging their flights from Baghdad.
