By Rhiona-Jade Armont
Yusuf Zahab was a Sydney schoolboy, taken to live in Syria under the Islamic State group when he was 12.
He has become emblematic of a generation of boys, adrift in the prisons of northeast Syria, locked up without charge from when they were children.
SBS Dateline documents the life of Yusuf Zahab, a boy sinking deeper into the quicksand of a system far from home.
By all accounts, Yusuf Zahab was a happy kid – an Australian schoolboy
who loved the outdoors.
But Yusuf’s story is not synonymous with bike rides around his local Bankstown.
In early 2015, Yusuf’s family went on holiday.
Toward the end of their trip they were in the southern Turkish city of Gazientep, and from there they travelled further south to the border with Syria.
They were no longer on holiday.
Yusuf’s family have conflicting accounts of how and why
they ended up in Islamic State (IS) group territory.
What is known is that two of his older siblings were already there. His eldest brother Muhammed had joined the IS group and his sister Sumaya had been there since 2014.
Yusuf’s father says they crossed into Syria to retrieve them.
His mother says they were coerced across the border by their other son Kaled.
Source: Conflict Monitor IHS Markit, 2015
Yusuf, who was just 12 at the time, says he didn’t understand what was going on.
“My brother Kaled was telling me to run and I was crying and I was scared and holding my mum’s hand and running.
“I didn’t understand until later on they told me what was going on. I didn’t even know what ISIS is. I didn’t even know Syria and Iraq exists in my life.”
From this point, Yusuf’s life would never be the same.
Throughout the years Yusuf lived in the so-called caliphate, the IS group’s territory continued to expand and reports of atrocities abounded.
The group became synonymous with violent extremism, brutality, and horrific violence against women.
Yazidi (a Kurdish-speaking religious minority) women were trafficked and held as sex slaves, journalists and aid workers were attacked and beheaded – their deaths publicised for the world to see – and cultural sites destroyed.
While the world erupted around him, Yusuf says he was mostly at home, playing PlayStation and watching movies on a laptop.
“There used to be hittings from planes and that. My mother was always afraid for me to go out and I was always afraid to go out because the noise of the planes is scary.”
Yusuf’s parents say he lived a protected existence for his first few years in Syria.
His brothers walked a different path.
Muhammad was now a senior IS group member and Kaled had begun training as a fighter.
Yusuf was told by his brothers to pick a new name while they lived under the Caliphate.
He chose Abu Osman.
“In my school Athletics Day … my team was called Osman.”
Within a few months of arriving in Syria, Kaled was reportedly killed
in a strike on his training camp.
By 2018, Muhammad had also been killed.
Yusuf insists he never joined the IS group. When asked by SBS Dateline about his parents’ allegiance, he was unsure.
“I always say in my mind it’s because of my brothers,
not because of my mother and father.
“It was because of my brothers, because of Kaled, because of Muhammad.
“They got us into all this trouble.”
Yusuf describes these years as rife with trauma and trepidation.
“We literally spent the time going from place to place, scared of getting hit
until we got to Baghuz.”
Baghuz, a town in southeast Syria on the Iraq border, became infamous as the last outpost of the IS group. As coalition forces closed in, it became clear that these were the final days of a fast-collapsing caliphate.
Source: Conflict Monitor IHS Markit, 2015
As the IS group faced a crippling defeat, the people who lived under its rule were almost free. But Yusuf says the day they emerged from a liberated Baghuz was ike a “horror movie”.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led militia that controls most of northeastern Syria, separated families; wives from husbands, children from parents. Women and children were to be sent to detention camps, men to prisons.
Some 10,000 suspected IS fighters and more than 40,000 civilians were rounded up.
Yusuf was only 15 at the time, but was swiftly separated from his mother and grouped in with the men; suspected IS group fighters and sympathisers.
For Yusuf’s mother Aminah, the moment of their separation is a haunting memory.
“He was put in a line of men on one side,” she says.
“I was put in with women on another side”.
“I couldn’t even hug him.”
Yusuf was shaken too. The prospect of leaving his mother’s side was terrifying.
“I started to tear up a bit,” he says. “I was like, how am I going to go with the men?
All these guys are big guys and that.”
“I never left my mum. Probably the first time I’m going to leave her.”
Yusuf says a guard promised that he would be taken to prison for no more than two months and then would be able to see his mother again.
His mother told him to take care of himself and pleaded with the guards to look after him.
“From then, they took me to prison.”
Yusuf says the various prisons he was held in employed torture tactics.
“The only water you get is salty water and there’s no normal water to drink. This [makes] us more thirsty.”
He also described overcrowding, with more than 40 men in his cell.
Many of the men he was detained with were suspected IS group fighters, rounded up in the final hours of the battle at Baghuz.
“I never used to sit with them. I never used to get close to them. I used to be scared of them.”
For Yusuf, the surroundings were often the most challenging part. He describes one cell flooded with sewage.
By the third location he had been moved to, his health started to deteriorate.
“I got kidney stones. I started to get pain and I tried to tell them. They never took me to a doctor.”
He says he was given one injection and returned to the cell.
The SDF, who run the prisons in northeast Syria, deny Yusuf’s allegations of torture and assert they are doing their best to provide medical care to prisoners.
For Yusuf, there were only small moments of relief during this time.
Soon after his arrival in prison, Yusuf says he was visited by ASIO agents who asked about his welfare and whether he joined the IS group. Yusuf was just grateful for a chance to tell his story and ask about his family.
A few months after his separation, Yusuf says the Red Cross passed on a letter from his mother. He wasn’t allowed to keep it, but he could send a reply.
“I drew on it … a flower for her.”
Yusuf’s father Hicham is also being held in a prison in Syria,
but the two have had no contact.
“I’m stuck in this quicksand,” Hicham says.
“I want say sorry to [Yusuf] because he’s been through a lot and he was so young to be in the jail.”
Soon, Yusuf’s time in prison would become even more harrowing.
He says he was sent to a notorious prison called Shadadi.
UN reports on the prison document incidences of inhuman, degrading treatment, torture, enforced disappearance and death in detention.
“I went there, got beaten up so much. I got knocked out twice,” Yusuf says.
“I [had] blood coming out of my nose and my mouth. My lips got ripped from how much they used to beat me up on the head, on my body.”
He also recalls being starved over the months he was held there.
Local authorities say these allegations are false.
Source: United Nations Geospatial, 2021
Yusuf was then taken to yet another prison, this time in the town of Al-Hasakah.
After what he recalls as at least 18 months of being held with men as an unaccompanied minor, Yusuf was finally placed among other children.
Yusuf says he was allowed to see the sun for just 15 minutes a day.
As the years ticked on, Yusuf’s family back in Australia continued to lobby for his repatriation. Concerns began to grow for his safety.
By early 2021, Yusuf’s family learned that he had contracted tuberculosis.
“I’m scared I’m going to die here,” Yusuf said of his diagnosis.
“So many people died in prison. I’m scared about this TB thing that I have in me. And then there’s no medicine. They’re not giving me medicine.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report just two months later that claimed at least 100 prisoners at Al-Hasakah were suspected of having tuberculosis and at least two detainees had already died from the disease.
HRW also reported on levels of overcrowding and described the facilities as having “open latrines and poor ventilation”.
These conditions stoked a constant fear and desperation in Yusuf.
“I wished to go somewhere else, a better place.”
On 20 January 2022, Yusuf found himself in the most dangerous place he could be.
Source: Islamic State group telegram channel, 2022
“It was like one day I was playing with a friend of mine … something exploded.”
The prison Yusuf was held in was attacked by IS group militants seeking to free the men inside.
“Everyone got scared and confused… I got really scared. I didn’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know how the doors fell open. Men started to come into our area.”
As IS group militants overpowered the guards, seizing control of the prison, men began moving between buildings.
The entire compound was now under siege, with the SDF’s special forces trying to contain the situation.
This was the biggest and most brutal resurgence of the Islamic State group the region had seen since the fall of the so-called caliphate, according to the SDF Special Forces Commander Danish Amuda.
“They broke all the beds and doors and turned them into swords,” Amuda said.
“We found three heads. Later we found out they were our comrades.”
Source: SDF
“The shooting was happening outside and I was really scared,” Yusuf says.
As others fled the area, Yusuf tried to outlast the siege, surviving only on some stale bread and a shared bottle of water.
As the battle raged on, his situation became even more desperate.
While searching for food, he sustained a head injury.
“I thought I was going to die.”
At this point, Yusuf found a mobile phone, likely smuggled into the prison.
“I took a picture of myself so probably people can believe and understand me that I’m injured, I need help.”
He also used it to send voice messages to HRW and a family member in Australia.
These would soon make headlines.
“I didn’t know what was going on and I thought if I asked for help … organisations were going to come help me. But nothing happened.”
“My auntie, my cousin told me to calm down and keep my head down and it’s all right, everything’s alright.”
The battle bled out into the neighbouring streets and lasted 10 days.
The SDF reported 500 deaths, including 374 supposedly linked to the IS group, 121 to the SDF, and four civilians.
The remaining inmates that survived and surrendered were rounded up.
Source: SDF
Once the siege was over, Yusuf was moved to yet another prison.
But the attack in Al-Hasakah was a critical juncture for boys like Yusuf.
Local authorities did not reveal the number of unaccounted inmates, but UN experts expressed concerns for the fate and whereabouts of at least
100 other unaccounted juveniles.
Back in Australia, there were headlines about missing boys, but the lines of communcation fell quiet and Yusuf’s family were left in the dark about his whereabouts and wellbeing.
No one had heard from him; no one had heard about him.
A few months later, on 9 April, Yusuf turned 18. The day came and went with no fanfare or celebration. He was no longer a boy lost in the system, but a man.
His family had still not heard if he had survived the prison attack.
By July 2022, he was no longer even lost in the system, but rather, lost to it.
Yusuf had been reported dead.
Rights groups and media speculated on the cause of his death – injuries sustained in the prison attack or his untreated tuberculosis – but how or when he died could not be confirmed.
The news of his death made its way to his mother, who is being held in a detention camp in northeast Syria. She said she knew this was coming.
His family back in Sydney held a memorial at Lakemba mosque and the community, heavy with grief, gathered to mourn him.
Yusuf was unaware the outside world had declared him dead.
“I’m not. I was in prison the whole time.”
The next 12 months would pass, quiet and unchanged.
But in July 2023, new information emerged that would change everything.
A family member says they were visited by two officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
They showed her a proof of life video of Yusuf.
She was told she couldn’t keep the video, but she took notes of everything she saw and heard.
In the video, Yusuf identified himself and said the date: 15 September 2022.
It was three months after he was pronounced dead.
Authorities were unable to provide details of the video’s origins or procurement.
It led to more questions than answers.
The family’s will to find Yusuf was renewed, but they had no knowledge of what had happened to him since the prison attack; no evidence that he was still alive.
Australian officials have long asserted that the logistics of operating in Syria has made managing cases like Yusuf’s particularly challenging.
In 2023, when discussing the cases of Australians awaiting repatriation in northeast Syria, Foreign Minister Penny Wong described the area as very risky.
“It’s not like we can turn up,” Wong said.
In early 2024, SBS Dateline did just that.
Travelling to Syria in search of Yusuf, the team met with the SDF and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) to arrange contact.
“We say this to whoever wants to take their citizens: we are ready to assist them,” said co-chair of the AANES’ Department of Foreign Relations, Badran Çiya Kurd.
“The situation in Rojava (northeast Syria) is suitable and sufficient for diplomats
to come from abroad.”
After a few days of waiting, SBS Dateline had secured an interview with Yusuf,
the boy once thought lost, even dead.
Taken to a secure third location, so as not to reveal the prison he is being held in, SBS Dateline laid eyes on him for the first time – a young man, handcuffed and hollow-eyed, desperate to hear news of the outside world.
When he learned who he was speaking with, a boyish smile appeared.
Yusuf says this was the first time in five years he’d spoken with an Australian in person.
At the time of writing, DFAT has not replied to Dateline’s question on whether Australian authorities had had direct contact with Yusuf since he was detained by Kurdish forces in 2019.
A written statement DFAT provided to SBS Dateline reiterated its challenges of official communication in the region.
“Our ability to provide consular assistance to Australians in Syria is severely limited due to the security situation.”
Yusuf’s fate remains in the hands of the SDF, until a time when the Australian government chooses to intervene.
Yusuf is unsure if he still has tuberculosis, but described a pain in his chest and reported headaches, dizziness and occasional blackouts.
But his primary concern is if he will be repatriated.
“Are they going to take me back to Australia?” he asked.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
Hearing of his family’s continued efforts to find him, Yusuf expressed his desperation
to see them again.
“I want to hug my mum. I want to hug my sister. I just want to sit down with them,”
Yusuf says.
“Please don’t forget me here.”
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