“Dad, I want to go back to Ceuta.” This is the phrase he repeated to his father from a precarious tent in the Roj camp, in northeast Syria. Lubna Mohamed Miludithe last of the Spanish women left in the country after traveling to the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate to marry ISIS terrorists. This is how he published it a year ago Chronic. And now his wish is already granted, as he was able to confirm THE WORLD from judicial sources and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lubna is in Ceuta, where she left more than ten years ago.
Spain, with US support, repatriated Lubna and her nine-year-old son Abderrahman after years of internment in camps run by Kurdish militias. The operation was carried out on November 25: A Spanish Air Force plane took off from Syrian territory and landed at the Torrejón de Ardoz base at half past one in the morning with both on board. Washington published a statement the day before in which it reported the arrival in Spain of “a woman and a child” from Roj.
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Lubna, the last Spanish jihadist in post-Assad Syria: “Dad, I want to return to Ceuta”
Lubna, the last Spanish jihadist in post-Assad Syria: “Dad, I want to return to Ceuta”
Lubna is one of the European women who gave up their lives to settle in the self-proclaimed caliphate. On November 5, 2014, he took a flight from Malaga to Istanbul and crossed the Syrian border. There she married a French citizen who was an ISIS fighter who later died in a bombing. From this marriage their son was born, Abderrahman.
After the territorial fall of the caliphate, mother and son were evacuated to Al Hol and, later, to Roj, where the families of the fighters were detained. A year ago, Chronic reconstructed the situation of the family in Ceuta and the whereabouts of Lubna in this camp, while a repatriation which did not take place in January 2023 was still uncertain. That month, an American military plane evacuates the Spanish Yolanda Martinez and Luna Fernándezalso accused of jihadism, with more than a dozen minors. The plane left without Lubna, the last widow, which fueled the versions of an alleged refusal to return and appear in court.
WHY DIDN’T HE COME BACK BEFORE?
Your lawyer, Marcos Garcia Montessupports another explanation. In the declarations to Chronic states that the absence was due to the child’s medical condition. “They were going to bring her with the previous girls, but the child was sick from an insect bite.”. They took him to a hospital outside the camp and, when they wanted to react, the plane had already left,” he summarizes. He adds that the image of the minor with a cardboard requesting repatriation reflected his desire to leave Syria.
After landing in Torrejón at the end of November, Lubna was arrested by agents of the General Information Commission and transferred to Madrid police stations. The child was placed under the guardianship of the protective services of the Community of Madrid and, a few days later, he was handed over to his grandparents, who went to the capital to collect him. The same morning, Lubna appeared before the Central Investigation Court number 1 of the National Court, assisted by García Montes. The judge ordered his provisional release with control measures while a case of alleged terrorist crimes is under investigation.
The lawyer describes her as a woman exhausted by years of confinement, but relieved to see that she will not go to prison. He recalls that in 2023 “everyone thought it was going to be a prison, as happened with Luna and Yolanda”, and asks to distinguish his case from that of the returnees. He claims Lubna did not travel as an activist or cell memberbut to get married, and that the fact that her husband was a fighter “does not automatically make her a jihadist”. He assures that he did not participate in any propaganda, recruitment or operational support. He considers that the heart of the matter is the minor: “He spent two to nine years in a concentration camp.” And this establishes his procedural position: without criminal record, without accredited collaboration or active membership in an armed organization. He announces that he will request dismissal.
The legal journey of Yolanda Martínez and Luna Fernández, repatriated in 2023, was very different. They spent months in preventive detention and ended up accepting a three-year sentence for integration into a terrorist organization, which forced them to return to prison before being granted semi-freedom. Their children were left under the supervision of social services or with their families. In Lubna’s case, the National Court opted for provisional release from the start.
“WITH THE SAME CONVICTIONS”
A state security source consulted by this supplement maintains that Lubna arrives “with the same convictions” with which he left, after years in an environment where “they fed off each other” in the discourse of the caliphate. He considers it unlikely that someone who has lived so long in IS circles would not carry some degree of indoctrination and hints at the need for a “deprogramming” process.in addition to a possible conflict with the family, who aspires to send the child to school and return to an ordinary life. The sources consulted distinguish this plane from the purely material: they describe “terrible” conditions in the camps, with disease and overcrowding, and attribute part of the desire to leave Syria to the misery of these places. They recall that the minor arrived without papers and must undergo biological tests to prove his parentage and regularize his situation. In the meantime, he remains under the formal guardianship of his grandparents. The same sources claim that Lubna already lives in Ceuta and that She was seen going out wearing the niqab she adopted years agoa gesture that they interpret as a continuity in their religious convictions. In 2019, Chronic previously published that these Spanish women and their children had received explicit military training during their stay in territories controlled by the Islamic State.
Javier Nartwho was a European MP, lawyer and war reporter, was one of the main promoters of repatriations. Nart explains that it all started when he learned that there were Spanish minors abandoned by Spain in the camps under Kurdish control. After overcoming initial disbelief, he crossed into Syrian territory to reach Roj, where he located several children and observed conditions he described as typical of a “concentration camp,” with violence, forced marriages and broken families. He claims that after his visit, he managed to “mobilize the Spanish government” and that Foreign Affairs acted effectively. Concerning Lubna, he states that he located her around Store 40 in Roj and that he passed this information on to Foreign Affairs and Defense, emphasizing the role of the Secretary of State. Diego Martinez Belio and the minister Marguerite Robleseven if the complexity of the process delayed the return for more than a year despite the proximity of the camps to the Iraqi border. He recognizes the trust maintained by the family and the work of García Montes, whose obtaining of provisional freedom he considers “a procedural miracle”.
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