Kidnapping of Yusuf and Zahra Shikder

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Rewards for Justice is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to location, recovery, and return of U.S. siblings Yusuf and Zahra Shikder.

The children’s mother kidnapped the children and took them to Syria in 2015 to join ISIS without their father’s consent. When the mother died in 2019 during a military strike against ISIS forces, ISIS key leader Khadra Essa, a Somali-born Dutch citizen, held the children and then took them to an undisclosed location in Syria.

Essa, also known as Umm Qaqa al-Somali and Umm Qaqa al-Britani, led a group that violently enforced sharia law against women, issued orders which resulted in physical punishments, such as assaults and even murder, and threatened to kill anyone who wanted to leave ISIS.

The Shikder children were last known to be in Syria. Yusuf was born in 2010, and Zahra was born in 2014.