They are fighting to save grandchildren who have been orphaned by ISIS ‘daughter
When Patricio Galvez heard that his daughter had died in Syria, he could not pause to mourn – because he needed to save his grandchildren.
“I needed to find the kids,” Galvez, 53, told The Post. “My mission was to go to Syria and get [her] children. That was very clear. “
But it would not be easy. Galvez’s daughter, Amanda Gonzales, had been married to Scandinavia’s most hated terrorist, Michael Skramo, who had raised money and recruited members of the Islamic State – ISIS – and instructed his followers on social media to murder non-Muslims in Sweden.
Amanda was killed in an airstrike in January 2019 near Baghuz, carried out by US-backed rebel forces. Amanda was pregnant with their eighth child when she died.
Following the shooting death of their father two months later, the seven surviving children, aged between 1 and 8, had been taken to the bustling Kurdish-run refugee camp Al-Hol in northeastern Syria. In the nasty site, which housed more than 60,000 people, the children risked dying of malnutrition – not to mention being further indoctrinated in the Islamic State through networks of ISIS widows who brainwashed “caliphate kids,” Galvez said.
Only 40 percent of ISIS orphans in Al-Hol receive education. “Violence is a daily occurrence” at the camp, according to the Save the Children group, with many children recently telling the charity that they feel “insecure” when they go to the market or use latrines and bathing facilities. “Murder, attempted murder, assault and intentional arson are also common,” according to a September report from the charity.
“I needed to get them out of that hell as fast as possible,” Galvez said. “I wanted to get them out of intolerance, which is like a malignant cancer.”
The musician, who grew up in Chile and now lives in Gothenburg, Sweden, switched between his mother tongue Spanish and English when he told the story of the two months he spent trying to save his grandchildren. He had not yet met the three youngest, who were born in Syria.
His journey to free his grandchildren is told in painful and often painful details in “Children of the Enemy”, a new documentary directed by the Chilean-Swedish filmmaker Gorki Glaser-Muller. The film will have its North American premiere on Saturday at DOC NYC Festival before it is streamed online.
Glaser-Muller, 48, accompanied Galvez to the Syrian border in Iraq to describe his one-man rescue mission.
– It was just me, and I was behind the camera all the time, says Glaser-Muller to The Post from his home in Gothenburg. “It was scary at times because I had little idea what I was getting myself into crossing the border into Syria.”
It was partly Galvez’s fault for not being near his daughter that drove his mission to save her children.
Amanda Gonzales had converted to Islam when she was 18, guided by her mother, with whom she lived after her parents split up when she was a small child. (Galvez changed his last name from Gonzales when he immigrated from Chile more than 30 years ago.)
After Amanda, who was completely covered in a jar, unsuccessfully tried to convert her father to Islam and refused to have dinner with him at restaurants that served alcohol, the two grew apart.
Amanda met Skramo through a blog with an Islamic theme that she wrote from Gothenburg, where the terrorist reportedly preached in the local mosque. Skramo had his own YouTube channel and changed his name to Abo Ibrahim Al-Swedi when he was further radicalized.
After the two married, Galvez felt as if Amanda was completely lost to him, even though he still visited her in Sweden after the birth of her oldest child. Her first, Ibrahim, was born when she was 21, he said.
“He was never there,” said Galvez of Skramo, a red-haired Norwegian converted to Islam. “Amanda was always at home with the kids.” “She wanted to be a filmmaker,” Galvez told The Post. To encourage this, her father bought her a video camera, which he found untouched after she left Sweden. Camcorders were haram – banned in the Islamic State “, he said.
In 2014, Amanda, then a 24-year-old mother of four, followed Skramo to Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State caliphate in Syria. She told her father that she was going to Turkey on a two-week vacation.
“I believed in it,” Galvez said.
Instead, she ended up devoting much of her time to raising her growing family within the strict framework of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, which was founded in the summer of 2014 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the terrorist group. Thousands of ISIS members from around the world gathered in Raqqa, where the football stadium was turned into a torture center where ISIS beheaded its enemies.
Amanda had three more children in the caliphate and continued to communicate with her father through online chats where she tried to convince him that she and Skramo had a higher calling. “Life is not useless,” she said. “What we have matters.”
But in 2018, when a US-backed militia group took over the city, the messages from Amanda to her father became increasingly desperate. Her family had to flee invading rebel forces and moved from safe house to safe house in the midst of gun battles and bombings. She asked her father to send her money.
“You know I’ve always been skinny but now my clothes are falling off me,” she wrote along with photos of the children who looked listless and skinny. “The situation is extremely worrying.”
Galvez, who went to Chile on a music tour in the summer of 2018, promised his daughter that he would find a way to help her. The last time he heard was in December of the same year. She said she lived in very difficult circumstances and had nothing to eat. Galvez received the news of her death on January 3, 2019.
Amanda was killed in an airstrike when a piece of shrapnel pierced her back. Her oldest child saw her bleeding to death. Skramo survived and fled with the children. Two months later, in early March, Skramo – who had already remarried – was paralyzed by a bullet. He left the children in the care of his second wife, who told Amanda’s mother about his death, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. In mid-March, Galvez heard from Amanda’s mother that the children had escaped from the war zone safely and were living in the Al-Hol refugee camp.
Two months after Skramo’s death, Galvez and Glaser-Muller were trapped in a hotel room in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and waited for weeks for Swedish and Kurdish officials to allow them to visit the children.
Both men were elated when they were finally allowed to visit the camp across the border.
“I’ll teach them the word freedom in Spanish, libertad, says Galvez in the film. His relief is palpable, and the scene is all the more poignant as both he and Glaser-Muller had left Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.
“It was very clear that Patricio would give in to grief if he did not succeed,” Glaser-Muller said of rescuing the children. “And I thought, ‘Will I be the one to pick up the pieces?’ At a certain point in time, you have to choose to be a filmmaker or to be a person. ”
Glaser-Muller is involved in the drama and secretly films the children in the camp where the youngest, 1-year-old Mohammed, was dangerously thin.
As if the bureaucratic nightmare to save his grandchildren was not enough, Galvez was confronted with anger from his fellow Swedes. When the Swedish media documented the rescue in May 2019, he received messages on social media from those who did not want the terrorists’ children to be brought back to their country.
“You have raised a terrorist; you are not a well-trained parent”, reads one of the messages that Galvez shares in the film. At the time, a survey conducted by YouGov in Sweden showed that 54 percent of Swedes were against bringing children back to Islamic members of the state, compared with 23 percent for.
The oldest children recognized their grandfather when he came to the camp and asked about their mother. Galvez flew with them to Sweden thanks to friends who donated money to buy airline tickets for all of them.
But there was no possibility for him to receive seven small children, as he lives in a small apartment and is already raising two more children of his own. Still, Galvez said he was broken when the Swedish social services took control of their fate.
Today, his grandchildren live under different names, housed in a foster home an hour away from Gothenburg. After two years, they are finally starting to make friends, Galvez said. He told The Post that he regularly visits them on weekends and holidays, but the social services in Sweden have not arranged to collect all the children – a decision taken to protect their anonymity in a country where they can still be stigmatized, Galvez added.
“I lost my daughter a long time ago when she was living a radical life,” he said. “I try to do everything I can for her children.”
Despite the life that Amanda led, he would still like to return to Syria to see where, he has been told, she is buried.
“I’m going back to find her,” Galvez said.
He has also started the non-profit organization Repatriate the Children to help other families repatriate children to Islamic State terrorists in the camp.
“They cataloged my daughter as a terrorist and the children in the same way, but these children are innocent,” Galvez said. “It’s important to separate them from what their parents did, and to realize that they are not guilty of anything.”