Selim Demolli gripped the table with his hands, and his lip trembled with anger as he spoke.
The previous day he had talked to an imam about his son, who was killed three years ago in Syria. He asked the imam for a religious explanation about what happens to a dead person whose parents have not forgiven him. The answer was hard to take.
“He is not a shahid [martyr]. Those who did not get a blessing from their father cannot rest in peace. The imam even told me so. They are called ‘cursed’,” Demolli said.
Demolli’s son Burim was killed in October 2014 at the age of 31, during an offensive by US forces in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Like Selim Demolli, hundreds of family members of Albanian jihadists from Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia live under the shadow of what their relatives have done, stigmatised and hated by others, and given no official support.
More than 315 people from Kosovo, 120 from Albania and over 100 from Macedonia have joined so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq over the past few years. At least 65 of them were killed in the fighting, leaving their families in an even worse plight.
Demolli, a 67-year-old from Pristina, said that he tried to stop his son from leaving.
“I informed the police, asking them to arrest him so that he could not go there. However, he managed to escape the police search while I was not at home, and he left with his wife and with three children,” he explained.
Burim Demolli was killed two months later, and now his father is searching for the ones who were left alive, his grandson and two granddaughters, who have remained in Syria.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
