By Jasu Diaz –
Jaqueline Salah thought love transcended boundaries, but then her Yemeni husband kidnapped their three daughters and took them to Yemen. It was not until 15 years later that she saw them again – and Jackie had to travel into a war zone.
“I felt I failed as a mother because they were taken by the person who’s supposed to love them, their dad,” Jaqueline says. “My heart just dropped. I knew that I was never getting them back.”
What began on the dance floor in Cardiff, Wales, turned into a nightmare. Her daughters wound up in war-torn Yemen in 1986, spirited off by a father who insisted they be raised under Islamic standards.
Jackie was only 15 when, headstrong, she left her parents for the club. There she met Saddak Hussein Salah, who was 28 years old at the time.
Love blossomed.
“It was fun, exciting, romantic,” Jacqueline recalls. “But my mom and dad were horrified.”
A few short years after their initial encounter, they started a family, despite her parents’ misgivings about the union.
The first child was Rahannah, the second Nadia.
Eventually Saddak found work in Saudi Arabia, and Jackie and the girls went with hin. Jackie had to convert to Islam and adopt the customs of Saudi Arabia, including full body and head coverings. She got pregnant with their third, Sophia, in Saudi Arabia.
She longed for home and for freedom. Saddak agreed to return with the family to Wales.
But family life soured in Wales. Saddak was drinking and became dark and gloomy. He became violent towards Jackie.
Finally he plotted to take the kids to Yemen with him. “He wanted them to be brought up. Muslim girls, kept indoors and being told what to do,” Jackie says. “He just wanted to control those girls.”
To execute the plan, he started treating Jackie nicely. One day when she was sick, he offered to take the kids to see family on the other side of town for the weekend.
Jackie didn’t see them again — until 15 years later.
“This was just the first day of a waking nightmare that would last for decades,” she says.
Police found he had managed to get them on a plane to Yemen, but without a treaty for extradition, there was nothing the British authorities could do. Under Yemeni law, he had full and legal custody of his daughters.
They lived in relative poverty and survived through success wars. There was the civil war with the Houthi takeover of the West. There was the war against Saudi Arabia. Saddak sent the girls out to get food when bombs were falling, Jackie says.
After more than a decade, a letter arrived. It was in Arabic. It was from her oldest daughter who had married and moved out of Dad’s control. She had remembered the address of her mom in Cardiff.
“I was so overwhelmed,” Jackie says. “I just couldn’t believe that my daughter had actually remembered the address.”
Rahannah was well, as was Nadia. Sophia was still a minor, under Dad’s protection.
She corresponded for a few months and finally made plans for Jackie to visit. The war was going on, and the British authorities warned her she could count on no help from them if she got into trouble in Yemen.
Still, she went with a lady journalist who had taken up her cause, keeping the story in the news.
At the airport of Aden, men with guns shouted in Arabic at them and pulled them off to a separate room for interrogation.
“I was shaking,” she recalls. “What kind of a situation have we got ourselves in? That was the most scariest thing ever. We didn’t understand what they were saying. They took our passports. I actually cried.”
Fortunately, Nadia’s husband showed up and reassured the officials that she was with him. Suddenly, they smiled and let her go on.
Outside, she rejoined her daughters for the first time in 15 years. They were covered from head to toe in the black Muslim garb.
“And there was a lot of crying, hugging, kissing, and I was so emotional,” she said. “My heart was pounding and I’m literally shaking and yeah, tears, tears, lots and lots of tears.”
She spent a week at the houses of the daughters, whose husbands were much kinder than the girls’ father.
After several days, Jackie was granted the opportunity to see the third daughter at the school. Since she was under her father’s authority, it would have to be secret.
Sophia felt very strange being called in. She had been told that Saddak’s new wife was her actually mother, but when Jackie produced childhood photos of Sophia as a baby with her sisters, she slowly understood that this woman in front of her was her real mother.
She cried and hugged her and wanted to ask her a thousand questions.
“I was shocked,” she remembered later. “In an instant my whole life changed, and then she had to go.”
Saddak was coming to pick up his daughter from the school, and they had to rush off.
Back in the United Kingdom, Jackie made plans for her two daughters to visit for three months. They returned to their husbands.
Nadia died giving birth to her fifth child.
Sophia got married and had children. Their house got bombed in the wars, and they were going from place to place trying to survive. Her husband had a hard time finding work.
In 2018, she crowd-funded for tickets and passports for Sophia, her husband and four children to come to Wales.
Rahannah still lives in Yemen with her family, as does Nadia’s husband and children.
Source: Only Human
