India Today has expanded its daring search operation for the 39 Indians, who have been missing in Iraq since 2014 , to the deadly war zones of Syria.
Barely three months ago, the network independently reached the Badoush prison in Mosul where the abducted workers were believed to have been held captive by the ISIS. The jail, India Today found, had been reduced to rubble, with no sign of humanity around.
The network’s stunning discovery prompted New Delhi and Baghdad to escalate government-level efforts to locate the lost Indians.
This week, Gen VK Singh, minister of state for external affairs, arrived in Baghdad on a mission for leads to the missing citizens.
The minister was carrying DNA samples of some of the relatives while some more will be collected in due course for any possible identification exercise, he told India Today in the Iraqi capital.
“The Iraqi government sought the DNA samples for their own investigation and records. It is required for positive identification,” Singh said.
Meantime, India Today’s journalists have fanned across the restive region for their own independent investigation into the whereabouts of those 39 Indians. They are shuttling from one war-torn city in Iraq to another and to as far as ravaged Syria for clues.
The ISIS has shrunk to a handful of Syrian towns bordering Iraq now. In capital Damascus, the Syrian regime told India Today they had received no information about the Indians abducted in Mosul in mid-2014.
“I have no information,” said Dr Bouthana Shabaan, adviser to president Bashar al-Assad. “If they were abducted in Mosul, the Iraqi government would know. If the ISIS brought them, they would have brought them to Raqqa, not to us, not to the Syrian government,” she told India Today.
India Today’s reporter then navigated her way through ruined towns, flattened structures and a labyrinth of mines to reach Aleppo, once the commercial heart of Syria for any tip regarding the missing workers.
She spoke with soldiers on the ground and also with fighters sitting under the flags of the Lebanese group Hizbollah.
But none had any information so far about the abducted Indians. “Nothing, nothing at all,” said a middle-aged man, who had fought the ISIS all these years, in Arabic.
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