Felicia Perkins-Ferreira cried while recounting how her two young sons were taken by their father from home in Trinidad to live under the Islamic State in the Middle East.
She had a blanket stitched out of their school uniforms and other clothes for comfort. She became plagued by panic attacks and exhaustion. “Every time I fell asleep, I’d dream that my children were there beside me,” she said. But they were gone. It was too much to bear. “So I just preferred not to sleep.”
Now that agony is over. After four years of surviving life under ISIS, through war and in a detention camp in northeastern Syria, Mahmud and Ayyub — ages 11 and 7 — finally returned home to Trinidad this week, following an extraordinary intervention by their mother, a renowned human rights lawyer and an international rock star.
