A Remote Region of Georgia Loses its Children to ISIS - The Intercept - First Look Media
AMZAN ALKHANASHVILI WAS was just 18 years old when he disappeared from the small Georgian village of Dumasturi in April of this year. His mother, Tina Alkhanashvili, dropped him off at school in the morning, as she normally did. A few hours later, around noon, he left and never returned. His mother waited until evening, and then she and relatives began to search for him, asking friends and acquaintances if they knew what had happened. That night they went to the local police station, located in the center of one of the larger villages in the region. The brightly lit station looks like a UFO amid the typical small, poor Georgian houses, built from stone and covered with circular asbestos tiles. It turned out that Ramzan, along with a friend who was barely 16 years old, had gone to the airport in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, and had flown out of the country at 3 in the afternoon, just a few hours after cutting out from school. It wasn’t until the next evening that the boys sent their families brief audio messages through the Internet instant messaging service WhatsApp, saying that everything was OK. They were in Turkey. They didn’t say what they were doing there, or why they had left so suddenly. The families didn’t hear anything more directly from them. A few days later, the Islamic State published the boys’ photographs online. Source: firstlook.org
