By Mohammed Amin

KHARTOUM

Eight Sudanese children on Tuesday were reunited with their extended families in Sudan after their parents -- who had joined the Daesh terrorist group in Libya -- had been killed or arrested.

The returnees include four boys and four girls, four of whom hail from a single family, whose ages range between ten months and nine years.

Abakar Sigairoon, the grandfather of four of the returned children, told Anadolu Agency how two of his daughters had joined the notorious terrorist group more than a year ago.

“Yesterday, the NISS [the Sudanese National Intelligence and Security Services] called me, telling me I should come pick my four grandchildren up at the airport,” he said.

“I’m so happy to see my grandchildren after losing my daughters,” he added.

Within the past three years, a large number of Sudanese university students have reportedly traveled to neighboring Libya -- or Syria -- to join Daesh.

The Sudanese authorities reportedly held long negotiations with their Libyan counterparts before the children were eventually handed over.

Al-Tijani Ibrahim, head of NISS’s anti-terrorism department, told reporters upon the children’s arrival at Khartoum’s international airport that the parents of the young returnees had joined Daesh in Libya’s coastal city of Misurata.

He said that the process of securing the children’s return to Sudan had been undertaken by the Libyan authorities and their Sudanese counterparts in conjunction with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“We coordinated with the Libyan authorities and the Red Cross to rescue this first batch of eight Sudanese children,” Ibrahim said.

“We hope to soon see more kids reunited with their families in Sudan,” he added.

Mutaz Merghani Abbas, a leader of the Sudanese community in Libya, told reporters at Khartoum airport that “intensive official and popular efforts” had been exerted to secure the return of the parentless children.

“Some of these children’s mothers have been arrested by the Libyan authorities, while their fathers were killed -- or otherwise lost -- in Libya,” he said.

“We finally managed to persuade the Libyan authorities to release these kids on humanitarian grounds,” Abbas said.