Abduction of Yusuf and Zahra Shikder
American siblings abducted by their mother into the Islamic State
Yusuf Shikder (born June 19, 2010) and Zahra Shikder (born May 5, 2014) are two American siblings who were abducted by their mother, Rashida, from Florida on March 14, 2015, while their father Bashirul was on a pilgrimage. She took them to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Yusuf was four years old at the time and Zahra was ten months old. Rashida is known to have been killed in ISIL territory and the children are missing. They may have been taken in by ISIL supporters and may still be living in Syria. The case was the subject of a Vice News documentary.
Family background and abduction
Yusuf and Zahra's father, Bashirul Shikder, was born in Bangladesh and moved to Canada as a young adult, then moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 2009 or 2010. He is an observant Muslim. He married Rashida Sumaiya, a Bangladeshi-born American, and they had Yusuf and Zahra. The family lived near Miami.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abduction of Yusuf and Zahra Shikder” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.